The cratering stock market has been hard on individual investors around the globe, but large pension funds have suffered too. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently issued a report on how pension plans around the world have suffered in the financial crisis.
Overall, the unweighted average among pension funds around the world was a decline of -23%. But some countries fared much worse than others.
English-speaking countries were particularly hard hit because stocks make up a majority of pension fund portfolios in countries like the U.S., Ireland, Britain, and Australia. As you can see by this chart from OECD, those were precisely the countries that fared the worst:
In contrast, countries like Germany and Mexico did better because pension funds in those areas had a much lower percentage of equities in their portfolios.