Data point #1. Metropolitan Transportation Authority executive director Elliot Sander and the authority's board members attracted more than 600 people to their marathon six-and-a-half-hour fare-hike and service-cut hearing in Manh Read More
Research
In a interview in yesterday's Journal, David Swensen, the longtime chief investment officer for Yale's endowment, had an implicit warning for public pension funds and other supposedly "sophisticated" investors (ha ha) whose overseers thi Read More
Congressman Anthony Weiner, a probable mayoral candidate, showed yesterday that if he does run, he's going to campaign against Mayor Bloomberg's fiscal record over the past eight years -- and boy, does Weiner have a lot of material. Most startlin Read More
In recent months, states and cities have lobbied for their piece of the bailout pie. Among other requests, they've asked the federal government to support municipal bond markets by directly buying municipal bonds through the new programs that the Tr Read More
If the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is right, Governor David Paterson's economic and fiscal projections for New York State are not gloomy enough. The CBO expects higher unemployment and a somewhat slower recovery than Paterson's budget has pro Read More
An in today's New York Daily News shows that what used to be considered a morally heartless and politically unworkable idea -- cutting public-sector salaries and benefits to a manageable level -- is now becoming mainstream thinking. Read More
The media treated it as good news when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union said last week that they'd settle their next contract through binding arbitration. Read More
New York City's average compensation cost per municipal employee is $106,743, and has grown 63 percent since fiscal year 2000, according to a Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) released yesterday. While base pay has grown faster than inflation d Read More
The chairman of India-based outsourcing giant Satyam, which has done work for a third of Fortune 500 companies, has confessed to a massive accounting fraud. He wrote that he had overreported profits and underreported liabilities until the fraud Read More
The city of Detroit lost its investment-grade credit rating from S&P Tuesday night, slipping to BB after just barely hanging on to a halfway decent rating for the past two decades. New York is not Detroit. But since one of Detroit's major problem Read More
Over at NY Public Payroll Watch, E.J. McMahon Gov. Paterson and others for allowing the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority to abdicate one of its main responsibilities -- negotiating a better contract with the New York City local Tr Read More
The Empire Center's SeeThroughNY.net offers a new trove of payroll data on the city and public-authority governments. An analysis of the data shows how top-heavy New York City's public-sector payroll is compared to at least one other relevant downst Read More