http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/07/24/larry-summerss-billion-dollar-harvard-gamble/ 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... [more]
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/07/24/larry-summerss-billion-dollar-harvard-gamble/
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
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Harvard had 19 swap contracts with New York-based Goldman Sachs; JPMorgan Chase & Co.; Morgan Stanley; Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America Corp. and other large banks, according to a bond-ratings report by Standard & Poor’s.
The agreements required Harvard to pay banks fixed interest rates on a total underlying amount of $3.52 billion in exchange for receiving floating-rate payments. Some of the swaps were used with existing floating-rate bonds, essentially converting the school’s cost to fixed rates.
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.
The value of the swaps dropped as the fixed rates charged by banks in exchange for floating rates on new contracts fell below what the university was paying. By Oct. 31, its swaps were worth a negative $570 million, meaning that’s how much Harvard needed to pay to get out of them, S&P said. The losses widened from $330.4 million on June 30 and $13.3 million a year earlier, according to Harvard’s annual report.
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Response by Riversider
about 17 years ago
Posts: 13573
Member since: Apr 2009
Do we really want this guy as head of the Federal Reserve next year?
Interesting how this arrogant economic guru argues men are smarter than women. Can I pick a different representative?
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Response by Dwayne_Pipe
about 17 years ago
Posts: 510
Member since: Jan 2009
"Interesting how this arrogant economic guru argues men are smarter than women. Can I pick a different representative?"
He didn't argue that men are smarter than women. He argued that men and women did not have identical aptitudes in all areas. Which of course is silly is this age of equality; anyone who has seen a naked man and a naked woman knows we're exactly identical in all ways...
Harvard is the worst example in this country of the haves vs. the have nots and the tendency of those who have to keep having. I'm not saying people need to fund schools that have led to education inflation, but why give to those who don't need, why do people allow poverty so they can give to the new music hall or sports field?
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Response by booyakasha
about 17 years ago
Posts: 109
Member since: Feb 2009
and Riversider, if you were there, or if you'd listened to the whole commentary, you'd know that Summers was referring to a hypothetical explanation (one of three, in fact) as to why there were fewer women, statistically speaking, in math & science professorships at research universities. Facts first.
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Response by EastRiver
about 17 years ago
Posts: 20
Member since: May 2008
Clawback his wages.
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Response by aboutready
about 17 years ago
Posts: 16354
Member since: Oct 2007
i really, really don't like larry summers. but boo is correct. his comments on the presence of women in math and sciences have been grossly distorted. or not even considered at all.
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Response by Riversider
about 17 years ago
Posts: 13573
Member since: Apr 2009
If someone has better reference material by all means but here's what I found...
In his remarks last week, Summers pointed to research showing that girls are less likely to score top marks than boys in standardized math and science tests, even though the median scores of both sexes are comparable. He said yesterday that he did not offer any conclusion for why this should be so but merely suggested a number of possible hypotheses.
Some women who attended the meeting said they felt that Summers was implicitly endorsing the notion that there are genetic differences that inhibit girls from excelling in math and science. They cited a story Summers told about giving his daughter two trucks as an effort at gender-neutral parenting. The girl soon began referring to one of the trucks as "daddy truck" and the other as "baby truck."
The point of the truck anecdote, said Hopkins, a Harvard graduate, seemed to be that girls have a genetic predisposition against math and engineering. "That's the kind of insidious, destructive, un-thought-through attitude that causes a lot of harm," she said. "It's one thing for an ordinary person to shoot his mouth off like that, but quite another for a top educational leader."
http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.com/2009/07/va-ni.html
Harvard had 19 swap contracts with New York-based Goldman Sachs; JPMorgan Chase & Co.; Morgan Stanley; Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America Corp. and other large banks, according to a bond-ratings report by Standard & Poor’s.
The agreements required Harvard to pay banks fixed interest rates on a total underlying amount of $3.52 billion in exchange for receiving floating-rate payments. Some of the swaps were used with existing floating-rate bonds, essentially converting the school’s cost to fixed rates.
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.
The value of the swaps dropped as the fixed rates charged by banks in exchange for floating rates on new contracts fell below what the university was paying. By Oct. 31, its swaps were worth a negative $570 million, meaning that’s how much Harvard needed to pay to get out of them, S&P said. The losses widened from $330.4 million on June 30 and $13.3 million a year earlier, according to Harvard’s annual report.
Do we really want this guy as head of the Federal Reserve next year?
Interesting how this arrogant economic guru argues men are smarter than women. Can I pick a different representative?
"Interesting how this arrogant economic guru argues men are smarter than women. Can I pick a different representative?"
He didn't argue that men are smarter than women. He argued that men and women did not have identical aptitudes in all areas. Which of course is silly is this age of equality; anyone who has seen a naked man and a naked woman knows we're exactly identical in all ways...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdLKipJM6Go
Harvard is the worst example in this country of the haves vs. the have nots and the tendency of those who have to keep having. I'm not saying people need to fund schools that have led to education inflation, but why give to those who don't need, why do people allow poverty so they can give to the new music hall or sports field?
and Riversider, if you were there, or if you'd listened to the whole commentary, you'd know that Summers was referring to a hypothetical explanation (one of three, in fact) as to why there were fewer women, statistically speaking, in math & science professorships at research universities. Facts first.
Clawback his wages.
i really, really don't like larry summers. but boo is correct. his comments on the presence of women in math and sciences have been grossly distorted. or not even considered at all.
If someone has better reference material by all means but here's what I found...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19181-2005Jan18.html
In his remarks last week, Summers pointed to research showing that girls are less likely to score top marks than boys in standardized math and science tests, even though the median scores of both sexes are comparable. He said yesterday that he did not offer any conclusion for why this should be so but merely suggested a number of possible hypotheses.
Some women who attended the meeting said they felt that Summers was implicitly endorsing the notion that there are genetic differences that inhibit girls from excelling in math and science. They cited a story Summers told about giving his daughter two trucks as an effort at gender-neutral parenting. The girl soon began referring to one of the trucks as "daddy truck" and the other as "baby truck."
The point of the truck anecdote, said Hopkins, a Harvard graduate, seemed to be that girls have a genetic predisposition against math and engineering. "That's the kind of insidious, destructive, un-thought-through attitude that causes a lot of harm," she said. "It's one thing for an ordinary person to shoot his mouth off like that, but quite another for a top educational leader."
Summers' speech
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june05/summersremarks_2-22.html