Super:the sleeping issue

Australians put an extra $121 billion into their superannuation pots last year.

That’s a very healthy rise of 17.9 per cent.

The Statistician is now reporting that the total amount Australians have invested in superannuation is a staggering $802.4 billion.

Australia’s superannuation funds, in turn, are now major property owners. Their assets include golf courses, city buildings and fabulous tourist resorts.

Some of their assets, though, are starting to attract attention, for the wrong reasons.

The fund managers for one of the really big funds, Comsuper, were forced to confess, effectively, that they may well have more than $1 billion tied up in hedge funds.

And hedge funds are looking much less healthy now than they were a year or so back, when those investments were made.

This was reported – exclusively – in Private Briefing.

We can expect not only Federal public servants, but the nation’s serving soldiers, sailors and Air Force personnel to start asking some very tough questions, when the newspapers, television stations and radio finally catch up with that story.

If they ever do.

The main fund manager’s defence, at the Senate committee, which extracted the confession, was interesting.

It was, basically, that all fund managers had been doing the same thing.

With amounts liike $802.4 billion at stake, fund managers everywhere can expect some very sharp questions from their members, if things don’t improve rapidly, for the hedge funds.

At present, though, the immediate prospects for hedge funds don’t look  good.