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Podcast Summary: Masters in Business - BONUS: NY Comptroller Candidate Drew Warshaw on Changing the NY State Pension Funds
Episode Overview In this special bonus episode of Masters in Business, host Barry Ritholtz interviews Drew Warshaw, a Democratic candidate for New York State Comptroller. The conversation navigates through Warshaw's background, his experience in rebuilding the World Trade Center after 9/11, his career in alternative energy, and his vision for reforming New York's pension funds, which are nearly $300 billion strong.
Key Topics Discussed
Background of Drew Warshaw
- Early Career: Warshaw started in public service, working for a governor and later the Port Authority during the rebuilding of the World Trade Center.
- Experience in Energy: Transitioned to a Fortune 250 energy company focusing on renewable energy investments.
- Affordable Housing Advocacy: Emphasizes the urgent need for affordable housing solutions in New York City and beyond.
New York State Pension Funds
- Current State: The New York State pension fund is one of the largest in the U.S., but Warshaw criticizes its management, arguing it has led to significant taxpayer burdens.
- Proposed Reforms:
- Investment Strategy: Shift to low-cost index funds to reduce fees and improve returns.
- Governance Structure: Proposes the establishment of a board of trustees to oversee the pension fund, as opposed to solo governance.
The Role of the Comptroller
- Overview: The Comptroller serves as New York's chief financial officer, auditor, and investment officer.
- Auditing Powers: The Comptroller has authority to audit any state expenditure, yet Warshaw critiques the current spread of audits, suggesting a more focused approach on significant issues.
- Public Awareness: Emphasizes the need for better public understanding of the Comptroller's role and responsibilities.
Affordability Crisis in New York
- Warshaw highlights the "affordability crisis" in New York, where many residents struggle to afford basic necessities, including housing.
- Proposed Initiatives:
- Creation of a $10 billion housing fund to invest in affordable housing.
Critique of Current Comptroller
- Warshaw's criticism of incumbent Comptroller Tom DiNapoli focuses on perceived inaction and underperformance, particularly regarding the pension fund’s management and unclaimed funds totaling $20 billion.
Vision for the Future
- Warshaw outlines success as reducing the financial burden on taxpayers, creating affordable housing, effectively managing pension investments, and returning unclaimed funds to New Yorkers. He envisions transforming the Comptroller’s office into a more proactive and public-facing entity.
Key Quotes
- *“The cavalry is not coming. The cavalry is us.”* - Drew Warshaw emphasizing the need for proactive leadership.
- *“The job cannot be keeping the job.”* - Warshaw on the responsibility to serve New Yorkers effectively.
Conclusion This episode provides insight into Drew Warshaw's candidacy and his comprehensive approach to reforming New York's fiscal management, particularly concerning pension funds and affordable housing. His experiences and plans highlight the crucial role of the Comptroller in addressing pressing economic challenges facing New Yorkers today.
For more episodes like this, listeners are encouraged to check out previous interviews and discussions on investing, markets, and business insights.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VODrew Warshaw's Journey and Background
2:30 to 6:12
Explore Warshaw's history, from public service to rebuilding the World Trade Center.
“I'm really excited to talk to you because of not just your background, but some of your ideas about the New York State pension plan, nearly$300 billion.”
The Housing Crisis in New York and the U.S.
6:12 to 10:10
Discuss the severe housing affordability crisis affecting New York City and the nation.
“You can get uptown anytime you want or out of the city.”
Understanding the Role of NIMBYism in Housing
10:10 to 14:04
Examine the challenges posed by NIMBYism and its impact on housing supply.
“And I look over to a government that we are trying to make faster, better, cheaper, and more efficient.”
Understanding Housing Supply and Neighborhood Resistance
14:04 to 14:58
Explore the economic and cultural factors affecting housing supply in neighborhoods.
“And so there is just this literal economic self-interest to not want to allow more homes into your neighborhood.”
The Role of New York State Comptroller
14:58 to 16:18
Learn about the responsibilities and significance of the New York State Comptroller's role.
“So let's talk a little bit about the controller position.”
Impact of the New York State Pension Fund
16:18 to 17:24
Discover how the New York State pension fund affects millions of residents.
“And we have, as I mentioned, you know, being – you know, focusing on the affordable housing crisis.”
The Structure of Pension Fund Governance
17:24 to 18:54
Discuss the governance of the pension fund and the implications of its structure.
“Every New Yorker is impacted by this pension fund.”
Challenges of Political Appointees in Pension Boards
18:54 to 20:12
Examine the issues arising from political appointments in pension fund boards.
“Just to be clear, only one other controller nationally has that level of sole trusteeship, that authority.”
The Unclaimed Fund and Its Significance
20:12 to 22:20
Learn about the New York State Unclaimed Fund and the financial implications for residents.
“Coming up, we continue our conversation with Drew Warshaw, candidate for New York State controller, talking about what most New Yorkers don't understand about the position.”
Addressing New York's Affordability Crisis
22:20 to 23:28
Understand the responsibilities of the comptroller in addressing affordability issues in New York.
“He is a candidate for New York State controller in New York.”
Show all 29 chapters
Critiques of the Current Comptroller's Performance
23:28 to 26:04
Analyze the current comptroller's effectiveness and areas for improvement in office.
“power and massive levers of money and help address the raging cost crisis and affordability crisis of New Yorkers.”
Fees and Investment Management in the Pension Fund
26:04 to 28:00
Discuss the financial implications of fees paid to Wall Street in managing the pension fund.
“For my part, though, the bar has to be a bit higher than that.”
Critique of the NY Comptroller's Performance
28:00 to 28:32
Understand the shortcomings of the NY State Comptroller's management of pension funds.
“I'm just curious, what sort of reaction do you get from people down by the bull on Wall Street?”
Taxpayer Burden and Underperformance
28:32 to 29:56
Explore the financial impact of pension fund mismanagement on taxpayers.
“In fact, they underperformed his own market benchmarks by 39 % and got$11.3 billion in fees.”
Direct Connection to Property Taxes
29:56 to 31:06
Learn how pension fund underperformance is tied to rising property taxes in New York.
“We found that$59.1 billion of additional taxes, what we call the Dinapoli tax, has had to subsidize that 39 percent underperformance over the last 18 years.”
Proposed Changes to the Pension Fund Management
31:06 to 32:56
Discover recommendations for restructuring the NY State Pension Fund.
“And these guys continue to get paid and paid and paid.”
The Challenge of Active Management
32:56 to 34:22
Understand the difficulties and risks associated with active fund management.
“The data on active managers beating their benchmark.”
