Andrew Jack
speaker
29 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Andrew Jack’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
of some loss of federal funding and indeed the litigation and uncertainty around it and potentially even some loss of donor funding or students is a cause that would totally justify them dipping into their endowment, but also looking at other sources of income. And incidentally, both Harvard and several of the other universities have also in recent weeks been issuing bonds to
So they're going to the bond markets to raise money, and that's cash. So that does give them additional reserves to help support or mitigate or prepare to challenge some of this onslaught that they're facing at the moment.
Well, of course, don't forget that in the last few weeks, President Trump has decided to wage war on the world with his tariffs. And that's caused, as you all have seen, the stock markets and the bond markets to tank tariffs. or to bounce around in a very uncertain way.
So if you ought to have a fire sale of your assets, which what these endowments are invested in, it also perhaps wouldn't be the right moment to do so.
So if you can borrow relatively cheaply with a reputation that's still out there of a great institution like Harvard, get some money in order to prepare for all sorts of uncertainties and short-term demands on cash, that's probably a rational approach to take.
So to be clear, the first response from Harvard has not yet been legal action. It's not yet launched, as far as we know, a lawsuit, but it has written very robust letters framed in legal language by some pretty top law firms. So it's very clear they're preparing. They've got a robust attempt to respond to the Trump administration.
But even when that set of statements came out that they wouldn't concede, you already saw very quickly the response from the Trump administration saying, We are immediately freezing $2.2 billion worth of assets. So that was point one. Secondly, we've heard further pushback.
And indeed, on Truth Social, Donald Trump hinted at some other potential levers and pressure points, including reviewing the tax-exempt, the charitable status of Harvard assets. And this is something that universities have been thinking about or concerned about for a while. Again, obviously, which would have a big financial cost were they to lose that status.
So a whole series of statements of potential threats of other levers, both financial and legal, that we can expect to see in the weeks ahead.
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