Word: mendillo
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...extreme uncertainty in our economy and a level of volatility and dysfunction in many types of investments that went well beyond all previous experience,” wrote Mendillo, who took the helm at HMC only last summer. The decline—the largest ever experienced at HMC, which manages Harvard’s endowment—was not unexpected, and administrators have been planning for a 30 percent decline since December. Many peer institutions have been anticipating similar losses...
...Mendillo emphasized in the endowment report released Thursday that the portfolio is “well positioned” to seize on new investment opportunities and to support University operations. But the report also supplies telling details about the brutal losses sustained by HMC since last July—losses that in many cases exceeded those of standard benchmarks. Possible investment policy missteps that exacerbated the effects of the global financial crisis on HMC, such as the maintenance of an insufficient cash reserve, are mentioned prominently as well...
...With a few notable exceptions, nearly every asset class did poorly,” Mendillo wrote. “While diversification has been a mainstay and a driver of the portfolio’s return over the long-term, the benefits of diversification did not bear...
...Mendillo partly attributed the endowment’s underperformance to “complications” within the portfolio existing before the financial crisis, including “recent over-sized commitments to illiquid asset classes; within asset classes, a larger proportion of strategies with long holding periods; [and] a lack of ready liquidity in the portfolio to meet our obligations along with the needs of the University.” For years, Harvard has been the subject of scrutiny—and idolatry—as its endowment consistently generated double-digit yearly investment returns, largely...
...With perfect hindsight we and most other investors would have started this year in a more liquid position and with less exposure to some of the alternative asset categories that were hardest hit during FY 2009,” Mendillo wrote in the report...