… the Madoff thing’s getting positively Shakespearean.
Bard College, a liberal-arts school in New York State’s Hudson Valley, lost about $3 million in investments related to Bernard Madoff.
The losses involved $11 million of Bard’s $270 million endowment that the college invested in the Ariel Fund, managed by J. Ezra Merkin, Bard President Leon Botstein said today in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. Merkin was introduced to the school by the late Leon Levy, a Bard trustee who founded OppenheimerFunds Inc., and serves as a governor of Bard’s Levy Economics Institute, Botstein said. [Bit confusing there. If Levy’s late, how can he serve?]
Bard believed about a fourth of its Ariel investment was in cash, Botstein said. Instead, it was invested with Madoff without the school’s knowledge, he said.
“It’s absolutely outrageous,” Botstein said. “We never knowingly invested with Madoff. We invested with Ezra Merkin.”…
January 5th, 2009 at 10:25PM
It’s Levy who is late and Merkin who is servin’ … much to our chagrin
January 5th, 2009 at 10:34PM
tzvee: You’re right. I didn’t see the comma.
January 6th, 2009 at 9:36AM
A partner in a local law firm has been asked by a university client what is involved in declaring exigency. Exigency?! Financial exigency turns out to be what you need to declare to break tenure. Yikes!
January 6th, 2009 at 7:50PM
don’t tease. which university?
January 7th, 2009 at 9:44AM
I’m not teasing. My informant didn’t tell me which U.