Secular Changes and Challenges Facing Nonprofits Today
Commonfund recently hosted its 25th annual Commonfund Forum, February 13-15th, in Boca Raton, Florida. The agenda included a range of sessions on relevant topics for institutional investors. This...
Spending Policy | Old Technology Still Dominates
Every year I eagerly await the release of the NACUBO Study of Endowments (NTSE) and, when I finally get it, I read it cover-to-cover. Despite reading all 195 pages, the two most frequent questions I...
Don’t Let Inflation be a One-Two Punch for Your Endowment
Investment committees overseeing the endowments of higher ed institutions need to think about inflation for two fundamental reasons.
What Does the NTSE One-year Number Tell You? As it Turns Out, Not Much.
I love the NACUBO-TIAA Study of Endowments. Every year, I eagerly await the annual report from the National Association of College and University Business Officers on the investment performance and...
A Financial Framework for the COVID Crisis
Despite the fall semester looking much better than the worst-case scenarios contemplated in early summer, higher education in America continues to grapple with the enormous challenges that the...
Crisis Response: A Framework for Strategic Decisions
With the equity markets retracing some of the losses that occurred in the first calendar quarter of 2020, endowment market values are likely recovering more quickly than we may have feared during the...
Are You Ready for the Next Crisis?
Ten years ago Lehman Brothers failed, representing the largest bankruptcy in history, and accelerating a global financial crisis that would knock many non-profit portfolios backward. This came on the...
A Gap In Reality
With the release of the annual NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments (NCSE) comes the obligatory comparison of 1-year returns. “How did we do relative to the 12.2 percent average return” is a...
When Leaks Turn into Floods: Challenges Facing Higher Education
2017’s tax legislation is the latest in a growing list of challenges facing higher education. The new excise taxes on endowment earnings of the largest private universities, coupled with the...
Spending Policy: Is Yours Ready for the Next Downturn?
In most Investment Policy Statements there is often a reference to two important, but conflicting, objectives: one, to preserve the purchasing power of the long-term portfolio in real terms, and two,...
The Misperception of Illiquid Investments
With many market participants expecting low nominal returns across traditional asset classes in the coming years, the challenge of structuring a portfolio to achieve CPI +5%, or long-term purchasing...
How Liquid are Private Capital Investments?
In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, institutional investors were rightfully concerned about the liquidity profiles of their long term portfolios. Although markets have recovered substantially...
‘What, me? Illiquid?’
Although it has been five years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers—an event that transformed a bad recession into a global financial crisis—the scars of that traumatic episode remain etched in the...
Coronavirus: Five Key Questions for Nonprofit Institutions