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NYC pension system will be in better hands after Brad Lander’s departure as city comptroller

admin — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 07:47:13 +0000

Brad Lander won’t be New York City comptroller much longer — and that’s good news for Gotham’s rank and file.

It’s not just because Lander is a knee-jerk leftist who rivals Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani when it comes to his out-of-touch patter on economic policy.

He’s also a dullard seemingly unaware of the core function of the job he’s held for the last four years.

Lander, as the city’s chief fiscal officer, is the fiduciary, investment adviser and custodian of the city’s $300 billion pension fund system.

He’s supposed to make sure the funds are invested in securities that grow in value so they can “fully fund” the retirement accounts of all the city’s police, firefighters and teachers.

Those accounts are not fully funded, and the shortfalls are poised to grow once Mamdani gets into office.

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Recall the mayor-elect’s pledges to raise taxes and turn the city into Moscow-on-the-Hudson, which will certainly cause more businesses and high earners to leave.

Now Lander wants to oust BlackRock from managing city retirement money because it refuses to embrace his weird green energy agenda, which envisions a future of windmills and bicycles along the streets of New York instead of cars — and energy bills that no one can afford.

Consider: BlackRock doesn’t suck at money management, it’s actually quite good at it.

Its CEO, Larry Fink, is considered among the best risk managers in the business.

BlackRock’s big crime is that it doesn’t want to be an accomplice to Lander’s wacky, unrealizable and maybe illegal campaign on the climate — i.e. reducing carbon emissions with brute force.

In Lander’s mind, the stocks of companies that drill for oil, frack natural gas, keep our lights on or make sure the AC works in the summer are pure evil.

The comptroller, of course, prefers those that embrace green energy — like those useless windmills off the coast of New Jersey that give the state some of the highest electricity bills on the planet.

What’s more, Lander literally wants the city to demand that all of BlackRock’s clients’ portfolios — not just the NYC retirement system’s — comply with his whims under threat of NYC yanking its funds.

Dumb and dumber

It’s among the most narcissistically dumb ideas to ever come out of a public official.

Let’s get real: little Brad Lander ain’t doing nothing to stop global warming; China keeps polluting and adding to carbon emissions every day. So does India and the rest of the developing world.

Plus, those green stocks often really do really suck (Google “Solyndra”) while companies that invest in good old-fashioned crude like ExxonMobil — with a five-year spike in its shares of nearly 200% far outstripping the S&P — really don’t.

BlackRock’s CEO, it should also be noted, is an odd target for Lander.

Fink was one of the key proponents of so-called Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing, which took into account carbon emissions of companies in which it invested.

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He got a bad rap from the political right for it, and BlackRock lost business — that is until Fink clarified the company’s position: As Fink told Lander years ago, the NYC comptroller can’t dictate what BlackRock does for the Texas state pension.

Plus, if BlackRock sold all of its $225 billion in energy-related stocks — the largest energy slug owned by any money manager — it would probably crash all major stock market indices.

How is that good for NYC retirees?

It isn’t, of course.

It shows how little thought Lander probably put into this attention-grabbing charade as he reportedly gears up to run for a seat representing lower Manhattan and progressive parts of Brooklyn in Congress in the 2026 midterms.

It also shows why lefty Manhattan Borough President and former City Councilman Mark Levine, who will replace Lander as comptroller, should just ignore his predecessor’s recommendation.

Levine probably won’t, of course, given how progressively cringey NYC politics has become.

I should point out that neither Lander nor Levine has the complete final say over where managers of the city’s retirement system invest all that money.

That say belongs to the trustees of the funds, of which the comptroller has one vote, while the mayor appoints members as well.

That doesn’t mean Lander should be given a pass in the court of public opinion for making this an issue.

Nor should he be given a pass when it comes to his legal obligations as city comptroller, i.e. maximizing returns in the retirement system, as opposed to tilting at windmills.

A fully functioning government should take action before Lander or whoever replaces him does even more damage to a city that has been losing population and business for years.

But our local prosecutors (Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, et al) are too busy jailing citizens defending themselves from criminals to make sure a raging leftist doesn’t defund pension funds that are already underfunded — and bound to get worse as the city goes full-on socialist under our new mayor.

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Trade Desk tanks on CFO departure, Q2 results and Amazon competition

admin — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 18:17:00 +0000

Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk.

Scott Mlyn | CNBC

Shares of The Trade Desk plummeted 39% on Friday, their worst day on record, after the ad-tech company announced the departure of its CFO and analysts expressed concerns about rising competition from Amazon.

The Trade Desk, which went public in 2016, suffered its steepest prior drop in February, when the shares fell 33% on a revenue miss. In its second-quarter earnings report late Thursday, the company beat expectations on earnings and revenue, but the results failed to impress investors.

The Trade Desk, which specializes in providing technology to companies that want to target users across the web, said finance chief Laura Schenkein is leaving the job and being replaced by Alex Kayyal, who has been working as a partner at Lightspeed Ventures.

