In a story over-invested with irony, a new financial research center at the University of Chicago which studies how to “measure, price, and hedge risk” may have disastrously failed in its own founding act of risk assessment.
Its donor, University of Chicago trustee Steven Stevanovich, allegedly made some of his immense fortune rather in the way Ezra Merkin made his — feeding funds to someone who turned out to be a Ponzi schemer. He’s being sued for 3.2 billion in clawback litigation arising from the Tom Petters scandal.
Stevanovich can’t be reached, and the University of Chicago is making no comment.
October 10th, 2010 at 10:48PM
O tempora, o mores – all you believe in classical education as a basis for humanities, weep: Humanities professors find it questionable for universities to accept dirty money!
Everybody with a bit of classical training knows that emperor Vespasian established a perfect justification for taking such kind of money almost 2000 years ago..
October 11th, 2010 at 12:06AM
I say nothing about whether a university should accept dirty money. I suggest, rather, that the university might not be able to collect, or might have to return, money from Stevanovich.
October 13th, 2010 at 8:51AM
[…] Like hedge funds themselves, it’s very, very risky. […]