[NA-Discuss] ICANN loses $4.6 mil

[John R. Levine]

> Personally, I think that says it all.  My own mutual funds have lost
> approximately 1/3 of their value since the dump in the stock market.
> Seems fairly obvious and reasonable.  But that's just me.

But ICANN's not supposed to be in the stock market.  They have a large 
contingency fund (way too large by some measures) which the budget 
estimates would earn $1M on a fund of $25M, which was a plausible 4%, 
something you could get on the kinds of investments that are reasoanble 
for such a fund, bank deposits or government bonds.  But instead they 
apparently have an 18% loss.

There may be a legitimate explanation, e.g., maybe they hedged all their 
non-dollar expenses last summer when the A$ was at 95c and the Euro was at 
$1.54, and now they're marking their hedges down to 64c and $1.29, but an 
organization that claims to be transparent needs more than a footnote to 
explain where the $4.6M went.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor
"More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.