While some analysts were uneasy about the sudden change in the top finance role, the bigger concern is Amazon’s growing role in the online ad market, as well as the potential impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on ad spending.

Amazon has emerged as a significant player in the digital advertising market in recent years, and is now third behind Google and Meta. Last week, Amazon reported a 23% increase in ad revenue for the second quarter to $15.7 billion, which beat estimates.

Lucid’s top priorities following EV CEO’s departure

admin — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 20:50:23 +0000

Lucid Motors CEO Peter Rawlinson poses at the Nasdaq MarketSite as Lucid Motors (Nasdaq: LCID) begins trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange after completing its business combination with Churchill Capital Corp IV in New York City, New York, July 26, 2021.

Andrew Kelly | Reuters

Shares of electric vehicle maker Lucid Group were down more than 10% Wednesday following a downgrade of the company’s stock by Bank of America and the abrupt departure of CEO Peter Rawlinson.

Rawlinson, who also served as chief technology officer at the company, was a driving force in its operations to this point, including the decision to go public in 2021. Investors considered Rawlinson to be the face of the company — and crucial to its success.

The company – majority owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund – is in search of a new CEO, stirring uncertainty among Wall Street analysts.

“We think the departure of Lucid’s (LCID) founder, CEO, and CTO, Peter Rawlinson is much more consequential than understood by the market,” BofA Securities analyst John Murphy wrote in a Wednesday investor note downgrading the stock to underperform. “We now expect product development to stall, consumer demand to be dampened, and anticipate additional funding opportunities could be put at risk.”

Interim CEO Marc Winterhoff, formerly the company’s chief operating officer, will attempt to ensure that’s not the case for Lucid.

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Shares of Lucid, Tesla and Rivian in 2025.

Winterhoff said in an interview with CNBC his objective is to build upon Lucid’s success rather than change its course. His top priorities include more than doubling vehicle production this year, narrowing losses and increasing customer awareness and technology offerings.

“We have a clear vision. Now my focus will be on execution,” Winterhoff told CNBC Tuesday ahead of speaking to investors on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call.

Gross profit

Lucid remains far from profitable, but it has been narrowing its gross losses by increasing scale and making its products more efficient.

Its GAAP gross margin, which includes production and sales but does not factor in other expenses, for was a negative 114% in 2024, improvement from a negative 225% in 2023.

“We expect a significant improvement in gross margin in line with what we see in 2024 compared to 2023. So, we are on the right trajectory,” Gagan Dhingra, Lucid’s interim CFO, told investors Tuesday.

For the fourth quarter, the company reported a net loss attributable to common stockholders of $636.9 million, or a loss of 22 cents per share, on revenue of $234.5 million.

New products

Lucid’s first product was the Air sedan, which it began delivering in late 2021. The pricey car has been praised for its styling and technologies, but demand for the vehicle hasn’t been as strong as anticipated.

Winterhoff said the company will continue to produce Air sedans as it begins to ramp up production of its second product, an SUV called Gravity.

Lucid Gravity Grand Touring SUV

Lucid

Winterhoff said production of the Gravity SUV will gradually build this year. He declined to speculate Tuesday on what percentage of the 20,000-unit production target the vehicle would represent. He noted Gravity ordering for customers in Saudi Arabia began earlier this month.

“We’re expanding our footprint and markets we are very active in, and then absolutely increasing the ramp of Gravity, which is a big, big focus for us right now,” he said during the company’s investor call.

Lucid also is in the midst of developing a new midsize vehicle platform that’s expected to launch at the end of 2026, which both Winterhoff and Rawlinson have described as critical to the automaker’s growth.

‘Double down’ on marketing

As the automaker increases production and the number of vehicles it offers, Winterhoff said Lucid will “double down” on marketing and advertising to increase customer awareness.

“I’m not planning to create a new vision or something like that for the company,” he told CNBC. “What I’m still focusing on is simply operational topics, like, for instance, increasing the deliveries for our customers. We will double down on marketing. You will see much more marketing from us.”

A Lucid showroom in New York City on Aug 19th, 2023.

Adam Jeffery | CNBC

The company’s selling, general and administrative expenses were $900 million in 2024, including a $19.9 million increase in sales and marketing expenses over the prior year. The company’s total marketing and advertising expense wasn’t immediately available.

New tech, partnerships

The Lucid Air has been criticized for its lack of advanced driver-assistant systems such as Tesla’s “FSD” or General Motors’ “Super Cruise.” Certain Air models cost tens of thousands of dollars more than vehicles from competitors with such technologies.

However, Lucid expects to release a new hands-free driving system for customers later this year.

What Lucid lacks in driver-assistant technologies, it arguably makes up for in battery efficiency, as its cars are among the most efficient EVs in the U.S., according to federal data.

Lucid has attempted to capitalize on its battery technologies by offering to sell them to other companies as a way to increase scale and revenue.

Winterhoff said the company remains in “constant discussions” with companies about using Lucid’s battery technology but declined to provide additional details.

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