Excerpt:
"Consider New York City. Its five pension funds held $326.3 billion as of June 30, 2026. The city pays about $10 billion a year into them, even as it struggles to close a projected $5.4 billion budget deficit. What does the city get for its money? In 2015, then-Comptroller Scott Stringer examined ten years of results from the asset managers running the city’s pension funds. Managers of public stocks and bonds had beaten their benchmarks (the returns the same money would have earned in a standard market index such as the S&P 500) by $2.063 billion. But that was before deducting the managers’ fees. The fees consumed more than 95% of the gain, leaving the funds only an estimated $40 million ahead. Managers of the funds’ private investments (stakes in assets not traded on public exchanges, such as private equity and real estate funds) fell $2.6 billion short of their benchmarks after fees. Overall, the outside managers fell more than $2.5 billion dollars short of benchmark returns over the ten year period. The pension funds would have done better in plain index funds. “Right now, heads or tails, Wall Street wins,” Stringer said.

Stringer’s study was cited by Scott Baker, managing editor at OpEdNews and a Public Banking Institute expert on pension funds, in a November 2025 article titled “The Case for Selling off the New York City Pension Funds.” Baker asks, “Why do we need pension funds at all?” More on his answer after a look at pension fund financing as it has evolved over the last half-century."