Last month, conservative economist Oren Cass made a searing argument in the New York Times against the financialization of our economy. He offers many worthy ways to pull back from this abyss. Yet missing among them, and from his diagnosis of how we got here in the first place, is a strategy to address the primary source of capital that has fueled financialization from the start.
The primary source, tragically and ironically, is America’s public pension funds, which currently hold $6 trillion in assets, nearly all of which flow through Wall Street middlemen who generate enormous fees investing these funds to try to beat the market net of their costly fees. Ultimately, as Cass makes plain, they suck value from our public pension funds instead of adding it. This capital comes directly from the paychecks of public school teachers, nurses, firefighters, frontline government workers, and other public sector employees, and from the pockets of taxpayers who fund the majority of pension benefits in the form of property and income taxes.
It is the administrators of these pension funds — little known and under-scrutinized elected officials and government appointees called “comptrollers,” “treasurers,” and “trustees” — who have provided the money to private equity and hedge fund managers that have driven this financialized economy. These private equity and hedge fund managers have to get their money from somewhere, and their largest and most dependable source is public pension funds. In other words, financialization and its destructive effects have been made possible at the expense of public employees and the American taxpayer.
This cycle represents the largest transfer of wealth that no one knows anything about: from ordinary taxpayers and working Americans to investment managers whose financial incentives are increasingly disconnected from the investors — read: us — they represent. In New York, we estimate that it has cost New Yorkers $59.1 billion…
Auteur: Drew Warshaw
