A poor lookout - Telegraph Something extraordinary happened yesterday: without anyone noticing, almost everyone in Britain became vastly poorer. This act of daylight robbery was carried out not by a gang of master criminals, but the sober statisticians at the Financial Services Authority - for the money was taken not from the public's pockets, but their pensions. Until yesterday, the projected value of our retirement income was calculated under the assumption that the value of our savings (as invested in the stock market) would grow by 5, 7 or 9 per cent a year. In the wake of the financial crisis, that looks absurdly optimistic. The new expected rates of return are 2, 5 and 8 per cent - which, thanks to the workings of compound interest, means that projected pension pots will shrink by tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds. For many people, this will be deeply unpleasant news. Yet being confronted with reality is often a painful experience. A toxic combination of inadequate saving levels, the impact of the recent crisis, Gordon Brown's criminal raid on the pension system and the excessive fees charged by many financial services firms mean that millions of Britons face a far more penurious old age than they realise. If these new guidelines drum that message home, they will have performed a valuable service. In the long term, the only solution to this crisis is to increase greatly the amounts being saved. This is the logic behind the Government's new auto-enrolment system, which pushes workers into a pension scheme unless they actively choose to withdraw. Of course, it may turn out that the new rules are too conservative, and that a return to prosperity sees Britons" eventual pension values far exceed the new projections. But it is surely better to be pleasantly surprised than to realise, upon retirement, that the piggy bank is empty.