Submitted by George N. Spitz, Apr 6, 2007 04:36

This otherwise illuminating article omits description of the cash flow to pay retiree benefits obtained from these speculative commercial real estate investments by the New York City and State Pension funds. This is important to know because these same pension funds now require approimately 10 times the amount of money from the respective city and state budgets to meet current and future obligations than five years ago..

Hopefully, the Sun which has done a consistently commendable job of exposing questionable practices in management of the City and State pension funds will follow up and provide readers with an actuarial analysis of pension returns. It would also be interesting to know if any of the real estate operators involved provided any of their public official pension fund trustee joint venture partners with campaign contributions or other favors. In addition it might be worthwhile to learn what benefit to New York of pension fund investments in "Boston Properties to acquire and develp office properties in Boston, New York, Washington, D. C. and San Francisco."

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