Free Republic

Obama Car Czar Banned from Securities Industry Thursday, 14 Oct 2010 09:31 AM Steven Rattner is near a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in a probe of corruption at New York state’s pension fund, according to a person familiar with the matter. Rattner, 58, is the co-founder of Quadrangle Group LLC, a New York-based private-equity firm he has since left. The proposed agreement includes a two-year ban from the financial industry and a $6 million fine, according to the person, who declined to be identified because the talks are private. In June, the SEC proposed a three-year...

Sen. Robert Casey (D., Pa.) and Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D., N.D.) are pushing legislation that would commit taxpayers’ dollars to bailing out the Teamsters’ retirement pension fund. The financial crisis and the Great Recession may have upset your retirement plans, but that’s not reason that politically connected union thugs have to share the pain. Here’s the deal, as former Department of Labor official Vincent Vernuccio, now an analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, tells Exchequer: Under the Democrats’ plan, the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which is basically a pension-insurance fund run by the federal government, would be able to...

61% Underfunded Illinois Teachers Pension Fund Goes For Broke, Becomes Next AIG-In-Waiting By Selling Billions In CDS Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/14/2010 14:47 -0500 “If you were to have faxed me this balance sheet and asked me to guess who it belonged to, I would have guessed, Citadel, Magnetar or even a proprietary trading desk at a bank.” So begins a story by Alexandra Harris of the Medill Journalism school at Northwestern, which, however, does not focus on some exotic product-specialized hedge fund, or some discount window (taxpayer capital) backed prop desk (hedge fund) at a TBTF bank, but...

California is the nation's shameful example of what happens when Democrats influenced by big-government labor rule the statehouse for forty years. With 12.5% unemployment (up from 4.5% a mere three years ago) and a "recognized" budget deficit of $21 billion, California has just found that out it is in much, much more financial trouble than anyone, especially a Democrat, really wants to admit. California's governor Schwarzenegger commissioned a study by Stanford University, which has found that California's three public employee pension funds (The California Public Employees' Retirement System [CalPERS], California State Teachers' Retirement System [CalSTRS], and University of California...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Three gay couples are suing California's giant public pension fund and the Internal Revenue Service to make long-term care insurance available to the same-sex spouses of state government workers. The Legal Aid Society-Employment Law Center filed the federal lawsuit Tuesday in San Francisco on behalf of the three married couples.

Giant California pension funds may lower earnings expectations dkasler@sacbee.com Published Wednesday, Mar. 03, 2010 Bruised by heavy losses and wary of the economic road ahead, California's two big public pension funds are considering reducing their official forecasts of future investment results. Such changes would have huge implications for taxpayers and public employees. A reduction in the investment projections would put more pressure on taxpayers and workers to support the two retirement systems, which already are significantly under-funded. The less the California Public Employees' Retirement System and the California State Teachers' Retirement System believe they'll earn from their investments, the more...

Steep Losses Pose Crisis for Pensions Two Bad Choices for Funds: Cut Benefits Or Take Greater Risks to Rebuild Assets By David Cho Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, October 11, 2009 The financial crisis has blown a hole in the rosy forecasts of pension funds that cover teachers, police officers and other government employees, casting into doubt as never before whether these public systems will be able to keep their promises to future generations of retirees. The upheaval on Wall Street has deluged public pension systems with losses that government officials and consultants increasingly say are insurmountable unless pension managers...

The Cost of Doing Business? /snip The dirty little secret in the pension world is that kickbacks are more common than people think in the private markets and hedge funds where funds try to bribe underpaid pension fund managers. How do I know? Because I have been approached in the past (very subtle, using words like 'facilitate') and witnessed my fair share of shady deals across many pension funds where I asked myself why the heck is this pension fund manager so gun-ho on that fund? The problem with kickbacks is even though you know they're happening, it's very hard...

Reported during Your World that Steven Rattner would step down and be replaced by a member of the Auto Task Force. No print story currently available at site.

Reporting from Los Angeles and Sacramento -- An ongoing investigation into pension fund corruption across the country intensified Friday as California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown directed subpoenas at politically connected firms and individuals, according to sources familiar with the investigation. Brown issued the subpoenas as part of a probe into "placement agents" who help secure pension fund investment contracts for their clients in return for large sums of money, often millions of dollars. The subpoenas seek information on the use and disclosure of placement agents and potential conflicts of interest, said sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity because...

