I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Just when I was thinking that we’d seen the worst of the economic crisis — a notion first planted in my noggin by a couple of friends and then reinforced by this recent CNN poll — I learned that New Mexico’s large investment funds had lost $5.7 billion in the last three months of 2008.
Yes, that’s billion with a B.
What’s worse, those four state funds are down more than $11 billion since the last quarter of 2007.
Yikes might have been an appropriate response had I not first thought of a much earthier one — a word that rhymes with ‘puck.’ I can’t say it here. Little ears might be listening. I have small children.
Reporter Winthrop Quigley informs us of this very, troubling development in a front-page story today in the Albuquerque Journal.
Here’s an excerpt for those of you who do not subscribe to the paper:
• The Educational Retirement Board lost $1.38 billion, or 17.3 percent, in second quarter of the state fiscal year and $2.78 billion, or 29.6 percent, from the same period a year ago.
• PERA lost $1.8 billion in the quarter, or 16.8 percent, and $4.34 billion — 32.7 percent — for the year.
• The land grant fund lost $1.64 billion in the quarter, a 17.7 percent loss, and $2.84 billion in the year, or 26.6 percent.
• The severance tax fund lost $821 million in the quarter — 20.6 percent — and $1.47 billion for the year — 31.8 percent.
PERA, which stands for Public Employee Retiree Association, ranked in the 99th percentile, meaning that 98 percent of similar funds did better than it fared last year, Quigley goes on to report.
It’s not totally clear what each of the funds started with, although those of you endowed with more math chops than us journalist types might be able to figure it out.
Thanks, Winthrop. I’m back to being a pessimist again.