Diversification and Asset Allocation
34:22 to 36:10
Examine the importance of diversification in pension fund asset allocation.
“So I don't know how selective you could be by basically hiring everyone anyway.”
Balancing Liquidity with Investment Strategy
36:10 to 38:17
Learn how to balance liquidity needs with long-term investment goals in pension funds.
“split second in the public markets we know exactly what an asset is worth in terms of that value discovery and price discovery.”
Radical Yet Logical Investment Approaches
38:17 to 42:00
Understand why straightforward investment strategies can be seen as radical in pension fund management.
“We could do that in the context of the mechanics of how the pension fund is funded and smoothing mechanisms and averaging and so on and so forth.”
Radical Common Sense in Pension Management
42:00 to 44:10
Explore the rationale behind pension fund management strategies in New York.
“And it's one person who is fully indexed and really goes in, answers some email, answers his own phone, has lunch and goes home.”
Understanding the Comptroller's Office
44:11 to 46:10
Drew Warshaw discusses the auditing responsibilities of the New York State Comptroller's Office.
“Coming up, we continue our conversation with Drew Warshaw, candidate for New York State Comptroller, talking about what most New Yorkers don't understand about the position.”
Audit Focus Areas for Better Resource Allocation
46:11 to 49:00
Drew Warshaw outlines three key areas for audits to improve efficiency and accountability.
“You mentioned the office does 2 ,000 audits a year.”
Proposed Changes to the New York Building Code
49:01 to 52:51
Warshaw emphasizes the need for a streamlined building code to reduce construction costs.
“With property insurance premium skyrocketing, with deductibles going up to the point where you basically are self-insuring anyway, so you need to start asking questions like that.”
Increasing Public Awareness of the Comptroller's Role
52:52 to 55:20
Warshaw discusses the importance of making the Comptroller's role more visible to the public.
“No, it's adopted by the city of New York and then the basically rest of state.”
Evaluating Infrastructure Investments in New York
55:21 to 56:00
Discussion on the effectiveness of recent infrastructure projects in New York.
“And in terms of definitions of success, we need to address this cost crisis.”
Evaluating New York's Infrastructure Investments
56:00 to 57:40
Learn about the effectiveness of ongoing infrastructure projects in New York.
“I don't know, is that six or eight billion dollars?”
Challenges in Public Works Management
57:40 to 1:00:10
Discover the issues within the Department of Buildings affecting project success.
“What do you see the next five or 10 years looking like?”
Vision for New York's Future Housing
1:00:10 to 1:02:20
Understand the proposed strategies for addressing housing affordability in New York.
“One, hopefully property taxpayers and state income taxpayers aren't bleeding because they're paying a bunch of fees to a bunch of bankers who just are not doing their job.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:28This message is brought to you by AppleCard. Issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City branch. Offer may not be available elsewhere. Terms and limitations apply. Hello, I'm Stephen Carroll. I'm in Brussels where many of Europe's biggest decisions get made. And I'm Caroline Hepker in London. We're the hosts of the Bloomberg Daybreak Europe podcast. We're up early every weekday keeping an eye on what's happening across Europe and around the world. We do it early so the news is fresh, not recycled. And so you know what actually matters as the day gets going. From Brussels, I'm following the politics, policy and the people shaping the European Union right now.
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1:47This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio. This week on the podcast, a special bonus episode. Drew Warshaw is candidate for New York State controller. The Democratic primary is June. That really is the whole shooting match. Fascinating person, helped rebuild the World Trade Center, background in solar and alternative energy, affordable housing, worked for the Port Authority. I thought this conversation about the New York State pension and the role of the controller was fascinating. And I think you will also, with no further ado, my conversation with New York State controller candidate Drew Warshaw.
2:32I'm really excited to talk to you because of not just your background, but some of your ideas about the New York State pension plan, nearly$300 billion. It's one of the biggest in the countries. We'll get to that in a bit. I have to start out asking you a little bit about your background. You get a bachelor's in history in government from Cornell, your MBA from Columbia Business School. Yes. What was the original career plan? The original path was public service. So that's I started my career in government. I worked for a governor many governors ago and then moved up to Albany and worked for that governor.
3:13And then when that governor resigned, his name was Elliot Spitzer, which you may have remembered. Sure. And this was 2008. This was the same week Bear Stearns went down, which I'm sure you remember. And I had to get back to New York City where I'm from. And the Port Authority was rebuilding the World Trade Center at the time. And the World Trade Center was still a 16-acre hole in the ground. I remember there was a whole lot of dysfunction and arguing with the person who had originally owned the property. I'm forgetting the name of – Larry Silverstein. That's right. Silverstein. Yes. I mean, this went nowhere.
3:51It felt like, oh, they're never going to rebuild this. This is going to be a horrific thing for New York City. Tell us a little bit about your involvement in going from a dysfunctional government entity to something a little more resilient. Sure. So I was blessed to become the chief of staff to the head of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. And this was seven years after the attacks. And it was still a 16 acre hole in the ground. And to your point, it was peak government dysfunction. Everyone was warring with everyone. There was a private developer. There were insurance companies. There was unfortunately the families of nearly 3 ,000 victims.
4:26And there was one of the most complicated engineering and construction projects in the most congested area of New York City, while two mass transit systems had to continue operating. The one train that bisects the site and the path system that comes in from the Hudson River. And we got there in 2008, and it was basically a hole in the ground at that point. And they called it the pit, if you remember, down at Ground Zero. And over the next four years, we got it built. And we opened the memorial by the 10-year anniversary. We secured Condé Nast as an anchor tenant for One World Trade Center. We ended up renegotiating the original real estate deal with Silverstein Properties and rationalized the commercial development and the financing of that project to phase it in over time, given where we were in the market at the time.
5:14So just the experience of a lifetime, especially for a lifelong New Yorker to have an opportunity to rebuild my hometown. There's really nothing like it. And what's fascinating and really relevant for today's circumstance is how lower Manhattan, which was never much of a residential area, very much transformed into a not quite Brooklyn Heights, but a very residential friendly, a whole lot more apartments and condos and co-ops. I wonder if that's a little bit of a template for moving forward now that we seem to have 60, 70 percent rates of return to office. Yeah, and much more mixed use, to your point.
5:56I mean, no one would recognize Lower Manhattan today where it was, you know, in 2000 or in the 90s. And I live in Lower Manhattan with my two boys and my wife not far from the World Trade Center, just given the importance that it has in my life. And it's an incredible area. I think it's, you know, the connectivity, the mass transit, you know, you're close to Brooklyn. You can get uptown anytime you want or out of the city. It's extraordinary. So not only have you worked inside government at the Port Authority, but you've worked for a Fortune 250 energy company. You've worked on affordable housing in the U.S.
