Questions about Idaho’s role in securities lending and how it affected taxpayers, are the focus of a new investigative report.
In the article published in the latest edition of Boise State's Blue Review, writer Eric Hayes unravels Idaho’s 15-year history of securities lending.
Hayes' mother, Deborah Silver, ran for Idaho Treasurer against Ron Crane in 2014. He began researching the story while working on his mom's campaign. After Crane won re-election, Hayes kept his investigation going. He wasn’t a journalist then, but he says he couldn’t put the story aside.
Over 18 months, with help from editors at The Blue Review, and a grant from the Idaho Media Initiative, Hayes requested documents, interviews and information from the treasurer’s office and other sources. He found a complicated web of events that he says leads to more questions about Idaho’s role in securities lending, the subprime mortgage crisis, and its aftermath.
Hayes says the article includes just a small fraction of the research he’s done so far.
“This is not just going to go away. This is something that’s going to keep popping up over the summer and we’re going to keep learning more about what happened with the securities lending program and how the state handled it,” says Hayes.
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