The asset allocation model is already looking a whole lot different than you see above. It is much more heavily weighted in all the none equity asset classes including Venture and Private Equity funds because those are long term committments and because the stock positions – US Equity, Emerging Markets Equity, Developed International Equity – just lost 1/5 of their allocation in the last week.

How will this affect decisions by the people who manage endowments?

How will this affect people who run hedge funds? Private Equity?

How will the inability to sell debt and corporate debt in particular affect the investment markets?

a) That the real endowment return will average 5.75% above inflation over the long haul.

b) That college costs will increase 1% to 2% faster than inflation because it’s a labor/wage intensive product.

Therefore, Swarthmore targets its average annual endowment spending at 4.25% or 1.75% below the anticipated real growth of the endowment over CPI inflation.

I don’t know William’s exact numbers (and I don’t know that they’ve spelled them out as specifically), but their spending targets are similarly conservative.

You can’t just toss around the final endowment size at the end of year and dump all the credit or blame in the laps of the investment managers.

The decline of the endowment value for a college such as Williams is exclusively a function of market returns.

I would give serious thought to delaying the renovation of Sawyer for at least a couple of years.

I think it’s a pretty safe bet that the brakes have already been applied to the timeline of tearing down a library built just thiry years ago and replacing it with a new building.

There are 100 odd educational endowments that are comparable to Williams. As far as I know, our endowment was at the very bottom in terms of performance last year.

It’s important to note that the change in the size of the endowment is not exclusively a function of market return for the year. The two figures get tossed around interchangeably, when they are not.

I have not personally seen enough data points to conclude that Williams will end up at the bottom of endowment return for 2007. I’ve only seen about five data points (Harvard, Yale, Amherst, UPenn, Swarthmore) so far.