6:29Tell us a little bit about your business experience. Yeah. So I was blessed to, one, get to help rebuild the World Trade Center and work in one of the most extraordinary government agencies that exists. and got to do it at a very young age. And so I had this extraordinary experience where I had the opportunity to either keep going vertical and keep going up within government or build out. And I bet that life is long. If it's not, we're sort of in trouble anyway. And so for my part, when I do things, I want them to be meaningful and transformational. To do that, I think you need experience and you need to broaden your foundation and not just build on high.
7:11So I pivoted out of government. I went to business school, as you mentioned, and then joined a Fortune 250 power company that was trying to build a renewable energy investment platform and development platform. And fortunately, was led by a very visionary CEO at the time who saw the green revolution coming, wanted to make sure that the power company was positioned for that and brought in a bunch of different people, some with power and finance experience, some with engineering experience, And then, you know, others like me who just were good at solving complicated problems. And together we built a really strong renewable energy business.
7:47And let's talk a little bit about housing. We in the United States have a shortage of single family homes, of starter homes, and then just generally affordable homes. How bad is the housing problem in New York City and in the entire country? It's as bad as it gets. But I think importantly, and your last point is spot on, this is not just a New York City problem. It is not just a city problem. It is an everywhere problem. And when I left the renewable energy industry, and just to give you a sense, this was late 2019. I was at my umpteenth ribbon cutting for however many solar farms that we had built.
8:29And it's an extraordinary thing to be at a solar farm, to see the sun shining on basically three pieces of equipment, clean electrons going into the grid. And you're sort of like, this is a miracle. We figured this out. We just need a battery. We need an extension cord. And we've got this. But what you don't have in that farm, in a field somewhere, is people. And I'm a New Yorker. And I'm a state and local guy at heart. And the affordability crisis was mushrooming around me. And I just felt like I needed to do something that impacted a person's day-to-day life as opposed to trying to save the species, which we need to do.
9:07And climate change is real. But for my part, the home is the centerpiece of a good life. And if you have a good one that provides safety and security and value, everything else opens up. And if you have a home that is the opposite of those things or if you don't have a home, then things close down on you. And so we have, I think, the most serious domestic policy crisis in this country is the fact that people cannot afford their own home. My kids go to public school downtown in lower Manhattan. One out of every single – one out of every seven public school students in New York City, they don't go home at night because they don't have one.
9:49That's unbelievable. They are homeless. and when I'm sitting there, co-CEO of the most extraordinary affordable housing nonprofit in the country, 1 ,100 dedicated professionals who were there to address the affordable housing crisis. And it occurs to me, Barry, that we were losing. We were getting smoked. It wasn't even close. And I look over to a government that we are trying to make faster, better, cheaper, and more efficient. And they have all this power And they have all this money. And we could use those things to address this raging affordability crisis. And that's sort of what turned me on to doing, you know, what we'll talk about, I'm sure, because I was not someone who grew up, you know, wanting to run for office.
10:37I was sort of the operator, the heads down person behind the person. But I got to the point where I realized that the cavalry is not coming. The cavalry is us. So let's stay with housing for a bit. We're going to talk a lot about the controller position and really what the main focus of that is. But I'm just fascinated by the housing circumstance, starting with really since the financial crisis, we've underbuilt single family homes to say nothing of affordable homes. So just in terms of demographics, depending on whether you believe the realtors, the economists or the builders, we're two, three, four million homes short.
11:18That's right. Relative to 330 something million Americans that is very likely over the next 25 years to be 350, 360, 370. So so given that and given you have federal rules, you have state rules, you have private sector rules, you have local city and county and town rules. What can we do to improve the housing situation? What should we be doing at each of those levels? Yeah, so we have a massive undersupply problem, a supply-demand imbalance. And whether it's$2 million, whether it's$7 million, it's too many million homes short. And people feel that every day, whether it's in their rent or in home prices.
12:02And what we saw at Enterprise Community Partners, which is the affordable housing nonprofit that I worked for, as to your point, at every single level, it is virtually impossible to build a home that people can afford. And I thought siting a solar farm was difficult and you get pushback. Try siting an affordable property. And there's so many layers of bureaucracy. And whether it's from the financing side, the capital structures of these affordable properties, you need a decoder ring to figure them out. They're so complex. The building code that I think is the silent killer of affordable housing in this country, we talk a lot about zoning, and that is also an issue.
12:43But what gets talked about much less is even if a piece of land is perfectly zoned, it is still hard to get the math work because the minute you hit dirt, particularly in New York, with the complexities of the building code and the gold-plated nature and the outdated and so on and so forth, it is a fortune to build. So whether it's the cost of construction or the cost of capital and the cost of land, you have so many different things working against you. And those are some of the roadblocks that we need to start clearing. How significant is the NIMBY not-in-my-backyard issue that once people are established and they have a home, hey, we don't want affordable housing.
13:25We don't want Section 8 housing in our area. Yeah, you're going to send property values down. How legitimate are those concerns and how can they be addressed? Yeah, you have this incredible dynamic in this country where the incumbents of homeownership are actually economically incented, in theory, to not allow greater supply. Because just if we're in a supply-demand world, if the supply goes up and demand stays constant, the value of their underlying property either will sort of rest in a neutral position or potentially go down. And so there is just this literal economic self-interest to not want to allow more homes into your neighborhood.
14:12And then there's cultural things and there's all sorts of other cross-currents. It is a big problem. And unfortunately, what we've seen is if you actually study this and you look at what happens when you introduce new supply of homes, what you don't see is home values plunging. You don't see wild traffic jams or the schools getting filled up. You see a balance because these things can't come online all at once anyway. They are phased in over time. And a place will naturally adjust to the inflow of new homes and new people. And I think much too much is made from a very small but very loud group of people who, to your point, say, not in my backyard.
14:58So let's talk a little bit about the controller position. Most people don't really know what this role is. We're going to go into a lot of details, but essentially this is one of the most significant financial roles in the state. There are regular audits and oversight of all sorts of tax and spending revenue, as well as overseeing the New York State Pension Fund, which is almost$300 billion. I think it's the third largest in the country. Is that right? That's right. That's right. So tell us a little bit about this role. Yeah. Everyone's heard of the governor. Everyone's heard of the attorney general.
