This week I received a stern letter from the guvmint telling me I had not yet chosen which Pension Fund to “invest” my pension contributions in. If I had not made up my mind which horse to back within ten days, the missive said, one would be chosen for me. Naturally it was too much trouble for the pen-pushers to provide me with a list of the horses starting in this race, or a breakdown of the commissions and fees charged by their managers, or a history of their past performances, so I had to look out myself for information about their form and breeding.

Only a couple of days later the earth was shaken by the unthinkable: Bernard Madoff, the respected financier, had in fact been running a cheap (50 billion dollar) Ponzi scheme. One of the marks he suckered into his scam was “Pioneer Alternative Investments” – they coughed up 280 million dollars. The news in Gazeta Wyborcza was reassuring, though: the nice lady from the Polish fund TFI Pioneer Pekao said that “the infected Pioneer Alternative Investments has nothing to do with out Pioneer apart from having the same owner.” So next time somebody steals the wallet from your left pocket – don’t worry! You haven’t really lost anything. The loose change and bits of fluff you keep in your other pocket will easily keep you solvent.

There’s a list of Open Pension Funds here. Second on it is AIG. Could it be that AIG? Doesn’t matter. The money they lost in the US has nothing to do with Poland. Tenth on the list is Pioneer, or, since names are so important here, “Pekao OFE (Pekao Pioneer PTE S.A.).” So who should I give my money to? Or should I let a computer decide which patch of mud to throw it into?