Tom Noe and Jim Conrad were right.
Friday, October 3rd, 2008 By David HansenA lot of people got their tighty-whities in a bunch simply over the thought that Ohio Workers Comp funds were being put into a rare coin fund. (We won’t get into the issues of access-buying and the rest, but the scandal started over outrage over the investment choice…)
Now the Wall Street Journal ($) reports that with stocks tanking many investors are ”seeking refuge in unusual alternatives — parking spaces, for instance, and condos in Peru. Sales of exotic livestock are up. The U.S. Mint has seen a gold-coin rush.” [My italics.]
I wanted to see how much of the multi-billion dollar Workers Comp fund was invested in AIG just to put the investment returns on rare coins into a context with one more politically acceptable alternative.
Ah, but of course the voters of Ohio still can’t easily look over the work of their elected officials. I spent 15 minutes on the BWC site, a reasonable amount of time for an ordinary citizen to have to spend in looking up how $22 billion of state assets were kept. I never came close to finding out this information despite the site’s frequent claims of greater transparency brought by the Strickland Administration’s control of this state monopoly.
If anyone more adept at BWC’s data sources has this information, please do share!
Tags: AIG, BWC, monopolies, Noe, Strickland