15:38There's a third statewide position in New York, and it's the New York State Comptroller. And put simply, the State Comptroller is the state's chief financial officer, chief auditor, and chief investment officer of the third largest fund in the United States of America, all rolled up into one job. One person has all three of those responsibilities. So it's an extraordinarily powerful position. Unfortunately, too few New Yorkers have ever heard of it. And the ones who have can barely pronounce the title. So we need to do a lot more to educate the public on the awesome responsibility and authority of this one office.
16:17And part of the challenge has been it's been occupied by the same person in the same seat for 18 years who has stayed well below the radar and unfortunately I think is sort of treating the position like a lifetime appointment. And we have, as I mentioned, you know, being – you know, focusing on the affordable housing crisis. We have a position that is sitting on all this power and all this money and is not being flexed for the people without it. And I think if we could get in there with energy and surround ourselves with talent, we have all the levers we need to address so many of the crises that we face.
16:53So I'm fascinated and I bet a lot of our audience is fascinated by we don't really think about New York State pension. My wife is a teacher. I have friends who are police and fire people, state hospital doctors and emergency room nurses. There are just a whole run of people that benefit from the New York State pension. Tell us a little bit about what's going on in that pension. $300 billion, that's real money. Yeah. So let's be clear. Every New Yorker is impacted by this pension fund. So one, to your point, there are nearly 1.25 million beneficiaries. These are public school teachers. These are firefighters.
17:37These are cops. These are frontline government workers. So they are directly impacted. But who funds the public pension fund? Don't they kick in? Taxpayers. They do kick in a portion, but taxpayers pay the overwhelming amount of the contributions into the pension fund. So your property taxes and your state income taxes, they are taxed and all 11 million New York tax filers pay into our public pension fund. So everyone is impacted. And what's so extraordinary is this is not only the third largest public pension fund in the United States, but it's run by one person. He is the sole trustee of this fund.
18:14There's not an investment committee and a lot of consultants. He does not report to a board of trustees. The New York City Comptroller reports to five different fiduciary boards. Who are those five boards? It's currently – there's the teachers, there's the firefighters and cops, there's the public employees and so on and so forth. The state controller reports to himself. He is the board. He is literally the chief investment officer. He is the fiduciary. He runs this money. So should there be a board of trustees the controller as head of the pension fund reports to? How do you propose changing that structure?
18:53Yeah, I think so. Just to be clear, only one other controller nationally has that level of sole trusteeship, that authority. That's Connecticut, which is a much smaller fund. And I think corporate governance is so critical here. I think a board structure makes so much sense, but we have to get that board structure right. And one of the challenges, and this is – I've looked at sort of best practices across the country. One of the challenges of these public pension funds is their boards are political appointees. And so you get into a situation where the governor gets an appointment and the state senate majority leader and the assembly and so on and so forth.
19:33And so now you have this board that you hope is accountable, but in many ways, you've actually diffused accountability away from a person who's publicly elected. At least they have a job interview every four years and have to come up to a sort of anonymous, unknown board that sort of operates wherever they operate and are politically appointed. So I think, you know, moving to a board structure to me on its face makes perfect sense. There is way too much concentrated power in one human. But if it becomes a politicized board, I think we have a problem. So I think we have to move in that direction, but we have to do that thoughtfully and carefully.
20:11Really interesting. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Drew Warshaw, candidate for New York State controller, talking about what most New Yorkers don't understand about the position. I'm Barry Rittles. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
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22:15I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest today is Drew Warshaw. He is a candidate for New York State controller in New York. Really, the primary is the whole whole thing. And that will be held in June of 2026. Let's talk a little bit about this role that so many New Yorkers either don't understand or don't even think about. You mentioned attorney general and governor. Everybody knows those titles. Tell us a little bit about the important powers of the New York state controller. Yeah, I think what is extraordinary and unfortunate is we have a position in government that is sitting on all this power and all this money, and it is not being used for people without it.
23:08And what do I mean? New Yorkers cannot afford to live in New York right now. We have a massive affordability problem, not just housing, anything, electricity bills, insurance, and so on and so forth. And there is a person up in Albany whose job it is is to address things like that. Although, unfortunately, I don't think he understands that or knows that. And so I want to take this position and I want to use the massive levers of power and massive levers of money and help address the raging cost crisis and affordability crisis of New Yorkers. And I think we can do that, whether it is managing the public pension fund in a very different way.
23:44And I'm sure we'll talk about that. Absolutely. The incredible audit powers, the fact that this person could audit anything that touches a state tax dollar, a quarter of a trillion dollars gets spent every single year in New York. And he has an all access pass to being able to audit any of that spending, which is basically the ability to audit anything. And then what is not well known is that the New York State Comptroller also oversees this thing called the New York State Unclaimed Fund, which is where all of our money, our uncashed checks, our health insurance benefits that don't somehow find their way to our mailbox goes up.
24:21And that's a pretty decent chunk of money, isn't it? It turns out it is. It should be zero because it's New Yorkers' money, and it is the state comptroller's job to give it back to New Yorkers. But it is$20 billion. There's$20 billion in the New York State Unclaimed Fund. when the controller was appointed 18 years ago. That number was only$7 billion. And by the way, that's still too high. And so that is a rare thing to be able to quantify the performance of an elected official, sort of how do you do that, especially with like a senator or an assemblyman. Is it how many bills that they sponsor?
24:50But what if the bills are bad bills? Or what if they're in the minority and they don't get passed? This is something in the job remit, in the description, that a fund that is supposed to go down has nearly tripled in size. And it's New Yorkers money In the middle of an affordability crisis, this guy is sitting on$20 billion of our money. So let me defend the sitting New York comptroller, a gentleman named Tom DiNapoli. He's been in the job for almost two decades. His reputation is he's a steady technocrat. He's done some audits. He's found some waste and savings. It's not like he's doing nothing.
25:29What do you credit him doing right? And where do you think the biggest areas he's fallen short? Sure. Well, look, I think and this is not nothing. And he he leads with this. Now, my problem is this is a problem that this is your reason for running. And what he says is he has never been indicted and he's never been in a sex scandal. Now, in New York, that's a pretty big thing. Elliot Spitzer stepped down. Lots of other public officials in New York have had a step down. And this predates Me Too by a long time. Yeah. For my part, though, the bar has to be a bit higher than that. So no sex scandals is not just the minimum.
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26:10I don't think that could be the definition of success in a position of this consequence. And unfortunately, that is what we have heard. So look, I think he is not corrupt. I don't know of any sex scandal, but we have to be doing more. And you asked some of the things that he could be doing more of. I think the way he has managed the$300 billion public pension fund has amounted to malpractice. I think it has cost New Yorkers, and we'll talk about this, nearly$60 billion of extra taxes that have come out of our pocket and literally just been vaporized. So I think whether it's the public pension fund, the fact that he hasn't been able to get$20 billion of New Yorkers back into their pockets in the middle of an affordability crisis, or the way he focuses the audit authority, not going after the things that matter most to New Yorkers and instead spreading his staff and diluting his staff over thousands and thousands of audits.
