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The city cannot afford the "inflated" pensions. You are correct. Here's my slant on it.
Prior to our big recession bust and being swindled out of our stocks by Wall Street, no one thought these pensions were inflated. The were "covered" by what had been invested. During the Wall Street criminal fiasco, not only was "Main Street" hurt (god I hate that term) but so were government pension plans. That money has been STOLEN out of the plan.
So rather than punish who is REALLY at fault for this pension crisis we are in now and fine these Wall Street crooks, we are going to start pointing fingers at the employees who had these promises made to them. Pension deals were made that no one ever thought were a big deal at that time. They KNEW when they made those deals what the payouts were going to be and no one had a problem with it.
The unfortunate thing is that there really is no solution but to keep chopping up the middle class and cutting the legs off these people because the RIGHT thing to do will NEVER be done.
Wow, nice spin on the whole thing. So unions gambled their money on risky stocks, knowing that if they hit it big, the unions got to keep the "winnings". And if they lost, they knew they could just go back to the state, with their hands out, because their pensions are guaranteed.
Can you give me examples of a Wall Street firm that stole pension money?
Hey, we have all been sold a bill of goods regarding our retirements. Do you think I like the fact that my retirement is based solely on how well the stock market does? Not one bit, but that's how we are told to save for retirement.
Most of our retirements would have been fine, as they had been for years, before someone decided to go playing a nasty shell game with bad mortgages. We all lost on that.
Take from and spend other people's money? It was their money. They paid into their pension funds. They negotiated pension benefits in lieu of larger salary increases. IOW, deferred "salary" until after retirement. It was their money.
And they should suffer because the city mismanaged it? Outrageous! Lessons the left can pull out of this? LMAO! You seem to have missed the point of the thread, too. It's the Right who are learning the lessons from this.
And they are Not. Happy.
And stop with the tired canard that this is redistributing other people's wealth. That's just absurd on its face.
Well I think the Right as you put it gets the message and typically saves for these down times instead of waiting for the soup wagon to roll by. Life serves many dishes and some are not very pleasant so you must prepare for those times. Right? The government you bow to mismanages our money and this is one administration that is doing a very good job of it and promised to redistribute the wealth. He said it, not me. LOL
Well I think the Right as you put it gets the message and typically saves for these down times instead of waiting for the soup wagon to roll by. Life serves many dishes and some are not very pleasant so you must prepare for those times. Right? The government you bow to mismanages our money and this is one administration that is doing a very good job of it and promised to redistribute the wealth. He said it, not me. LOL
Good point. Public employees' salaries plus benefits are better than the private sector workers get. Obama supporters should have no problem with them losing some of the excess to redistribute their wealth.
But I thought we were told that if we privatize everything and let the "market" wave it's magic wand we'd all prosper and Jesus would descend from the clouds with Ronald Reagan at his side and give his blessing. After all the "free market" is cure for all societal ills.
We haven't had a free-market in this country...ever. Why are you criticizing it?
Wow, nice spin on the whole thing. So unions gambled their money on risky stocks, knowing that if they hit it big, the unions got to keep the "winnings". And if they lost, they knew they could just go back to the state, with their hands out, because their pensions are guaranteed.
Can you give me examples of a Wall Street firm that stole pension money?
Spin, really?
I don't believe the unions gambled the funds for public workers. It was the government entity doing the gambling. All retirements, defined or not, are encouraged to utilize the stock market.
Stock Market Crash and its Effect on Pension Funds
[LEFT]Investopedia defines a pension fund as a "fund established by an employer to facilitate and organize the investment of employees' retirement funds contributed by the employer and employees." The contributions from both the employer and employees forms an asset pool which is then invested in stocks, bonds and other avenues to generate growth and to produce enough income to cover the employees' pension when reach their retirement age.
In a defined-benefit pension plan, it is the responsibility of the employer to assume the risk of investments and to see that employees get their benefits no matter what happens to the investment. The employers ensure the stable growth of their pension funds by investing a major portion of their assets in stock because in the long run the stock market provides the best return on investment. In fact, when the economy was in good condition most pension funds had a surplus in their accounts. However the stock market crash eroded the value of pension funds and as of 26, July 2010, the aggregate shortage of all pension plans in the S&P 500 Index is a staggering $227 billion. According to Hewitt Associates' Pension Risk Tracker, the funded ratio of all pension plans in the S&P 500 Index was around 80% at the end of June 2010. This means that the value of assets in the funds are 20 percent short of covering the benefits due to the employees.
