Cezary Podkul is a reporter for ProPublica who writes about finance. Previously, he worked as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal and Reuters where he specialized in data-driven news stories. His work with Carrick Mollenkamp for Reuters’ Uneasy Money series was a finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. He has covered energy and commodities and the private equity industry, among other beats, after leaving investment banking in 2008 to pursue journalism.
Cezary earned a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 and is a 2011 alumnus of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, where he won the Melvin Mencher Prize for Superior Reporting. He is fluent in Polish.
Bankers and new accounting rules are emboldening governments to borrow-and-bet their way out of pension problems, a strategy that’s backfired in the past.
Governments that borrow money to fund their pensions often pay less into their pension funds in future years than they're supposed to. Here’s how the 20 biggest pension bonds deals since 1996 have worked out.
Facing a giant budget deficit, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal plans to borrow $750 million against future income from a landmark legal settlement with cigarette makers.
The New Jersey governor counts past pension borrowing as “school aid” in his budget – but not when it undercuts his claim of spending more on pensions than prior governors.
In pledging to fix New Jersey’s ailing finances, Gov. Chris Christie promised to avoid one-time budget fixes he called “sins of the past.” A review by ProPublica and The Washington Post shows he’s committed some of the same sins – and some new ones.
The latest Securities and Exchange Commission examination of credit rating firms found problems similar to those documented in ProPublica's investigation of tobacco bonds.
When New Jersey decided to bail out some of its tobacco bonds, the state gave up $400 million in future revenues to pocket $92 million immediately, an arrangement that also helped one savvy investor cash in on a big bet.
Wall Street pressed S&P, Moody’s and Fitch to assign more favorable credit ratings to their deals and bragged that the raters complied. Now many of the bonds are headed for default.
In 1999, New York counties had a choice to make. They had just been promised annual payments from tobacco companies as part of a national settlement to reimburse them for smoking-related health care costs. Like winning the lottery, they could either get small payments indefinitely -- or take a lump sum immediately by entering into "securitization" deals. Counties knew that these deals would mean less money in the long run, but bankers said they offered protection in case the payments shrank or went away. Now the cost is clear: millions pledged to investors that counties could have kept for themselves.
Users can see how interest rates and declining cigarette sales affect the bottom line for counties that borrowed against income from the landmark tobacco settlement.
An updated tally by ProPublica shows that tobacco bondholders are due $2.6 billion of the $6 billion in this year’s payouts to state and local governments from Big Tobacco.
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