Reply #8: Summers Shit Legacy at Harvard to Take Five Years to Fix [View All]

[ozymandius]

Not the actual headline...

Mendillo, who says she doesn’t believe she was asked about her view of the markets at the 2008 meeting, has focused on unwinding some of the endowment’s investments in private equity and hedge funds made by her predecessors from 2005 to 2008 and bringing more of Harvard’s money to in-house managers.

She has started to restructure the school’s real-estate holdings, which lost 50 percent of their value in the year ended on June 30, 2009. She has been increasing investments in natural resources and timber, an area that she pioneered during an earlier, 15-year stint at Harvard.

Mendillo has recouped some losses. In the fiscal year ended on June 30, the endowment crept back up 11 percent to $27.4 billion, still 26 percent below its peak. That performance lags behind the 13 percent median for public and corporate pensions, endowments and foundations during that time, according to Wilshire Associates Inc., a consulting firm based in Santa Monica, California.

In her first months on the job, Mendillo had to hasten to raise funds to extricate the university from interest-rate swaps it had entered into under former President Lawrence Summers...

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aqEvfk0usksA&pos=12