Major employers are asking the government to bail them out of their obligations to their pension funds, which have shrunk by some $200 billion in the last month as a result of the plunge in stock prices.

This is just another indication of how little institutional investors’ cash is on the sidelines, waiting to jump on a sustained rally. The market rallied 889 points, or about 10%, Tuesday, and fell in the last 12 minutes of trading Wednesday, putting the Dow Industrials down 74 points for the day.

The key lede graphs from Bloomberg:

Oct. 29 (Bloomberg)—A trade group whose members include Lockheed Martin Corp., Dow Chemical Co. and General Motors Corp. is pressing Congress to help close a record $200 billion deficit in U.S. pensions created by this month’s global stock-market collapse.

The Committee on Investment of Employee Benefit Assets is kicking off a lobbying effort today to delay provisions of the Pension Protection Act that it says will force companies to drain cash flow to comply with funding rules set to take effect next year.

Where were the portfolio managers who allowed their pension funds to lose all of that money? Why didn’t they sell stocks when they saw them begin to lose value? They’ll give a lot of reasonable sounding explanations, but they failed to preserve their pension funds’ capital.

Now the employers want a bail out? How will that go down in Congress? This will be another opportunity for Congress to nationalize corporate America.