The Orange County Register published an article last Friday stating that the University of California has lost millions on risky bets on interest rates – a claim UC officials said was “completely wrong.”
The article said University officials agreed to financial deals called interest rate swaps, which the paper claims ultimately cost the UC millions and would continue to do so for 34 years.
Peter Taylor, chief financial officer for the UC, wrote a letter to the OC Register to correct what he claimed to be numerous errors, unfounded allegations and reckless reporting in the article. The Daily Bruin received the letter on Tuesday.
Taylor said in the letter that the interest rate swaps discussed in the article have actually saved the UC millions of dollars on debt service. He said the University entered into interest rate swaps not to bet on rates but to lock in fixed ones.
“To suggest that the university has made ‘risky bets on the advice of Wall Street bankers’ is unsubstantiated by the facts and portrays either ignorance or a willful disregard for the truth,” Taylor wrote in the letter.
Chris Knap, investigations editor for the OC Register, said Taylor’s letter mischaracterized the story. He added that numbers came directly from financial statements that the reporter was trained to interpret. The reporter, Melody Petersen, is trained as a certified public accountant and audited companies, local governments and universities before becoming a journalist.
“We stand by our story,” Knap said.
Knap said Taylor’s letter will be published as a letter to the editor on Sunday.
Compiled by Fiona Kirby, Bruin contributor.
The OC Register once ran a story stating that animals didn’t deserve moral treatment because they lack free will, that’s the acumen you’re dealing with here.
If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth, right? the Democrats’ great accomplishment is producing the political equivalent of a Rodney King video, clearly demonstrating the lies of the right, the right Hilary Clinton correctly identified as a vast conspiracy. Confirm by examining Central District of California Cases, 01-4340, 03-9097, 08-5515, 10-5193, US Tax Court 12000-07L –though I think you want to view my US Tax Court Appeal to the 9th Circuit for a good account of their day to day assaults, a few month time slice indicative of a decade of assault, and 9th Circuit case 11-56043.
Typically operating through puppets–including puppets in the judiciary–the right wing has for decades been committing crimes and trying to classify them to cover them up, a move explicitly forbidden by the Code of Federal Regulations. The right has accomplished its political objectives by presenting a fraction of the evidence to judicial officials who, having seen the pattern dozens of times before, could not help but realize that they were being presented with incomplete and inaccurate information. With either the willfully blind approval or the willful ignorance of the judiciary the right has killed & stolen several of my pets and routinely shoot energy weaponry at me and my pets, despite my calls to the police, the FBI, Congress, and despite my petitions in court. There is really only one solution, and that’s to disempower them politically.