Topic: USAW Loses $1,000,000

[Jim Moser]

 

USA Weightlifting Loses $1,000,000

At one point the USA Weightlifting Foundation was valued at over $2,000,000. Recently I was told the fund was valued at around a $1 million. This would mean the fund has lost around $1 million dollars. I was told the fund was invested in Mortgage Reits. Many mortgage reits have lost at least half of their equity value in recent months.

Typically the USAW has used ½ of the interest from this fund to finance the huge budget of the USAW. Ideally the fund would reinvest the other ½ of the interest from the fund back into the fund. This in its self is a pretty conservative action. However investing in Mortgage Reits is not conservative and as the USAW is finding out pretty risky business.

This loss along with the USOC cuts is really going to hurt. The question now is in 2008 who will feel the pain of these cuts and losses. My bet it will eventually be the athletes.

I was told that Friday, Dennis is going to inform the membership in his weekly address what happened here.  My hats off to Dennis for doing this, I was also told the BOD is not very happy about this and was going to tell Dennis at the upcoming BOD not to do this. Lets hope this does not happen and Dennis discloses this information to the membership. Perhaps, this will be the first step in getting open truthful communication to the membership. It should be very interesting to see who the BOD puts the blame on for losing the $1 million dollars. The bottom line is USA Weightlifting is out 1,000,000 BUCKS and this BOD needs to be replaced for at the very least not paying attention.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2kRv2_i9d0

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

Jim,

I hope this isn't true. It seems unlikely since at every BOG meeting, we sit and listen to the Foundation report that repeats how conservative the investments it makes happens to be. But, I don't know how you could blame the BOD for this since they don't run the Foundation. The Foundation is elected at the BOG meeting. And, if you are going to blame the BOD, why do you give Dennis a pass? I like Dennis and know he is popular, but it seems like a contradiction to me since he was President of the BOD during this supposed disaster.

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

It appears Jim is correct that the USAW has suffered big losses. From the USAW weekly report:

"At this time, it was decided that no foundation earnings will be used in 2008, due to unrealized losses in the foundation principal.  Budget to be distributed to Board of Governors’ delegates."

I wonder how much worse things are going to get.