They often have significant and liquid endowments that serve as collateral for the debt.
That was when McGeorge Bundy of the Ford Foundation famously decreed that endowments should invest for total return.
That means the industry will become more focused on institutional investors like pension funds and endowments.
"It's a fairly tiny group" of endowments that have significant allocations to gold, he said.
However, structured notes are increasingly showing up in the portfolios of pensions, endowments and foundations.
The point is to test whether they are making the most of their own endowments.
But celebrity foundations can continue long after the celebrities themselves are gone, thanks to endowments.
Non-profit universities with their endowments and dedicated alumni are not going down without a fight.
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Now the models for modern investment institutions are the endowments of Harvard and Yale.
The report references the recently released College Sustainability Report Card conducted by the Sustainable Endowments Institute.
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For the cause of medical progress--or art patronage or university endowments--wealth concentration is a good thing.
The biggest endowments now employ dozens of bright sparks to look for promising new pastures.
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Large institutions like pension funds, banks, endowments, and insurance companies suffered punishing and sometimes fatal losses.
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"Many endowments stretched too far, and I think Harvard did as well, " he says.
Gates encouraged other foundations to donate more of their endowments to education than the government mandated 5%.
The percentages are considerably higher in the case of public funds (75%) and endowments and foundations (63%).
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Most of the billion-dollar money pools, endowments and pension funds were cut in half over 24 months.
Traditionally, the firm raised most of its capital from multibillion-dollar pension funds, banks, insurance companies and endowments.
That's heady stuff for Venrock investors, including Rockefeller heirs and the endowments of Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Stanford.
"Diversification previously worked very well for large endowments, " said John S. Griswold, the executive director of the Commonfund.
All endowments invest in each of the asset classes shown, but some endowments have not published their results.
Bogle did not have access to this data because the endowments have never broadly published their track records.
"New Englanders understand endowments better, " he says, and they seem to be less interested in the naming game.
Swenson is not alone among endowments using ETFs as a major part of their tactical asset allocation strategies.
Both independent and publicly funded institutions should be helped through tax breaks to raise endowments to assist students.
Then came the Equitable Life debacle and, as investment returns tumbled, a scandal about the mis-selling of endowments.
Another key post, the minister of religious endowments (Awqaf), went to Osama al-Abd, the president of al-Azhar University.
Investments from institutional investors, like university endowments, were fairly straightforward: They hand over money and wait for returns.
This is asking mutual funds, pension funds, bank trust departments, college endowments to flex their muscles and be heard.
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There are still valid arguments that Endowments and other such institutional investors should continue to invest in fossil fuels.
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