The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 11 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Liu: Former Ford Foundation CIO Linda Strumpf completely rejected alternative investments
“Linda Strumpf was the CEO of the Ford Foundation at the time, and she did not believe in alternatives at all. And she felt like anything that you can do in the private markets, you could do in the public markets without giving up liquidity.”
Siegel: Ford Foundation outperformed mostly via high equity allocation, not manager selection
“I think we did over the very long run, but most of that was by having more equities than the average foundation in a period when equities went up tremendously.”
Liu: Ford Foundation prohibited investment staff from emailing program staff
“The Ford Foundation kept investments completely separate from the rest of the foundation. In fact, discouraged any kind of interaction. I think that when I first got there, you couldn't even email the program staff if you were on the investment staff.”
Fitzpatrick: Forward foundation commitments effectively function as portfolio leverage
“If you have forward foundation commitments, that is effectively leverage in your portfolio.”
Many major foundations remain below their 2007 peak values due to illiquidity
“That fight for cash Left some of them still permanently impaired. Some of those foundations still have not gotten back to their 2007 high watermark.”
Ford Foundation under Linda Strump held no hedge funds, capped PE
“Linda at the time didn't believe in hedge funds. The private equity portfolio was 10%. That was it.”
Ford Foundation barred buyout investing due to board anti-takeover bias
“The board in prior iterations had been a lot of captains of industry who had been the victims of hostile takeovers, and so they felt that the LBO market was unsavory, so they did not allow the Ford Foundation to invest in buyouts.
But they would let them inves…”
Lew: Ford liquidated $1.8B in tech distributions right before dot-com crash
“We literally had about 1.9 billion dollars in our distribution portfolio,
because the
Distributions were coming so fast that we literally were losing stock certificates because people were sending them in the mail.
And back then the transfer agents were not ef…”
Liu: Ford Foundation began venture investing in 1974, capping it at 10%
“Despite the fact that the Ford Foundation had a tremendous venture portfolio, because it had started investing in venture in 74, it was only 10% of the portfolio.”
Baumgartner: Ford Foundation shifted $8B of $10B into new strategies post-2008
“And then what we did over the next five years was to shift that portfolio more toward an endowment like portfolio. We built out the investment team there. We shifted probably eight of the ten billion at that point into different strategies or different manager…”