Truth-out: Is New Jersey Fudging Its Pension Fund Results to Defuse a Christie Scandal?

[Omaha Steve]

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. (Photo: Steve Fallon / Flickr)


http://truth-out.org/news/item/26224-is-new-jersey-fudging-its-pension-fund-results-to-defuse-a-christie-scandal

Tuesday, 16 September 2014 10:37
By Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism | News Analysis

You cannot make stuff like this up. New Jersey, in its attempt to diffuse a pension fund scandal that implicates Chris Christie (it roused him to respond in public), looks to have committed the classic crisis management blunder of a cover-up worse than the original crime.

International Business Times reporter David Sirota has been putting questionable relationships between state pension funds and Wall Street under the hot lights. One of the objects of his scrutiny has been the New Jersey pension fund, which is seriously underfunded. A recent tally puts it at number 43 out of 50 states in the level of its pension funding, with only 60% of its commitments funded. The New Jersey shortfall is the result of a series of classic blunders, starting with a decision to starve the pension system in the 1990s under governor Christine Todd Whitman.

New Jersey dug its hole even deeper during the crisis, by taking risky bets right before the markets unraveled, including investing in Lehman shortly before its collapse.

This bad situation was made worse under Christie. As we wrote in 2011:

A more accurate rendition would be that, at least in New Jersey, the state has been raiding the pension kitty for over 15 years. This is not news to anyone who has been paying attention, any more than underfunding of corporate pensions. In the Garden State’s case, Governor Chris Christie skipped the required $3.1 billion pension fund contribution last year. He claimed this move was to force reform, but what impact does another $3.1 billion failure to pay have on an unfunded liability that was already over $50 billion?

FULL story at link.

[Liberal_in_LA]

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