America's "best and brightest" are not doing very well either on Wall Street or minding their own shop. Maybe they should have been a bit more generous with that endowment when they had it instead of being excessively greedy. From the Boston Globe:
Even the famous Harvard University endowment can't beat this historically ugly market.Uh huh. Because Harvard has always been so generous, or did that only start when Congress pushed them? I wonder how much they're paying their investment team this year.
Harvard had just one-third of its assets in stocks last summer, yet the fund still lost 22 percent of its value, or $8.1 billion, in four months from July through October, the school's president told deans in a letter Tuesday. It was by far the largest loss ever for the world's biggest endowment - a huge reversal of fortune at a school known for its investment superstars.
And the damage isn't over yet. Total losses this fiscal year could reach 30 percent, according to the letter, written by Harvard president Drew G. Faust and executive vice president Edward C. Forst. The recent losses have come amid the worst market plunge since the Great Depression, spurring a cash crunch at Harvard and warnings of cost cuts across the university.
Calling the decline "sobering," Faust wrote that "the severe turmoil in the world's financial markets has affected all major asset classes in which the endowment is invested."
The endowment provides an unusually large share of the university's operating budget - about 35 percent, or $1.6 billion last school year. Most large private schools rely on endowments for just 15 percent of their budgets.
