Felix Salmon

Greg Mankiw adds some insider detail to the story of Larry Summers’s ill-fated interest-rate swap, in the form of an email from “someone knowldgeable about the financial situation at Harvard”.

The email is clearly meant to exonerate Summers, at least a little, but I’m unconvinced. Taking the three points in sequence:

1) The instrument in question was highly liquid and could be sold fully within a few days; essentially all money was lost in 2008 two years after Larry Summers left.

This is true, but misleading. When people speculate in the markets, it’s the act of putting on the position which is the point at which the gamble is made. After that point, you make money if the position rises in value, and lose money if it plunges. Interest rates could have fallen at any time after the bet was made, and Harvard would have lost the same $1 billion.

The argument about liquidity only serves to underline how speculative this bet really was. If it was a genuine long-term hedge of certain future borrowing needs, Harvard would not have needed the liquidity since the position would have been designed to sit on the university’s books for decades. On the other hand, if Harvard was intending to trade in and out of this position, then the liquidity helps, but the swap can no longer be considered a hedge at all.

Was Harvard maybe intending to keep the swaps on its books in the event that interest rates rose, while selling them if rates fell? That seems to be the implication here: that if Summers had still been around, he would have liquidated the swaps when rates fell, and thereby avoided massive losses.

Again, however, this argument doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. If Summers had wanted to buy a swap with limited downside, one which automatically unwound if rates fell to a certain level, he could easily have done so. But that’s not the instrument he bought. Instead, he bought a sophisticated financial product which left Harvard potentially on the hook for $1 billion or more — and then did nothing to address that tail risk.

2) Harvard has a system where the treasurer makes these decisions with approval of the corporation and involvement of a debt management committee on which president does not serve.

Does anybody believe that this hare-brained scheme was the idea of Harvard’s treasurer? Come on. Harvard had $1.6 billion in floating-rate debt, and it’s conceivable that the treasurer might want to swap that debt into a low fixed rate. It’s not conceivable that the treasurer would be interested in swapping nonexistent future floating-rate debt into today’s fixed rates — especially not when the hypothetical future borrowing wouldn’t even take place for as long as 20 years. This deal has Summers’s fingerprints all over it, and would never have been done had he not been president of the university.

3) Given the plan to borrow large amounts of debt in the future, doing something to lock in low rates made sense. Iif Harvard was borrowing big, there would be offsetting saving now. The big error was the failure to adjust hedge when Allston was scaled back and to take account of the risks associated with the change in the university’s credit rating.

I honestly don’t know what Mankiw’s anonymous source could be talking about when he or she refers to “offsetting saving”. Was it an egregious dereliction of fiduciary responsibility to keep the swaps on Harvard’s books even after the excuse for putting them on — the multi-billion-dollar plan to expand the university into Allston — was put on hold? Yes, of course. And you can’t blame Summers for that, since he had left Harvard by then. On the other hand, there was always a risk that Allston would be scaled back, and indeed one of the most likely reasons for scaling back Allston was that there might be a national economic crisis — exactly the sort of thing which is normally accompanied by a reduction in interest rates.

Summers was well aware of the risk of an economic crisis. Indeed, in 2004, at about the time that the swaps were put on, he gave a major address at the IMF/World Bank annual meetings about the systemic risks posed by the US current-account deficit, and warning of “a slowdown in growth that would be unacceptable in the United States and would have very severe consequences for growth globally”. But maybe because he had gone through so many other current-account crises abroad during his tenure at Treasury, he was pretty clear that he thought the big risk was that interest rates would go up, rather than go down. In response to one question from a central banker, he said:

I certainly would not want to suggest how you or any other central banker should manage your reserves, but I would point out that when you buy U.S. treasury bills, what you get is 1.75 percent, and it doesn’t really matter whether the U.S. economy grows rapidly or grows slowly. And that is, as I said, a negative interest rate in real dollar terms, and I think that’s the number that one should focus on.

Summers couldn’t have been much clearer that he was pretty convinced that interest rates in the US were going to have to rise: it seems quaint now, but back then 1.75% really did seem like an incredibly low interest rate on T-bills.

Given his analysis, and his ego, it’s pretty obvious how Summers decided to use the future Allston expansion as an excuse to engage in a massive interest-rate gamble outside the purview of the Harvard Management Company, which is the arm of Harvard with a real mandate to play the financial markets. The real reasons for the rate swaps can be found in that 2004 lecture, not in vague ideas that Harvard was sure to issue floating-rate debt at some point in the 2020s. And given those real reasons, it’s easy to see why there was no clear mandate to unwind the swaps when Allston was scaled back.

Basically, Summers took a massive gamble with Harvard’s money, and lost — big. The buck stops with him, and I look forward to Summers admitting as much sooner rather than later.

This is why I love the blogs. The Epicurean Dealmaker has picked up on a detail buried in the 17th paragraph of a dry Bloomberg story from March about the relative funding costs of Harvard and Princeton — a story which, in light of TED’s comments, surely counts as having massively buried its lede.

