00:00New York City Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli secured an easy victory in his first primary challenge
00:05since 2007. That is according to a projection by Decision Desk HQ. Bloomberg's Martin Z. Braun
00:12has been reporting on this story. I'm pleased to say he joins us now. Martin, it's great to see you.
00:17Help me out here. What does the state comptroller do? I'm glad you asked. Yeah. State comptroller
00:23is the chief fiscal officer for New York State. He is an auditor. He audits state programs.
00:29He approves contracts. But most importantly, he oversees and is the sole trustee of a $300
00:36billion pension fund. So that gives him a lot of power. Most people don't know who the controller
00:42is. Well, to that point that he has a pretty important job here and he's been in office for
00:49many, many years at this point. As I said, this is his first primary challenge since 2007. What is the
00:55read through for the muni market? Had we seen someone else really come into the seat? How much
01:01of an upset necessarily would that have been? Really not much. I mean, he was being challenged
01:08by two progressives. We split the progressive vote. And as you saw in the general election or the
01:13primaries in New York City, where you had Mamdani back candidates win, you know, running to the left of
01:19the mainstream Democrats. Same was true in the comptroller's case. A big issue actually was
01:25Israel and the state's investment in Israel bonds. Two progressives wanted the pension to divest of
01:33those. Danapoli says Israel has been a good investment since, you know, 1990. And they also,
01:41his challengers also wanted to get the pension more involved in social, you know, affordable housing and
01:48green energy projects. So they, they took that position that they wanted to use the power of the
01:53pension to kind of advance those, those goals. Interesting. And in addition to, you know, how the
01:59pension was being used, I know that you wrote that, you know, also lackluster returns were something that
02:07some of the challengers sort of latched onto. So talk to us through his track record as helm of this
02:12pension. Well, so he was, he's been there for 17 years. And if you're a Democrat running statewide
02:19in New York, you're pretty much guaranteed a job. So I don't know how much longer he's going to be
02:23there. His, uh, over 17 years, the annualized return was like 6.8%, which is a little bit better
02:30than a passive, um, a passive portfolio of 80% global stocks and 20% U.S. Ag, um, the
02:37bond,
02:37Bloomberg bonded decks. So he beat that, but he underperformed against the S and P largely because
02:44of AI and all the, uh, all the, uh, tech stocks that have done so well. Um, the challenge, the
02:52challengers were really upset about his, he had the really, um, you know, tons of private equity
02:57managers and they're saying, you know, we're spending all this money on private equity and
03:00private equity is underperformed, but, um, over the long, over his term, he's kind of, he's
03:07beaten a, uh, global, uh, bond portfolio slightly.
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