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I do despair when people say, "oh business, that's so boring."

As you and I both know, business is all about money and the decisions we make about it.

It's the information we need to earn money, spend it and invest it.

It's about the choices that are made in the board room, at our office desks, at our kitchen tables - even those made around the cabinet table.

The fascinating thing is how those decisions intersect.

We told you yesterday that the to new workers. It's a final salary scheme, where your pension payout is usually a proportion of your last pay cheque before retirement.

The big plus of these schemes is that you know what you're going to get in your old age. The pension fund - or the employer that stands behind it - coughs up if the investments are not performing. It takes the risk.

Anyone who joins BP in the future will be offered an alternative scheme where the amount of pension you get in retirement in old age is linked to the performance of the investment. If shares or bonds don't earn as much as expected, you get less in your pension. You take the risk.

Many big companies have already closed their final salary schemes to new workers. BP is one of the last to do so.

Others have gone a stage further.

Barclays says this week it will close its final salary pension scheme to EXISTING workers. The money they've already saved is still there - but they can't add to it.

If they want to make further pension savings, they'll have to take out an alternative scheme where they, not the company, takes the savings risk.

So. What about those connections?

In other news this week, it was revealed that the bosses of Britain's biggest companies got an average pay rise of 7 percent last year.

Not bad in these credit crunched times, you might think.

You may think it's even more remarkable when you remember that the stock market value of top companies - as measured by the FTSE 100 index - is 26 percent lower today than it was a year ago.

Whatever performance targets are used to trigger the pay rises, it's clearly more than just a bald reading of the share price.

My ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ colleague Peter Allen - who I bump into every afternoon during his Drive programme on 5 Live - demanded to know why bosses can give themselves pay rises and bonuses, often in the teeth of opposition from their own shareholders, while they're cutting pension benefits to their workers.

As Gillian pointed out on Working Lunch yesterday, it's less about cutting benefits and more about reducing risks to the company.

Under the alternative schemes, the employer takes the risk of under-performance, not the company.

But retirement costs are an issue for our biggest companies. As another story we covered this week demonstrates.

General Motors.

One of the reasons is obviously that not enough Americans are buying American cars.

But that's partly because retirement and healthcare costs bump up the price of GM-made motors. On one estimate, they add $1,500 to the cost of American vehicles, relative to those made more cheaply by Asian rivals.

And that will become an increasingly important issue in countries like the USA and the UK.

We have a growing, ageing population - and a shrinking, younger one - at a time when retired people are not just living longer lives, but more demanding and exciting ones too.

This poses a major challenge to welfare systems based on the assumption that current workers pay for the costs of retired ones.

And the demographics are going the wrong way for a comfortable solution. As demonstrated at a BP refinery or a Barclays bank branch near you.