The former director of the government's pension agency took the Fifth Amendment at a Senate hearing where lawmakers quizzed him about allegations that he had inappropriate contacts with three Wall Street firms. ### The former director of the government's pension agency took the Fifth Amendment Wednesday when senators asked about allegations that he had inappropriate contacts with Wall Street firms while running the operation, which insures the pensions of 44 million Americans. Charles E.F. Millard denies that he had improper communications with the firms that recently won multimillion-dollar contracts to advise the agency on a new strategy to invest its...

FDIC seeks pension funds' interest in toxic-loan purchases 11:39 AM, April 3, 2009 Major pension funds today are getting pitched to participate in the Obama administration's plan to buy banks' toxic mortgage assets. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair was scheduled to brief the funds, including the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, on the program. The California State Teachers Retirement System also was invited. A CalPERS spokeswoman said one of the questions the fund had was whether it could buy loans directly from banks under the program, rather than using a money manager to handle and manage the purchases....

NYC Real Estate Wipes Out Israel's Pension Funds Kamelia Angelova | Jan 14, 2009 2:12 PM It's not only your investments and 401(k)s that have been syphoned off in the economic crisis. Retirees and about-to-retire workers in other countries are suffering, too. But not because of the Madoff scheme. He's off the hook this time. Israeli pension funds saw $5.1 billion disappear as US and UK real estate investments, made by Jewish billionaires from those countries. with the retirement money, lost their value. Israel is on the verge of a strike because of it. Even the New York City real...

Obama bundler says he lost $25 billion of N.J. pension funds By Editor Hedge Fund millionaire Orin Kramer and Obama national finance director Julianna Smoot. A state pension fund headed by Kramer says they have lost $25 billion since July A New Jersey pension fund run by one of Barack Obama’s earliest and biggest campaign fundraisers/bundlers has lost $25 billion -- including $9 billion in October, according to a report issued today by a state panel. The New Jersey Investment Council, chaired by hedge fund manager Orin Kramer, says that the value of the state pension fund has shrunk from...

Looming global recession will put thousands of hedge funds out of business By Simon Duke Last updated at 10:29 PM on 24th October 2008 Millions of savers and pension fund holders face huge losses on their investments as hedge funds feel the pain of the credit crunch. Over recent years British pension and insurance funds have channelled big chunks of their money into the highly controversial ?1.3billion industry because big returns were promised. But the growing turmoil on financial markets could obliterate up to a third of the industry's value. An expected 'fire sale' of hedge fund assets will also...

S&P Warns Russia Over Using Funds 12 September 2008 NEW YORK -- Standard & Poor's warned Russia on Thursday that its BBB+ sovereign credit rating would be put at risk if Moscow uses money from its national wealth and pension funds to support battered financial markets. S&P's statement was made in response to Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin's comment earlier Thursday that Russia was considering using the cash to buy securities in the domestic market, which has suffered a significant drop in value this year. "Any use of public funds -- including the National Welfare Fund, which was originally established to...

State senators from both political parties said at a hearing on Wednesday that they had been shocked to learn that they had voted again and again in recent years for measures that had left the state pension in great distress, and they faulted the state treasury for failing to explain to them the risks of what they were doing. “I had no idea we were in the company of some of the same corporations that I have condemned for not funding their pensions,” said Senator Shirley K. Turner, a Democrat from Mercer County. “And now, it seems, we’re in the...

The US ambassador to Norway gave a speech full of polite but very firm criticism of the Norwegian oil fund's blacklisting of American companies. US ambassador to Norway Benson K. Whitney spoke to the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) on Friday, and made it clear that shared core values "like fairness, transparency, justice, dialogue, ethics" gave way to "disappointment and surprise" due to the failure of Norway to live up these ideals when investing its petroleum riches. "It's one thing for an individual Norwegian to get up one morning, read the paper, decide they don't like a company for...

State Senator Ray Lesniak thinks allowing the New Jersey Turnpike Authority to sell off a portion of the state's toll roads would produce a huge windfall and annual savings for years to some. He doesn't, however think any potential cash from the sale should be used to stave off Governor Jon Corzine's one-cent state sales tax proposal. A bill Lesniak is set to introduce a bill that would, "allow the sale of 49% of the Turnpike Authority retaining control for the State of New Jersey." The Senator claims financial experts have told him that by doing so the state will...

A 20 count indictment against was leveled by a federal grand jury against former SDCERS trustees Ron Saathoff, Cathy Lexin, Theresa Webster, Lawrence Grissom and current General Counsel Lorranie Chapin. They were charged with wire fraud, mail fraud and conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud and aiding and abetting.