Institutional sophistication for the individual investor
The pension crisis has been a conveniently ignored time bomb in New Jersey, but now we are about to light the fuse. A legislative committee just approved a ballot referendum to constitutionally mandate extra spending of over $3 billion now and $6
What happens if we don’t enact pension reform? Nothing terrible happens immediately, and that is the danger. Disaster is a decade away, so politicians see no urgency. But disaster it will be. Consider this. The State’s 2015 budget was approximately $33 billion;
Some elected Democrats have asked me why I agreed to serve on a pension commission to help Chris Christie solve a complicated pension problem. I agreed to serve because the unfunded pension liability of anywhere between $37 billion and $83 billion, depending
Although the state is in its worst financial shape ever, the gubernatorial campaign has shed little light on these problems. The reality is that either services get worse, taxes go up, government gets more efficient, or most likely, some of each. There
Let’s play a TV game show. What would you rather have: $600 cash or a 30% chance of getting $1000? The latter has an expected value of only $300. In this example, better to go with something more certain. What follows is
Sometimes numbers get so big that eyes just blur. Let’s try to put the state’s $58 billion health care liability for public employees in perspective. This $58 billion is the estimated present value of all post-retirement health-care benefits for state, local, and