Harvard Endowment Suffers, But Not From Real Estate
Harvard University’s endowment, the world’s largest college fund, reported a 2% annual investment loss after a tumultuous year spent searching for new leadership.
The fund lost $1.9B, falling to $35.7B after accounting for spending on buildings, scholarships and research, Bloomberg reports. Harvard blames the loss on poor investments in stocks and a large decline among two natural-resource investments in South America.
The top performing asset class that did well for the university was real estate, which shot up an impressive 13.8%. Yet the university and its team of over 200 in-house money managers need to do better, according to Paul Finnegan, who chairs the board overseeing Harvard’s endowment, who said that “clearly these are disappointing results.” [Bloomberg]
