* A commenter mentioned something the other day which caught my eye. The commenter claimed that the Civic Committee’s Ty Fahner admitted in a March speech to the Union League Club that he had actively helped talked down the state’s bond rating in order to put more pressure on the General Assembly to pass pension reform.
So, I looked up the video and watched it this morning while hanging out at my uncle’s house…
The commenter wasn’t quite right, but he was close.
* If you go to about the 47-minute mark, you’ll hear an unidentified questioner say this to Fahner…
“Maybe sometimes you gotta be irresponsible to be responsible. If a political solution really doesn’t produce a favorable outcome, maybe you really need a market solution. And a market solution, I don’t mean bankruptcy, I mean actually talking down the state rating even further so the state’s bonds essentially become below investment grade. And it drives up the borrowing cost to the state and all of us to a significant level enough that you really feel the public pressure…”
* Fahner’s response…
“The Civic Committee, not me, but some of the people that make up the Civic Committee… did meet with and call - in one case in person - and a couple of calls to Moody’s and Fitch and Standard & Poors, and say ‘How in the hell can you guys do this? You are an enabler to let the state continue. You keep threatening more and more and more.’
“And I think now we’ve backed off. We don’t want to be the straw that broke the camel’s back… It hasn’t been irresponsible, but we have told them that we thought they were being irresponsible. But we stopped that a couple of months ago.”
Thoughts?
