Metropolitan King County Councilmember Bob Ferguson said recent announcements of further downgrades within the $4 billion King County Investment Pool makes the Council's creation of an Investment Pool Advisory Panel all the more important.

"Over the past two months, we have seen three downgrades that exposed vulnerabilities with our investment pool," said Ferguson, chair of the Council's Operating Budget and Fiscal Management Committee and the council's representative on the Executive Finance Committee. "An independent examination of our investment pool policies will verify that we are taking the appropriate steps to help ensure that these taxpayer investments are sound."

_Recently, Standard & Poor's announced it has further downgraded two of the Investment Pool's commercial paper investments. Cheyne Finance was downgraded from A-2 to D and Rhinebridge, LLC was downgraded from A-1+ to D. These sudden and unprecedented downgrades were prompted by continuing turmoil in the credit markets and declining market values of the assets associated with each investment.