The subject is those notorious interest rate swaps, put on by Larry Summers, on which Harvard lost a whopping $1 billion. And here’s the key graf:

Most of the swaps, signed when Summers, 54, was Harvard’s president from 2001 to 2006, were intended to lock in rates for debt that Harvard expected to issue as far off as 2022, for a 340-acre campus expansion, according to Moody’s Investors Service. In 2006 and 2007, Moody’s warned of risks from those so-called forward swaps, though it said the school’s finances and management experience mitigated them. Summers declined to comment on the record about the matter.

It turns out that Summers wasn’t protecting Harvard from having to pay more on its floating-rate debt were interest rates to rise. Instead, he was swapping hypothetical future floating-rate bonds into fixed-rate obligations. Says TED:

Forward swaps, or forward start swaps—which behave like normal swaps except the offsetting fixed and floating rate payments are scheduled to start at a date certain in the future—by themselves count as little more than rank interest rate speculation, specifically in this instance as a bet that short-term interest rates will rise in the future. They can make a great deal of sense when an issuer intends to sell bonds in the relatively near future and when the issuer wants to hedge against budgetary uncertainty by converting floating rate obligations into fixed rate debt. That being said, I have rarely encountered a corporate client who feels confident enough about both their absolute funding needs and current and impending market conditions to enter into a forward swap starting more than nine months into the future. Entering into a forward start swap for debt you do not intend to issue up to 20 years in the future sounds like either rank hubris or free money for Wall Street swap desks.

Of course, it’s not uncommon to see the term “rank hubris” applied in the general vicinity of Larry Summers. But let’s be clear, here: what Summers did could in no way be considered a hedge, under any common definition of the term. He was indulging in interest-rate speculation, just like Robert Citron. I think it’s fair to say that no previous Harvard president would ever have considered himself qualified to do such a thing, but Summers never let such considerations stop him. And his alma mater is now paying the 10-digit price.

Harvard Business School has a blog called Financial Intelligence, where you can find this:

It would not be rational for a public company to be funded only by equity. It’s too inefficient. Debt is a lower cost source of funds and allows a higher return to the equity investors by leveraging their money…

Back to Google. It’s a nearly $22 billion company with no debt, which is inefficient. The problem for Google is that their cash flow and profit are so strong that they can finance the business with retained earnings. But I predict that as Google matures and growth slows, debt will become an important source of funding.

Yes, this is the kind of insight that 942 MBA students are paying $76,600 per year for. The “problem” for Google is that it’s making too much money! Debt is good because it provides leverage for equity investors! And of course, “as Google matures and growth slows”, it will never be content with simply making billions of dollars a year, but will instead seek “funding” in the debt markets in order to, er, invest in something. Or something. That’s all left very vague.

The weird thing is that if Google was ever silly enough to believe this claptrap, it wouldn’t wait until its business had “matured” to raise debt — instead, it would raise debt right now, and spend the proceeds on buying back its stock. That would put an end to its “inefficient” capital structure right there. Thankfully, Google is sensible enough not to want to spend vast amounts of money on needless interest income — especially when it’s paying no dividend. And I doubt it’ll raise any debt at all for the foreseeable future, either now or after its growth has slowed. It simply doesn’t need to.

(HT: Zubin)

Overdraft fees and lottery tickets are both in their own way taxes on ignorance, or at least a lack of sophistication — which is one reason why both should be carefully regulated. Richard Sine, today, adds another item to the list: J-school tuition fees. He has a clear message for deans of journalism schools around the country:

Do not charge so much money to walk through the door that the program is open only to the rich, the idle, or the financially illiterate. That’s not a journalism school; that’s a gold-plated welfare program for your old newsroom buddies, built on the backs of starry-eyed naïfs.

I think it’s fair to say that going to journalism school increases your chances of getting a job in journalism. If J-school graduates are almost by definition financially naive — if they weren’t financially naive they’d never have spent so much money on J-school — then maybe J-school is only serving to increase the number of innumerates working in journalism. Which is a sobering thought.

This year’s class size at Harvard Business School — 942 students — is a new record, up from 900 last year. Most of HBS’s costs are fixed, of course, so a marginal increase in enrollment is likely to drop straight to the bottom line — something Harvard’s in desperate need of these days.

The value of the Harvard brand doesn’t seem to have diminished — I doubt it had too much difficulty scaring up those 942 students — and similarly I doubt that a 5% increase in class size will have any effect on the market value of a Harvard MBA. But there’s no doubt that value has gone down substantially over the past year or two, especially given that Harvard’s MBA is one of the more finance-heavy courses out there.

The pendulum’s swinging back: senior managers will need to manage more, while doing much less in the way of financial engineering. I wonder whether and how that fact is going to be reflected in the Harvard curriculum

Nina Munk’s VF article on Harvard’s endowment isn’t online, but the précis is, and it seems that Larry Summers takes a particular beating, being blamed for $1 billion in losses on interest-rate swaps, as well as for meddling with Harvard Management Company’s investment strategies and ultimately, with Bob Rubin, being responsible for the departure of Jack Meyer. The result?

