Florida, edna od 50te Amerikanski sojuzni drzhavi, bankotirashe denes...
Vo SAD, drzhavite ja finansiraat administracijata, shkolstvoto, policijata i komunalnite sluzhbi (nezavisno od sojuznata vlada). Parite od danokot koj drzhavata gi sobira (povtorno nezavisno od drugiot danok koj sojuznata drzhava SAD go sobira) se sobira vo razni fondovi i najchesto se investira vo pazarot na nedvizhnini - koj pred nekoj mesec padna.
Najverojatno kje se zgolemat i onaka nepopularnite danoci za da se platat site sluzhbi.
" The unthinkable and the unimaginable have just happened here in Florida,'' said Hal Wilson, chief financial officer of the Jefferson County school district, located 30 miles (48 kilometers) east of the state capital Tallahassee. "What we just experienced here is a classic run-on-the bank meltdown.'
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Florida's State Board of Administration, manager of the Local Government Investment Pool, halted withdrawals yesterday at an emergency meeting after $13 billion was pulled out this month from participants. Governments from Orange County, home of Disney World, to Pompano Beach asked for their money back following disclosures that the fund held $1.5 billion of downgraded and defaulted debt.
Losing Jobs
If public funds loše money, towns and local agencies could raise taxes, sell more debt or, more likely, trim budgets, Turner says. ``Cutting spending usually means people losing jobs because someone else didn't do their job,'' he says.
Jeannie Garner, the league's director of financial services, says local agencies are under the erroneous impression that the pool will be rescued by the state in case of disaster. "A lot of people mistakenly believe it's backed by the state, and it's not,'' she says.
Every day, Florida officials post on the pool's Web site its daily and monthly yields, which are among the highest in the nation for local government investment pools, according to Tracs Financial, a Park City, Utah-based research firm.
As of Oct. 31, Florida hadn't disclosed its defaults or junk-rated debt. At the Nov. 14 public meeting, no state official said any holdings had defaulted.
"It's a case of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,'' says former SEC chief accountant Turner. He adds that local school districts and other pool participants should be fully informed of defaults in debt held by the fund.
Thousands of school districts, towns and fire departments across the U.S. keep their cash in state- and county-run pools. These public accounts, modeled after private money-market funds, are supposed to invest in safe, liquid, short-term debt such as Treasuries and certificates of deposit from highly rated banks.
By freezing the Florida fund, officials left governments without ready access to cash they are accustomed to drawing upon for routine expenditures.The Florida State Board manages the fund along with other short- term investments and the state's $137 billion pension fund.
SIVs are typically offshore companies created by banks and other firms to sell short-term debt to buy mortgage securities and finance company bonds with higher yields. They profit on the spread between the two.
Banks such as New York-based Citigroup, which manages $83 billion in SIVs, collect fees for running SIVs while keeping their contents off the bank's books. SIVs finance themselves by selling asset-backed commercial paper, or short-term loans backed by collateral such as mortgages.
Public fund managers say they've bought SIV debt because it had the safest credit ratings and offered higher yields than other short-term fixed-income investments.
SIVs, many of which are assembled by London-based bankers, had a low profile until some of them collapsed. When the subprime debt market blew up in August, investors stopped buying SIV commercial paper. As a result, in September and October, SIVs didn't have the cash to pay debt holders of more than $8 billion of their paper.
The banks had also peddled SIV paper to their clients, including state officials who oversee pools of taxpayer funds like Florida's. The $27 billion Florida pool, the largest in the U.S., has invested $2 billion in SIVs and other subprime-tainted debt, state records show. About $725 million of these holdings have already defaulted.
Two days before that, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., stunned investors by saying banks had agreed to start a private fund of about $80 billion to help bail out the $320 billion in SIVs that may run short of cash to pay investors.
'High-Risk Investments'
Without such protection, SIVs may be forced to auction their debt at substantial discounts, leading to immediate recognition of tens of billions in losses. When Paulson proposed the fund, few people had heard of SIVs. Even fewer knew that states were buying their commercial paper.
Among the places caught up in the SIV and subprime snarls are Connecticut, Florida, Maine, Montana and King County, Washington.
