UD has followed benighted Yeshiva University closely on this blog, since the school embodies many of the wrong things you can do with a university. Yeshiva’s downfall (literally – Moody’s just lowered its rating yet again, to an abysmal B3) has mainly to do with corrupt trustees – a motley, incestuous (in terms of investing the school’s money in one another’s funds) crew until recently dominated by none other than Bernard Madoff and his partner in you-know-what Ezra Merkin… But even with one of them in jail and the other busy fielding twelve trillion lawsuits against himself, there’s still Zigi Wilf (“The bad faith and evil motive were demonstrated in the testimony of Zygi Wilf himself,” [the judge ruling against Wilf in a recent fraud case commented.] and a whole bunch of his buddies… Yeshiva is the ultimate example of what UD characterizes as the provincial, good fellas university, brought low by long-established oblivious dumb insidery ways. At the very least Yeshiva needs to dump its overpaid and useless president. But there’s no talking to Yeshiva. It’s just going to tank.
Yeshiva University’s bonds are the most traded in the $3.7 trillion U.S. municipal market today after Moody’s Investors Service lowered the New York City school deeper into junk status.
At least $41 million of fixed-rate Yeshiva debt traded as of 11:30 a.m. in New York, the most of any issuer, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Tax-exempt bonds due in July 2034 traded at an average price of 93.4 cents on the dollar, up from 92.3 cents when they last traded Feb. 24. The exchange of at least $25 million for that maturity is unprecedented since the revenue-backed securities were issued in 2004.