Munk asked the hedge fund manager to look at Harvard’s finances and assess the extent to which its endowment will be able to keep pace with its immovable costs. The hedge fund manager’s conclusion: “They are completely fucked.”

Is it really as bad as all that? Yes, probably — especially given the way in which both Harvard president Drew Faust and HMC CEO Jane Mendillo seem to be incapable of taking tough decisions. But hey, at least Harvard still has its triple-A credit rating. That must be worth something, right? Er, maybe not:

In December, the university sold $2.5 billion worth of bonds, increasing its total debt to just over $6 billion. Servicing that debt alone will cost Harvard an average of $517 million a year through 2038.

$517 million per year works out at more than $20,000 per student per year. Yikes.

Philip Delves Broughton on what you really learn at Harvard Business School:

Everyone knows what they’re best at, but often they think it’s of no value. I felt like that when I graduated from HBS, and I was wrong.

Broughton’s memoir of his experiences at HBS is now out in paperback, and I can recommend it: he nails the tone of delusional self-congratulation that seems to pervade HBS alumni.

I suspect that the heyday of the MBA — the extremely expensive piece of paper which pays for itself through massively inflated earnings after graduation — is now a thing of the past. The finance-heavy courses, in particular, should surely be ripe for what their students might like to think of as “consolidation” — what the rest of us would call shuttering. It’s clear, in hindsight, that they did more harm than good. So why perpetuate these things?

Big university endowments like to think that their returns constitute alpha — a simple outperformance of the market. But it looks increasingly as though in fact there’s a large component of beta — outperforming when the market goes up and underperforming when it goes down.

The five largest single-school endowments, which in addition to Harvard and Yale, are Stanford University, Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have said they are planning for declines of 25% to 30% for the fiscal year.

By contrast, the median decline for an endowment or foundation for the first 11 months of the fiscal year was 20%, according to Northern Trust Corp. Foundations and endowments with less than $100 million in assets did even better, down 16% for the period.

If the big endowments came out explicitly and said “we have more money, and therefore the wherewithal to take more risk, while smaller endowments must perforce care more about capital preservation”, that would be one thing. But they generally don’t — in good years, they present their high returns, improbably enough, as carrying relatively small amounts of risk.

The critics of Yale’s David Swensen, in particular, are now finally being heard:

John Michaelson, who heads Cooper’s investment committee, said other schools could benefit from taking a lower-risk investing approach. He is especially critical of what has been known as the “Yale model.”…

Mr. Michaelson of New York private-equity firm Imperium Partners says Yale’s approach, widely emulated in recent years, places too little emphasis on colleges’ annual cash needs and is “deeply flawed.”

Michaelson can talk, here: the $600 million Cooper endowment looks as though it won’t have fallen at all in the year to June 30, and might even have risen a little. And he even locked in property-bubble gains, by renegotiating the lease on the land under the Chrysler building in 2006, and selling a six-story academic building in 2007 for $97 million.

What’s more, the endowment isn’t simply managing to preserve capital: the endowment has risen in value sixfold since late 2001, when it was valued at just $100 million. And one look at its spectacular new Thom Mayne building proves that it’s hardly been hoarding cash over that time. Would that Brandeis had been able to manage its endowment so well.

Richard Bradley reports:

Harvard has already halted the hiring of junior faculty and announced an early retirement program for tenured professors, and for the first time ever is considering laying off tenured professors.

And why might Harvard be laying off tenured professors? Because it’s down to its last $25 billion, of course.

Bradley adds a bit to what we know about Harvard’s financial mismanagement:

According to the university’s 2008 financial report, in the next 10 years it must pay various private investors some $11 billion in capital commitments. Where will that money come from if, as seems likely, endowment growth over those years is minimal or nonexistent, and alumni’s own strained budgets limit their generosity?

These are the famous capital calls from Harvard’s private-equity investments, which previous HMC managers assumed could be met out of earlier private-equity payouts. Or something. But now — and for the foreseeable future — Harvard is facing a massive liquidity crunch:

HMC “took the university right to the edge of the abyss,” one alumnus, a financier who is privy to details of the university’s balance sheet, told me. I asked what he meant. “Meaning, you’re out of cash.

“That,” he added, “is the definition of insolvency.”

Er no, actually it’s the definition of illiquidity, but never mind. The point is that Harvard has run out of liquid assets, and that’s going to have huge effects on its institutional psyche — and possibly even on the job security of tenured professors. My guess is though that no one with tenure will be laid off involuntarily.

And maybe Harvard’s alumni might start giving a lot more now than they have in the past. After all, until recently, any giving from alumni was dwarfed by the investment gains of the endowment, and so the incentive to add another drop to the bucket was greatly reduced. Now, by contrast, cash from alumni is desperately needed to meet the university’s annual liquidity requirements. It might even feel better, giving money when you know it’s going to actually be spent, rather than giving money simply to augment some gargantuan endowment.