27:08And if you audited 2 ,000 things every single year, it is very difficult to get to the root cause of any one of them. And so I think just even the level of focus, and we could talk about some of the ideas and some of the areas that I would audit, just need to be fundamentally more focused. And when you run large organizations or large businesses or even large government agencies, resources are finite at the end of the day. And you need to understand that and you need to concentrate those finite resources on the things that matter most. So let's talk about the New York State Pension Fund, nearly$300 billion.
27:42You've taken to standing by the Wall Street charging bull with a giant check for$21 million that you say is how much the fund is wasting every week. So that's$1.1 billion a year in fees. Yes. We'll dive into that. I'm just curious, what sort of reaction do you get from people down by the bull on Wall Street? Yeah, so I think Drew for NY is what you're talking about. And by the way, it's lower Broadway near Wall Street. Right. So if you go to DrewFranY on Instagram or X or whatever social channel, you will see what Barry is talking about. But every single Friday, which is payday, which is when New Yorkers get paid, I go down to the Wall Street Bull and I call – I don't know what we can say on this podcast.
28:32You can say whatever you want. Okay, I call bullsh** on the fact that our New York State Comptroller for the last 18 years has given$11.3 billion in fees to hundreds of Wall Street bankers who fundamentally didn't do their job, who did not beat the market net of their fees. They did not even come close. In fact, they underperformed his own market benchmarks by 39 % and got$11.3 billion in fees. And we got this all off of the Comptroller's annual reports. Is that how you got to 50 plus billion dollars was the underperformance? The underperformance would have had to be made up by taxpayers. Now, the state controller walks around and he goes, you know, I've done a really good job.
29:13Why? Because the Public Pension Fund of New York is one of the best funded in the nation. And he's right. It is. But he doesn't tell you why. It's funded through taxes. It's funded because 11 million New York taxpayers over the last 18 years paid fifty nine point one billion dollars in extra property taxes. and extra state income taxes to make certain it was fully funded. It was the taxpayers that insured that, not the stewardship of the investment fund, because it is New York state law for the public pension fund to be fully funded. Mickey Mouse could be the state controller, and it must be. The question is how.
29:47How is it funded? Is it through the investment income and the returns, if you're doing your job, or is it through taxpayers subsidizing the underperformance? And that's what we found, Barry. We found that$59.1 billion of additional taxes, what we call the Dinapoli tax, has had to subsidize that 39 percent underperformance over the last 18 years. So I live in Nassau County, which I think is like the third or fourth highest property tax in the country. Are you telling me that my taxes are higher because the New York State Pension Fund is not even getting market beta? Is that what I'm to understand?
30:24That is exactly the case. You understand this perfectly. And that is the direct connection between this job and people. And that's just one of the direct connection between this job and everyday New Yorkers' lives. On Long Island last year, 10 of the 13 towns on Long Island blew through their property tax cap. The reason they blew through it is because Tom DiNapoli did not do his job. It's because he underperformed the market and we are sending billions of dollars of property taxes,$1.1 billion last year alone, or$20 million every single week. every single payday alone in fees to a bunch of bankers who fundamentally did not do their job.
31:01And if you and I didn't do our job for 18 straight years, what would happen to us? We'd be fired. And these guys continue to get paid and paid and paid. So let's talk a little bit about what that pension fund should look like. And full disclosure, I've testified at various state pension funds. I've made the argument, actually it was about a dozen years ago, to the Connecticut Pension Fund that they should move away from high-priced alts and just simplify. What do you think we should do with this$300 billion pension fund? How should it be positioned? So the state controller right now pays 664 different investment managers to actively invest the fund.
31:46And their promise is we will beat the market net of our fees. And as we've established, they have not even come close. And what I would do is I would replace those 664 investment managers with a diversified set of low-cost index funds. To your point, let's not pay all these fees for something that they have been unable to do over the last 18 years. And let's take the market return. Let's focus on asset allocation. To be very clear, that matters. Whether it's between 89 % or 93.4 % of a portfolio's return will be driven by your asset allocation. So let's spend our time and resources on getting that right and making sure that asset allocation matches the job description of the fund.
32:28An asset allocation can look very different depending on what that fund needs to do, the liquidity needs, and so on and so forth. So let's focus on that. Once we do that, the picking and choosing of the underlying securities and so on and so forth, to me, I think that's a loser's game, as one person famously said it. And I think we should save taxpayers their money in the form of these fees, and we'd earn a better rate of return for the pension, and we'd be able to lower property taxes in the process. Right. The data on active managers beating their benchmark. And to be fair, a big chunk do every year, but it's just about half, usually a little less each year.
33:06Over time, that drops to about 20 percent over five years, 10 percent over 10 years. And over 20 years, it's virtually nobody. You know the handful of names, Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, et cetera. But the vast majority, vast, vast majority don't. Um, what sort of response do you think you would get from wall street who is very happy to collect, uh, big fees on underperforming funds? And, and again, to be fair, there is a substantial chunk of fund managers that do great each year. It's just really hard to pick them consistently over time. And that's the thing. Um, so one, the response that I've gotten from people who understand finance and investments, no one could possibly understand how someone could hire 664 different investment managers.
33:56Effectively, he's bought the most expensive index fund in the world with the worst tracking error. And that's basically what he has done, right? And with a lower sharp ratio than the market. So you're getting a worse risk adjusted rate of return and you're underperforming the market by 39%. So it's like on every possible level, this thing is not performing. And I'm not here to say, you know, we can debate active management versus passive management. What I am here to say is for purposes of a$291 billion fund that is managed by a bunch of folks in Albany, I do not believe that fund should or needs to try to pick the pickers and to somehow be the ones who, frankly, I think would be arrogant enough to think that they know how to choose these folks.
34:44And they have 664 of them. So I don't know how selective you could be by basically hiring everyone anyway. Hey, someone has to be pretty good in that group. Right. Exactly. But how do I know which one? And I'm not arrogant enough to think I do. So here's the pushback. And I have this discussion on the regular, but the pushback is, well, we could be concentrated in any one index or any group of indexes, but we want non-correlated returns and we want the potential to outperform the market. So when we go to venture capital or private equity or private credit or real estate investments, it allows us to withstand whatever the market or the economy throws at us because these are so non-correlated and they give us the chance to outperform the market.
