It's Everywhere!

The toxic waste is everywhere. Like I've been saying, it's in your money-market fund and it's in your pension. It's owned by your bank, your insurance company and, apparently, your state and local governments. This is going to be ugly when all these dead bodies manage to start floating to the surface.

Public School Funds Hit by SIV Debts Hidden in Investment Pools

By David EvansNov. 15 (Bloomberg) -
- Hal Wilson smiles at the blue numbers on his desktop screen. His money is yielding 5.77 percent. For the chief financial officer of Florida's Jefferson County school board, that means the $2.7 million of taxpayer funds he's placed in the state's Local Government Investment Pool is earning more on this October day than it would get in a money market fund. And Wilson says he knows the Florida officials who manage the funds of the 1,559-student district have invested them wisely. ``We're such a small school district,'' Wilson, 55, says. ``We don't have the time or staff for professional money management. They have lots of investment advisers. It's risk free and easy.'' It may be easy, but it's not risk free.

What Wilson didn't know in October -- and what thousands of municipal finance managers like him across the country still haven't been told -- is that state-run pools have parked taxpayers' money in some of the most confusing, opaque and illiquid debt investments ever devised. These include so-called structured investment vehicles, or SIVs, which are among the subprime mortgage debt-filled contrivances that have blown up at the biggest banks in the world.