[/LEFT]
AND
One of the interesting aspects of the financial crisis is how a relatively small sector of the mortgage housing market — subprime — was able to infect the entire financial system. The WSJ has a very good article explaining how this was done (warning, it’s a little on the wonky side):
In a memo last week, panel Chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) said Goldman’s work “magnified the impact of toxic mortgages” by replicating mortgage securities in debt pools known as collateralized debt obligations as well as CDO derivatives, and also in an index that tracks subprime bonds.
The subprime mortgages that caused big losses generally were packaged into CDOs, in which dozens of mortgage-backed bonds were pooled together and slices of the CDOs were sold to investors. Another version of these CDOs didn’t contain actual mortgage bonds but were linked to them via derivatives called credit-default swaps. Through the use of derivatives, banks created many of these synthetic CDOs using the same mortgage securities, all of which would rise or fall in value depending on how the mortgages were performing. With synthetic CDOs, those who had bet that the loans would perform well were on the hook if their performance deteriorated.
In effect, the documents said, Wall Street was “copying and pasting” what turned out to be the worst-performing securities of the mortgage boom. Such activity helped multiply opportunities for hedge funds and traders who wanted to short the housing market, but magnified the losses of those on the other side of the trades. To short a trade, in this instance, is to bet the housing market will turn down.
In the Washington Post, Heidi Moore takes on the silly notion that only sophisticated were hurt:
It’s not just the big clients, however, that get hurt. What Wall Street would like to ignore when it is taking bets in its casino is that a big pile of chips on the table come from regular consumers — from their bank deposits, retirement accounts, credit-card balances, car loans and mortgages. That’s why the distinction between these sophisticated investors and everyone else is nonexistent. When Wall Street banks omit information and draw profits from “institutional investors,” that means they are taking money from your pension funds, your school endowments, and your city and state governments. Other sophisticated investors include hedge funds, which take money from those pension funds, or private-equity funds, which own companies that employ 10 percent of all Americans.
Pension funds, for instance, are considered “sophisticated investors” on Wall Street. But those are just pools of retirement money owed to workers. The pension funds, looking to expand their stash, invest in stocks and bonds sold by Wall Street. These pension funds also give their money to other funds, such as hedge funds and private equity funds, that invest that money in riskier investments, perhaps troubled companies or distressed mortgages. Pension funds play the Wall Street game to score a healthy return — but when they lose, the money lost belongs to regular people.
HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!! So now they're Obama's Wall Street bankster buddies. BWAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! As if Obama was President when these Wall Street Banksters started their mortgage bundling schemes and destroyed this country's economy. BWAAHAHAHAAAAAA!!!!
Agreed for the most part except for your attempt to mainly blame liberals for the problem. I think George Bush touted the American Dream of everyone owning a home, did he not? It's not his fault EITHER. The bottom line is that NONE of what was done with the above was watchdogged by any one party. They all fell down on the job. And back to my earlier point, Wall Street did commit some actions that were criminal. There's a documentary out on it now but no one cares.
The point is how ironic it is that despite what the Feds did not do, the immoral greed on Wall Street, this STILL gets turned around on the employees and being the cause of this. They have been made scapegoats of some other party's recklessness.
I also agree that they should not be a "protected" workforce either but I think the blame is being placed on the wrong people.
sorry to disappoint you but bush was hardly a conservative.
as for you continuing to blame wall street, funny how when people make money in the markets, no one says anything, but let the economy turn sour, and people lose money in the markets, and suddenly its the fault of those evil greedy wall street types that stole our money, and we need to sue those greedy wall street bastards to get our money back, etc. thats a little like blaming cops when they get killed in the line of duty because some criminal does not want to go back to jail.
as i have posted earlier, everyone has to share the blame, from the bankers that created new products, to the brokers that sold those new products, to the people that bought those new products despite the huge risk, to the government who should have been on the ball and prevented those new products from being created in the first place but were surfing the net for porn, to congress who gutted the financial regulations, and then never fixed the problem.
people always forget the caveat, if something seems to good to be true, then it probably is. we had banks pushing sub prime mortgages, and "helping" people who would never have been able to qualify for a mortgage in the first place get those mortgages, and this was encouraged, rather forced, by the government. but the only people that we should punish is wall street?
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