OK—I admit it. Those protestors outside our pension reform event in Albany today did get one thing right. I do think people need to “gamble” some of their retirement savings on Wall Street. Read More
Tag: Public Pensions
Public pension funds in New York and across the country are continuing to rely on overly optimistic assumptions about their future investment gains, as detailed in a major New York Times story yesterday. Read More
Opponents of Governor Cuomo’s 2 percent property tax cap were able to stick one major exclusion into the legislation before it passed in 2011: a provision excluding a portion of local government and school employee pensions from the total allowable “levy limit” in years when taxpayer-funded employer contributions rise by more than two percentage points of salaries. Read More
State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli has marked the beginning of Labor Day weekend by announcing the next wave of increases in taxpayer-funded pension costs for local governments throughout the state (except New York City, which has separate systems). Read More
The New York State Teachers’ Retirement System (NYSTRS) has officially confirmed pretty much what it predicted last fall: the taxpayer-financed pension contribution rate payable in the fall of 2015 will rise to 17.53 percent of teacher payrolls, or 1.28 percent above the contribution payable this coming September. Read More
The state Senate’s one-house budget puts its own twist on Governor Cuomo’s dubious pension “smoothing” plan. The Senate version would give the state, as well as localities and school districts, the option of significantly under-paying pension contributions over the next few years... Read More
The state pension fund gained about 10.4 percent on its investments during the recently ended 2012-13 fiscal year, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced today. The latest gain is comfortably above the pension fund’s 7.5 percent target rate of return. Read More
New York State’s Common Retirement Fund, which underwrites state and local pensions, returned a negative 0.92 percent on its assets during the quarter ending June 30, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli just announced. That would translate into a loss of about $1.2 billion on an asset base of roughly $148 billion. Read More