First Big Public Pension Investment Settlement

“If Boss Tweed were alive today, he would be a placement agent.” So said New York's attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, announcing a settlement with the Carlyle Group, by which the Carlyle Group, an outside investment manager for many government pension funds, will no longer hire placement agents to get public pension business and will greatly limit its officers' and employees' campaign contributions to anyone involved with public pensions (according to an article in today's New York Times).

The attorney general "hopes to use the settlement as a model for an industrywide overhaul of how hedge funds and private equity firms interact with public pension funds."

The SEC is also talking about bars on campaign contributions and other remedies for the problems that have come out regarding public pension business in New York, Tennessee, and elsewhere.

For more on this topic, see these recent blog posts
Hank Morris, New York's big-time placement agent
Problems in Tennessee