Hard times, part 2 of 3: Downturn to affect University funds
For the nation’s best endowment managers, it was clear years ago that something in the credit markets was off. Debt was too cheap and the economy’s brisk growth was bound to peter out.
The Yale University Investment Office prepared by betting against the market and shorting stocks that were backed by sub-prime mortgages.
“This bubble was not something that should have surprised people,” Yale’s investment czar, David Swensen GRD ’80, said last spring in a guest lecture to economics professor Robert Shiller’s class. “I thought the University positioned itself well to take...
There's a certain smugness in all this: Swenson's Yale fiddles while Rome burns. Just who do you think Yale's pound of flesh has been and continues to be exacted FROM?
Despite its chatter about social conscience, despite it's seeming farsightedness in getting in on the ground floor of China (which is poised to become the greatest economic and environmental plunderer of all time), Yale remains a symbolic academic fifedom whose princes and princesses --- the Clintons, Bushes, Bidens, even Ashcrofts --- move the peasants around on the chessboard of life.
Fess up. Yale feel ENTITLED (an archaism redolent of a world of the Round Table). It's that simple.
And yet Yale is going to spend money on adding two residential colleges...
In Swenson we trust...
Yale is doing just fine. And, as usual, crying poor because everyone else is.
It's "Swensen." David Swensen.
"Yale is doing just fine. And, as usual, crying poor because everyone else is."
Excuse me, but I think the article says that Yale isn't "crying poor." To the contrary, Yale is saying it's doing just fine for now, although not utterly unaffected, and is increasing its prudence just in case.
People like Anonymous #5 might consider actually reading the article before extruding their "usual" complaints in these comments! And maybe sobering up and reading the other YDN article on this topic, the one with the headline "Yale avoids cuts, for now" wouldn't have been a bad idea, either. Sheesh.
There are, of course, administrators of some universities other than Yale who have announced serious cutbacks while simultaneously claiming to have no reliable knowledge of what has happened to THEIR endowments, but are putting the cutbacks through "just in case" their endowments were down 30%. Cutting 10% to 15% across the board because Moody's says endowments elsewhere are down 30%? Really? Who knows, maybe it's not baloney. Stranger things have happened. Can't think of one at the moment, but still.
Count yourselves very lucky to be at Yale, where the administration (so far) has an enviable track record of competence, honesty and amazing street smarts.
The unnamed school in a liquidity crisis is Columbia