Already suffering from pension scandals, and an ideologically-wired County Executive desperate to prove he's a leader, Milwaukee County is poised to risk hundreds of millions of borrowed dollars in what can best be called fiscal alchemy.
Supervisors need to resist Scott Walker's suicidal course.
Did Walker hire Jim Cramer as a consultant/wizard?
The scheme sounds like arbitrage to me. Isn't that illegal, or is this variant somehow permissible?
Finally: how can Walker rail (bad pun) against taking federal stimulus funds because they might have recurring costs, yet propose a potentially-calamitous financial house of cards that could collapse and saddle county taxpayers with costs that would be ruinous.
I appreciate Steve Schultze at the Journal Sentinel for staying on top of this story.
This plan is exactly arbitrage. It made very little sense when the economy was doing better and interest rates were very low, but now the plan would cover a fraction of the pension hole and almost certainly fail to achieve an 8% return.
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