A New York law to end to Wall Street’s pension ripoff

The ex-suckers flip the card table.

The “Shield of Boringness” — c.f. Dana Claire — is a scammer’s weapon. Layering scams in complexity lets villains get away with all kinds of nastiness. Some things are hard to understand because they’re complex, but some things are complex so they’ll be hard to understand.

In finance, this is sometimes called MEGO: “my eyes glaze over” — complex scams designed to bore their victims into submission. All of us are vulnerable to MEGO, because there’s only so many hours in a day and at a certain point, your eyes just start to slide over the legal mumbo-jumbo without any of it registering.

For me, the most powerful MEGO is the bottomless scamming of public pensions by private equity firms. In some distant way, I knew that there was something really terrible going on there, and that pension managers and PE looters were colluding to rip off billions, maybe trillions, from workers’ pensions. But despite how awful that is, every time I encountered an article about this scam, I just bounced off it. Just the word CALPERS was enough to send me into a coma.

But finally a piece of reporting has penetrated the Shield of Boringness, perhaps because it’s a rare (unprecedented?) piece of good news about this whole awful mess. Writing…