To quote Werner von Braun; or, if you’re the University of Texas, once the pharma prices go up, who cares on whose head they crash down? Your endowment benefits hugely from investing in pharma company Valeant as it buys cheap old drugs and then jacks up their prices a zillion times over so that sick people…
Well, note the headline on an article about the situation in Nonprofit Quarterly:
Price-Gouging the Sick to Grow Your Endowment Turns Out to Be a Bad Bet
Yeah, everything was copacetic for awhile – Valeant, always mentioned in the same breath as its comrade in pricing Martin Shkreli, was doing great for UT, price-gouging the sick and making big profits and it was great for everyone! But then Valeant caught a teeny bit of bad publicity for making the hellish lives of sick people much more hellish, and its value dropped, and now the UT endowment returns are looking kinda shitty too because of UT’s failure to anticipate this glitch in an otherwise brilliant corporate strategy.
UD would love to know where UT’s investment advisors are looking next. Where’s the hot new pharma co. whose business model destroys the lives of vulnerable people for a GARGANTUAN payoff? Maybe UT can ask its business students to help them find the next Shkreli. A credit-bearing project of some sort.