Let the Old Folks Die But Let's Take Care of Wall Street

I've recently written about the City's new attack on the health care of city retirees. It is almost certain that some retirees will die because of the City's actions and complicity of the retirees' former labor unions. All this so that the City can save $460M a year. Talk about blood money.

But every year the City and the unions are more than happy to squander money on Wall Street.

Below are copies of the income statements from 2002 and 2022 for the City's five pension funds. That spans a 21 year period in which the penion funds have gone crazy with throwing money at Wall Street.

In 2002 the pension funds spent $102M on investment fees. In 2022 they spent $1.509B. That amount is over 14 times more than what they spent 2002. Just in case you think that is because the assets of the five funds have increased 14 times - no. They increased less than 3 times their value in 2002, $93.5B versus $263.2B.

I defy anyone to put forward an honest reason for this craziness. Not for nothing - the pension funds lost almost $32B in FY-2022

Stop the Bleeding - Public Pension Funds Under Attack - Report and NY Times article

I have been hammering the NYCERS trustees for several years about about their investment decisions, in particular, allocations to private equity, real estate partnerships, and hedge funds.

Now there is a growing record of how misplaced these investments are for public pension funds.

Read the October 20, 2013 NY Times article by Gretchen Morgenson, Ted Seidle's recap article in Forbes on the investigation to the assault on the Employee Retirement System of Rhode Island, and the broad sweeping expose in Rolling Stone magazine.

Here is the link to the full investigative report.

Maybe the new mayor could find the money for his pre-K program by stopping the bleeding of the pension funds by Wall Street.