Writing in Vanity Fair, Nina Munk explores Harvard’s staggering endowment losses in Fiscal 2009 (the amount they lost that year is about DOUBLE the total amount of the endowment in 1993):

last December [2008], the university sold $2.5 billion worth of bonds, increasing its total debt to just over $6 billion…

To be clear, even if you’d tried hard, you could not have picked a worse time to sell bonds than December 2008; that was the precise moment when credit markets seized up. But Harvard, it seems, had no choice. Unwilling to sell its assets at fire-sale prices, it needed immediate cash to cover, among other things, what my sources say was approximately a $1 billion unrealized loss from interest-rate swaps…

Those swaps, put in place under Harvard’s then president, Lawrence “Larry” Summers, in the early 2000s, were intended to protect, or hedge, the university against rising interest rates on all the money it had borrowed. The idea was simple: if interest rates went up, the swaps would bring in enough money to cover Harvard’s higher debt payments.

Instead, interest rates went down. And for reasons no one can explain to me, even as interest rates were plunging in 2007 and 2008, the university simply forgot, or neglected, or chose not to cancel its swaps—with the result that Harvard wound up facing that $1 billion loss! Whose responsibility was that? Where were Harvard’s chief financial officer and treasurer while all this was going on?

When you remember that the so-called “Masters of the Universe” and “financial wizards” who run Wall Street and the world’s major corporations are educated at places like The Big H… maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising that The Big H itself was the biggest financial loser in the latest round of global economic catastrophe.