Policy

CA County Schemes To Seize Mortgages From … Public Pension Funds

It turns out they're big investors in resold mortgages

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Caught between rising pension costs and  declining tax receipts, several local governments in California have gone bankrupt, including the city of San Bernardino, which has stopped making its required contributions to the California Public Employees Retirement System.  CalPERS is threatening to sue.

Meanwhile, the county of San Bernardino is thinking of trying to help the local economy by injecting it with billions of dollars, which, unfortunately, it doesn't have.  So the people who run the county are thinking of simply seizing the money by using eminent domain.  But an examination of the plan reveals a simple scheme in which the right hand of government robs the left hand of government, because the idea that has been floated is simply to confiscate the money from institutional investors — and many of these institutional investors are pension funds, including government pension funds like CalPERS.