Forbes has an interesting article on the performance of Harvard Management Co., the subsidiary that invests the institution's money.
Desperate for cash, Harvard Management went to outside money managers begging for a return of money it had expected to keep parked away for a long time. It tried to sell off illiquid stakes in private equity partnerships but couldn't get a decent price. It unloaded two-thirds of a $2.9 billion stock portfolio into a falling market.Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of information and networking services to the private equity and venture capital ecosystem in India. View free samples of Venture Intelligence newsletters and reports. Email the author at arun@ventureintelligence.in
Now, in the last phase of the cash-raising panic, the university is borrowing money, much like a homeowner who takes out a second mortgage in order to pay off credit card bills. Since December, Harvard has raised $2.5 billion by selling IOUs in the bond market. Roughly a third of these Harvard bonds are tax exempt and carry interest rates of 3.2 per cent to 5.8 per cent. The rest are taxable, with rates of 5 per cent to 6.5 per cent.
...The fact that a fifth of HMC's portfolio is in private-equity-like investments makes it vulnerable to the kind of problems HMC faced this fall. HMC has made $11 billion of capital commitments to investment partnerships through 2018, says Moody's. HMC used to make good on those commitments with income generated by the existing private equity portfolio. "Endowments are afraid capital calls will come quickly and far ahead of any liquidity from private equity funds," says Colin McGrady, managing director at Cogent Partners.
Watching all of this, the group of 10 Harvard alumni from the class of 1969 feel vindicated. "The events of the last year show that the whole procedure of rewarding people so handsomely based on increases on paper value of the endowment was deeply flawed," says a spokesman for the group, which recently sent a letter to the Harvard president suggesting HMC staffers return $21 million of their latest bonuses. "Even now, we don't really know how well it has done in the last 10 years."