Arizona Town Wants to Make Some Stock Market Money!

Right now, they do a thing called the Local Government Investment Pool; there’s a ton of these, state to state, and they do cautious, over-night, low-return investing for counties and towns. But really these GIPs are actually kind of hectic sometimes! Florida’s GIP had a weird March: It opened the month with $7.3 billion, it had deposits of $690 million, withdrawals of $1.3 billion… and all of $1.8 million in earnings. Closing balance? $6.93 billion. (PDF.) Also they are wrangling with Lehman Brothers for selling them “certain unregistered secured notes” before going belly-up. So yes: is your money safe? Not at all!

So back in Camp Verde, our trusty town manager has an idea: let’s just go big or go home: “Martin suggested that the town consider working with financial services firm Stone and Youngberg to find more effective ways to increase returns on those millions in investments, possibly by as much as a factor of 10.” Wouldn’t it be awesome if all the counties put their savings in private hands? Or at least: wouldn’t it have been awesome if they’d done that in 2007?