After Blackstone Group strategist Byron Wien uttered the apparently unutterable truth that "The retirement benefits for state workers, really not only in New York, California and New Jersey but throughout the country, are very generous, too generous," the New York City pension funds, whose boards include a bunch of Democratic politicians and union officials, demanded that he retract the comment while making threatening noises about what they were planning to do about the $750 million they have invested with Blackstone, Bloomberg News reports.
In my review of Blackstone co-founder Pete Peterson's book, I wrote that Mr. Peterson is "silent about the possibility of private, defined contribution accounts for state and local workers to replace the big defined-benefit pension funds that helped make the Peterson fortune by investing in Blackstone funds." One of the effects of those public pension funds is that their existence as customers and investors tends to mute or silence the political activism or speech of Wall Street types who might otherwise be expected to be speaking out for restraint in Albany, Sacramento, and Trenton.
