Bloomberg on New York Pension Investments

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2010/07/bloomberg-on-new-york-pension-investments

Bloomberg News has an article on the New York City comptroller's refusal to disclose the identities of six city outside pension managers fired for poor performance:

He refused to identify them all, even after Bloomberg News sought their names under the state's Freedom of Information Law. Liu, a Taiwan-born Democrat who became the first Asian-American elected to citywide office in November, didn't want to embarrass them, said his spokeswoman, Sharon Lee....

The comptroller's office has not yet complied with the Bloomberg News request for the identities of four of the six terminated companies, an up-to-date accounting of how much money they managed, what they billed in fees and the reasons for their dismissals.

It's not clear to me why race is relevant to this particular story. And, last we checked, the city's finance commissioner was on the board that managed these pension investments, perhaps even the chairman of it, raising the question of why, if the news service owned by Mayor Bloomberg wants this information, it doesn't just ask the finance commissioner, who works for Mayor Bloomberg, to provide it.

Those flaws aside, the article is worth reading for a window into how the government manages pension funds. It isn't pretty.

by Editor  |  Jul 20, 2010 at 9:22 am Related Topics:  New York, Politics, Press, State-pension-fund capitalism receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list