35:37When you buy an index, all you're going to get is the market. Yeah, sure. So I guess a couple of things on that. One, I think diversification matters. So that's back to asset allocation. Absolutely, we need to be thoughtful about diversifying. We need to be thoughtful about idiosyncrasies and trying to find those non-correlative asset classes. But to me, the idea that we should put our money in a bunch of private asset classes to basically perform an exercise in volatility washing just because they may not have to mark to market their valuations the way every split second in the public markets we know exactly what an asset is worth in terms of that value discovery and price discovery.
36:23To me, that can't be the reason we are putting our money in private asset classes. We can deal with volatility in the mechanics of the contribution rates and look-back periods and smoothing mechanisms and things like that. But let's not have that be the reason we put our money in private asset classes. If there are idiosyncratic opportunities, if there are ways to diversify within the context of a private market, I am open to that. But what I am not open to is the idea that just because it's somehow in private equity, the laws of physics and gravity of the economy are not impacting the underlying assets simply because the ownership model looks different, right?
37:09I mean, to me, that doesn't mean that we've diversified. It just means we've changed the ownership structure. And if we can diversify, I would love to have that conversation and we could get the benefits of those idiosyncrasies. then great. I truly am open to that conversation. But to me, it can't simply be because we're going to wash away the volatility because that is a terrible reason to make investments. That volatility washing, you're channeling Cliff Asnes of AQR. He's the one who's championed that phrase more than anybody else. And he's a quant and an active manager. And he says, Because if you're putting things into privates just so you don't have to do quarterly reporting, you're probably paying too much in fees and you're probably giving up too much in terms of future returns.
38:02Yeah, that's a bad reason. Right. And again, in the context of a pension fund, we could deal with volatility. I appreciate and am sensitive to the liquidity needs to ensure benefit payouts. But we can do those things outside the context of our investment choices. We could do that in the context of the mechanics of how the pension fund is funded and smoothing mechanisms and averaging and so on and so forth. We don't have to do it in the actual job of investments. So let's stay with that because it's really a fascinating way to think about – whenever I talk about perpetual funds like a pension or a foundation, they have certain obligations.
38:44There's a substantial payout every year. If you're a tax-exempt foundation, it's 5 percent at a minimum. I think the pension fund pays out a whole lot more than that each year, right? That's right. Like$15 or$16 billion a year. So that's not an insubstantial chunk of money. How do you think about and how should whoever is running the New York State Pension Fund think about the future liabilities that fund has for forever and what it means for asset allocation. Does this mean we steer away from illiquid assets? Does this mean we steer towards fixed income? How do you think about that asset allocation model?
39:27I think it just needs to be balanced, and it needs to align and reflect to the job description of the fund. And I was talking to a former chief investment officer of one of the largest public pension funds in the United States, and he was the one who reminded me, You know, Drew, what is the job description of the New York State Public Pension Fund? What does it need to do? What is the benefit stream that it needs to pay out? What is the income stream that is coming in, whether it's from the investment income or, you know, public taxpayers and, you know, employers, the 3 ,000 municipalities that are paying into the public pension fund that are funded by those property taxes?
40:05So to me, that is first principles. And for my part, I think we absolutely can be in areas that are less liquid. We just need to have balanced liquidity. We just need to ensure that, on the other hand, we have pockets of the portfolio that we know can perform or we know can pay out and we know are highly liquid. And fortunately, in the capital markets, there are plenty of asset classes that can provide that liquidity. while some of our assets may be tied up and can either get, whether it's some illiquidity premium or some other cash flow characteristic that is useful, again, for that broader job description of the fund that has to pay out now, but also, to your point, is the ultimate long-term investor.
40:52The state of New York is not going away anytime soon. They are a forever open fund. And we need to have that focus of and that balance of what are our liquidity needs today and over the foreseeable future. But how are we investing to ensure the public employees and the public school teachers who just entered the workforce, who are teaching my two sons, are going to have the benefits paid out 30, 35, 40 years from now? And for sure, 90 percent of the assets don't need to be liquid each year, even if most of them will be. It's less than 10 percent annually that has to be paid out. What you're proposing sounds radical, but I could look at elsewhere around the country.
41:41I know CalPERS made a shift a few years ago, 10 years ago, where they took a lot of money away from not just underperforming hedge funds, but even fairly well-performing hedge funds that were kind of pricey and rolled them into index funds. And then very famously, The Wall Street Journal did this somewhat hilarious article about the head of a Nevada pension fund. And it's one person who is fully indexed and really goes in, answers some email, answers his own phone, has lunch and goes home. This isn't really radical what you're proposing. This is BlackRock, half of their$12 trillion is passive or I should say indexed.
42:29Even more of Vanguard's$11 trillion is indexed. This is fairly state-of-the-art thinking. If you want to use radical, it is radical common sense. It is the first day of business school. They gather you around and they say, come close. We're going to tell you a secret. It turns out it's really, really hard to beat the market net of fees. It's really hard to do that over a long period of time. It's especially hard to do that with a fund size as big as$300 billion that just wants to regress to the mean. And so focus on asset allocation. Think about diversification. Think about that job description.
43:05But once you do, don't worry about the last 6 % or whatever it is, which a lot of people argue may not be skill, could be luck, could be a lot of other factors. I don't need to have that debate right now. For purposes of the third largest public pension fund in the United States of America, we should not be trying to beat the market and doing something that we can't possibly do because it turns out over the last 18 years, it has crushed taxpayers in the process in the middle of an affordability crisis. And what we've seen, Barry, and what this basically amounts to is our state controller over the last 18 years has overseen one of the largest wealth transfers that no one knows anything about.
43:42From ordinary taxpayers,$59.1 billion, to hundreds of Wall Street bankers who didn't do their job. And if they were to do their job, if they were to beat the market net of fees, great. Then it's a win-win. Then everyone wins. Then we are living in a world in which we can have our cake and we can eat it too. But I live in the real world. 19 million New Yorkers live in the real world. It hasn't happened over the last 18 years. And that's why I think we need a fundamental change. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Drew Warshaw, candidate for New York State Comptroller, talking about what most New Yorkers don't understand about the position.
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45:44I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest today is Drew Warshaw. He is a candidate for New York State Comptroller in New York. Really, the primary is the whole thing, and that will be held in June of 2026. So we've talked a bit about the pension. Let's talk about some of the other roles within the New York State Comptroller's Office. You mentioned the office does 2 ,000 audits a year. What areas are they auditing? What's the purpose of it? And how do you want to change that? What areas do you think they should be auditing but are not?
