Dunleavy falsely claims Alaska Permanent Fund gained $11 billion since March

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, no stranger to fiscal fantasies, is the narrator of a 39-second state-funded video that should be immediately corrected because it promotes a fraudulent multi-billion-dollar error.

Dunleavy claims the Permanent Fund gained “$11 billion during the pandemic alone.”

Dunleavy uses this phony number to justify his claim that the state can afford to spend an extra $3 billion from the Permanent Fund for giant dividends in 2021.

“So the payments represent just a few months of profits from this year’s permanent fund earnings,” Dunleavy claims.

If a private company did this to promote an investment scam, someone would go to jail for securities fraud. If the executive director of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. did this to exaggerate performance, she would be fired for political fraud.

The $11 billion statement is a lie, one that is easy to expose.

Here’s the truth.

The Permanent Fund ended 2019 with a market value of $68.3 billion. This week it had a market value of $72.3 billion.

That’s nowhere close to $11 billion.

But Dunleavy can’t justify his plan to withdraw a total of $6 billion from the fund and claim it represents “just a few months of profits,” if he tells Alaskans the truth about 2020 earnings.

He also can’t justify his claim of “a few months of profits” on the performance from March to December, if he tells Alaskans the truth.

The truth is that on March 1 this year, the fund had a value of $65.8 billion. That’s not $11 billion lower than it is today.

As panic about the pandemic spread worldwide, the Permanent Fund lost nearly $8.5 billion in market value over the next 18 days.

The fund dropped to $57.9 billion on March 18. The decline in world stock markets was real and short-lived. The fund began to recover and reached $60.7 billion by the end of March, the apparent starting point for the $11 billion claim.

Dunleavy’s fraudulent video excludes the unprecedented $8.5 billion loss to exaggerate the gains in the Permanent Fund between March and December.

The anti-math movement that has taken over much of the Alaska GOP clearly has an ardent believer in the governor’s chair.

Dunleavy needs to correct the record and apologize to Alaskans.

The $11 billion claim by Gov. Mike Dunleavy is not true. The fund gained $6.5 billion from March 1 until Tuesday.