46:28Sure. So their remit, their job jar is they are allowed to audit anything that touches a state tax dollar, which if anyone understands public finance is basically everything because our taxes go up to Albany and then they get redistributed all across the state. So he, in theory, is able to audit anything he wants. These are audits, I think, importantly to understand, these are not only financial statement audits, which they are, they do do those, but these are auditing the efficacy of how our tax dollars are spent. Are they spent well? Are they getting the results that the legislature and these laws intended?
47:06If not, how should we improve them? So this is also not just chief auditor, but sort of chief efficiency officer of the state of New York. And one of the things that – and there are nearly 3 ,000 employees who work for the state controller, which I hear, and that seems like a lot. That seems like an extraordinary resource to be able to deploy over a quarter of a trillion dollars of spending. But when you dilute those resources over thousands of different audits and you don't focus your finite resources, I think, on the things that matter most, then you don't get to the root cause of so many of the challenges.
47:42Give us a few examples. So let me give you three. Let me just give you three examples. And everyone, you know, would start with the MTA. And of course, we're going to audit the MTA. But the first thing I was thinking of is why is it so expensive to build subway or roads and tolls and things like that? But one of the things that I want to get to some of the other things, because the state controller actually does audit the MTA. And one of the things that I would want to do is because there have been so many audits of the MTA, I would first initially just do an audit of the audits. I would want to truly understand what have been the findings, make sure that those findings make sense, and then just simply cross-reference to what have they implemented and what are still outstanding.
48:21And, like, literally just simplify it from that point. And then we can get in the weeds once you've gotten smarter on that. But for my part, before we, like, launch into some new MTA audit, there have been so many MTA audits. Let's just understand what of the findings have actually been addressed and what remain outstanding. But I want to talk about three audits, three things that I think we should concentrate this authority on. One is I think we should audit the Department of Financial Services. What is the Department of Financial Services? It turns out the State Department of Financial Services is the largest regulator of insurance companies in the country.
48:57Insurance companies are not regulated by the federal government. They are regulated on a state-by-state basis, and the Department of Financial Services in the state of New York happens to be the largest among them. How are they doing? We have no idea because we have never done a top to bottom audit on the way in which they regulate this massive sector of our economy, whose business model these days seems to be to take our money and make it really, really hard to get it back, whether it's on the health side and the health insurance, you know, gauntlet that you have to run or in my old world, in the housing world.
49:32With property insurance premium skyrocketing, with deductibles going up to the point where you basically are self-insuring anyway, so you need to start asking questions like that. We are going to get to the bottom of this insurance industry, and we can from this position of state controller. A second area, the New York State Public Service Commission and the Department of Public Service, another sort of mouthful of bureaucratic-sounding things. Well, it turns out this bureaucratic sounding thing is the largest regulator of our electric and gas utility monopolies. This is the one thing that ensures that these monopolies actually serve the public interest.
50:12And I was in the electricity business for eight years building renewable energy, power infrastructure all across the country. And I had to deal with these utility monopolies. And these utility monopolies are broken. And their regulator is not doing anything about it. And what I would do is go in and we would audit the regulator. The one thing that's standing in between the public interest and these monopolies. Why aren't we laser focused on that when electricity rates are going up by double digits? I was up in Rochester, New York, and Rochester Gas and Electric, one of those utility monopolies, proposed a one-year 36 % increase to your electricity rates.
50:52That is an admission of failure. That is literally an admission that the company in charge does not know what it is doing and is not up to the task. We need to fundamentally change the utility business model. I think we can. I think there's a financial incentive structure that was built for 100 years ago, not for today and for the next 100 years. And I think that that would ultimately be good for rate payers, good for consumers, and fundamentally good for the investors and the developers of these power infrastructures in the first place. And the third thing that I would audit is I would audit the New York City and New York State building code.
51:29And people say, well, wait a minute. You can audit agencies. You can't audit something like the building code. But my authority extends to anything that touches a state tax dollar. And if you had energy, imagination, and urgency, you would recognize that the silent killer of not just housing but of anything in this town or all across New York State is the building code. This thing kills projects before they start. And it is gold-plated and it is outdated. And what I would do is propose a model building code that we estimate will strip 15 % of the cost to construct anything, not just housing, which obviously I care a lot about and New Yorkers need more of, but anything.
52:09And I would literally do – the audit would be a track change version from the model building code to the existing two codes that govern construction in New York. And we would show precisely what would need to be changed to get to that lighter, simpler, easier, and more cost-effectively to build building code. We would do the work for them. And then we would go to the mayor and we would go to the city council. And they have talked a lot about affordability. And we would say, if you are serious about this, go adopt this code. And we would go to the governor and the legislature and they talk a lot about affordability as they should.
52:43And we would give them a concrete way to be able to deliver that. And that is how I think we need to be thinking of leveraging the power of this audit. So is the code passed by a city or state legislature or is it administratively passed? No, it's adopted by the city of New York and then the basically rest of state. The state adopts a building code. Different municipalities can add on. But that's one of the challenges, Barry, is we always add. We never subtract to these things, right? And no one has done a top-to-bottom audit of the thousands of pages of code that drives up the cost to build anything.
53:23And that's the type of creativity and energy and experience-driven audits that I think we need to bring. So you're talking to a large degree about making this position much more public, much more visible, much louder than it's been. What's been going on with the incumbent? I don't think most people and, in fact, the data point that you've shared before, 62 percent of Democrats don't know who he is. 20 % of them view them favorably. This has kind of been a stealth position. You're really proposing, if not elevating this, while certainly making it much more visible and public. Tell us about that and your thoughts in that space.
54:15Yeah. I mean, look, the job cannot be keeping the job. That's not what this job is. And we are in a moment where if you were sitting on money and you were sitting on power and you are not using that really, really well, you have got to step aside. When one out of every seven New York City public school students do not go home at night because they don't have one and you are sitting on the third largest pool of public capital in the United States of America and none of that money is invested in homes that people can afford, by the way, while earning a reasonable risk adjusted rate of return, which is what we did for a living, then that is a massive problem.
54:53And so for my part, the fact that no one has ever heard of this office is a problem. That is not an asset of the last 18 years. That is a massive liability. That is red blinking lights that the fiscal watchdog of the state of New York, no one has ever heard of them. And if you were to ask, if you were to make up a name and you were to poll it, you know, it is human behavior for at least one out of every three people to say, yeah, yeah, sure. I've heard of that person. And so the fact that 62 percent of New Yorkers and New York Democrats have never heard of this guy, to me, is an indictment of the performance of this job.
55:31And in terms of definitions of success, we need to address this cost crisis. But after four years, you better have heard of the New York State Comptroller, right? Because that means we are actually using this power and this money for the people who don't have it. So let's talk about some things that I think have worked out pretty well. And they tend not just to be New York City or New York State programs, but port authority and bigger programs. Also, as a lifelong New Yorker and a long time, lived in the city for a long time, I've been really impressed with, I think, LaGuardia could be the best airport in the country now.
56:14I don't know, is that six or eight billion dollars? Later, they should have done it 20 years ago, adding and moving part of Penn Station to Grand Central as well as the new facility. A huge win, the extension of the Second Avenue subway. And then as I drive around New York State, we seem to be repaving everything. I know a big infrastructure bill passed a couple of years ago and the Long Island Expressway and the Interstate 95, the New York State Thruway. And it seems everywhere I look, new roads, new bridges, new tunnels are being laid. Are these are we getting the best bang for our buck with these projects?
57:00And what other projects there's talk about a very expensive project to protect southern Manhattan from climate change and rising sea levels. And I recall after Sandy, there was just every Superstorm Sandy, there was a brief discussion about, gee, look at the towns that had buried power lines. They didn't lose electricity as opposed to half the state lost electricity for two weeks or longer. How do we look at all these projects? How do we manage the expenses of them? Are we getting a bang for our buck on any of these? Tell us about these big public works projects. What do you see the next five or 10 years looking like?
57:44Sure. So the short answer is no, we are not getting the best bang for the taxpayer buck in these projects. And there are any number of reasons why I talked about the building code as one of those reasons. Another reason, and I think listeners will appreciate this, is you look at the Department of Buildings and where are their service level standards, right? Where are their turn times? Where are the things that they need to be doing to ensure that the people out in the world who are investing the capital and putting that capital to use and all the workers who are trying to build these projects and build these infrastructures, these pieces of infrastructure, where are those service level standards?
58:28You know, in the world that I used to occupy, we would have service level agreements, right? Our counterparty would have to perform based on a number of different metrics. And this is, you know, goes back to that audit authority. These are the things that the state controller can do both by proposing those service level standards and making sure that they are adopted. And if they aren't adopted, that's okay. We can still measure them anyway. And we can come back every single year and see how they're doing. So the Department of Buildings is one of those places where, again, sort of projects go to die.
59:02And I think there just is a lack of discipline and focus around metrics to just make sure that they are doing their legally required job. You should not have to hire an expediter to have an expedited project. That seems to be the standard. It's a layer of cost, right? That is a layer of cost and a layer of friction that basically admits that the status quo makes no sense. And so we're going to have this off-ramp for people who can afford it and only those people who can afford it. And they will somehow get special treatment. And to me, that is like the exact wrong thing and the wrong direction.
59:39And we have to show that the regular thruway works, that you don't need the Lexus lane that only certain people can afford. And that's where we have to kind of pull government back in that mindset, that they should just be able to do their core job. So let's zoom out and ask you to imagine four years or eight years into the job. What does success look like? How do you define being able to look back after a term or two and saying, this is where we succeeded. This is how it should be run. Yeah, great question. So a few very concrete examples. One, hopefully property taxpayers and state income taxpayers aren't bleeding because they're paying a bunch of fees to a bunch of bankers who just are not doing their job.
1:00:27So, one, we have pivoted the investment strategy away from that sort of beat the market idea that has failed utterly over the last 18 years. And we are moving away from that and we are taking pressure off of taxpayers that is part of the cost crisis that we are facing in New York and why New Yorkers cannot afford to live here. So that's one thing. The cost of housing. I think the state controller has an ability both on the capital side and on the audit side to address it. We talked about the audit side in terms of addressing this building code issue, and I hope that that can lower or at least keep neutral the cost of construction.
1:01:07And on the financing side, I think we could bend the cost curve of the cost structure, the capital structure, and the cost of capital for affordable housing by making available, and I propose the largest housing fund in the United States of America, a$10 billion housing fund to invest in homes that New Yorkers can afford. Definition of success, that is deployed in what we estimate to be 100 ,000 homes that New Yorkers can actually afford. That is something that is absolutely concrete. And then this$20 billion fund of New Yorkers own money in the New York State Unclaimed Fund, that we actually start getting that money back.
1:01:47And you have to go to some dopey website right now that is complicated and hard to use. And if you have money, they don't even tell you how much because they don't even really want you to get it back, right? It sounds like you're trying to issue a health insurance claim or something like that. We are going to get rid of this website. We are going to decommission it. We won't have a website because we won't need it because we're automatically going to send New Yorkers their money back because it's their money. It is not Tom DiNapoli's. It is not the state of New York's. It is New Yorkers. We have your name.
1:02:16We have how much you're owed. We have your last known address. We have access to all the data in the world. And we are in 2026. My phone knows more about my personality than I do. My phone knows where I live. why can't we figure out how to get you your money back automatically we can and we will true really interesting thank you so much for coming in and i'm going to extend an invitation to tom dinapoli if you want to come to bloomberg and talk to us about um what you've been doing as controller and what your plans are for the future we would love to have you i'm going to have my producer reach out um really really interesting stuff thank you uh for a thought provoking conversation.
1:02:56We have been speaking to Drew Warshaw. He is a candidate for New York State controller and the Democratic primary in June 2026. If you enjoyed this conversation, well, check out any of the 600 we've done over the previous 12 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Bloomberg, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I not thank our crack staff who helps me put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega is my video producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my podcast producer. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
1:03:44I'm Matt Miller. And I'm Hannah Elliott, inviting you to join us for the Bloomberg Hot Pursuit podcast. Every week we bring you news and industry insight on everything cars. And we do a whole lot more than just talk about cars, Matt. We actually get behind the wheel of basically every latest model, especially the luxury ones and the sports cars, direct from the showroom floor. It really is remarkable how many cars we have access to. I feel a little bit guilty about it, but everything from$40 ,000 EVs to exotic half million supercars. We also speak with the insiders who shape the automotive industry from the top CEOs and collectors to visionary designers and racing champions.
1:04:24Search for Bloomberg Hot Pursuit on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Maybe you listen while you're on your weekend drive, maybe go into Cars and Coffee. Listen to us talk about what we are driving this week. That's Bloomberg Hot Pursuit. I'm Matt Miller in New York. And I'm Hannah Elliott in Los Angeles. Subscribe today wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.
From the publisher
On this special, bonus episode, Barry speaks with Drew Warshaw, Democratic Candidate for New York State Comptroller. They discuss his role in building the World Trade Center after 9/11. his career in alternative energy, and running for NY Comptroller. They dive into his thoughts on New York Pensions funds and the changes he'd make if elected.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.


