The H-Bombed
Posted on April 27th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 25 Comments »
After publishing two issues in three years, Harvard’s sex magazine has come and gone…..
Is this conclusive proof that sex at Harvard is infrequent and does not last long?
After publishing two issues in three years, Harvard’s sex magazine has come and gone…..
Is this conclusive proof that sex at Harvard is infrequent and does not last long?
25 Responses
4/28/2007 5:38 pm
Here’s an article on Harvard-Enron entanglements… guess under whose Presidency?
http://www.truthout.org/docs_01/02.02G.Harvard.Watch.htm
4/28/2007 5:41 pm
So, playing in the HMC sandbox could actually make people rich?
http://www.dunwalke.com/resources/documents/ArticleScans/Sized/HarvWat-Harvard_Could_Face_Inquiry_Into_Enron_Links.pdf
4/28/2007 5:43 pm
Whatever happened with Ralph Nader’s suggestion to Larry Summers?
http://www.dunwalke.com/resources/documents/ArticleScans/Sized/HarvWat-Nader's_Statement_on_Trading_Truth.pdf
4/28/2007 5:46 pm
Why did Jack Meyer really resigned?
What did the HMC really buy Harvard?
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/oct2002/hark-o19.shtml
4/28/2007 7:36 pm
Remember Jeff Epstein?
4/28/2007 7:54 pm
Of course managing an institutional portfolio could help you!
Think of this simplified example. You manage a large institutional portfolio. You also manage your personal portfolio. You identify a winner stock and buy as much as you can in your personal portfolio. You immediately buy with the institutional portfolio, this pushes the stock price upward. You sell the stock in your personal portfolio. Quick return. As you picked a winner to begin with the institutional portfolio does well, you do well. No impropriety really, except that the institutional portfolio underwrites your own personal risk.
How do you make these transactions invisible and untraceable? Put your own portfolio on a hedge fund and invest part of the institutional portfolio on the same hedge fund.
If, in addition, you have access to privileged information that bears on the value of investments -the value of Google, of particular biotech industries- then you can win even more. Imagine if, in addition, your own decisions can influence the development of certain industries, and thus the stock value of the widgets which they make.
The social ties that bind scientists, hedge fund managers and politicians together are worth real gold.
4/28/2007 8:05 pm
In 1990 JKG published a little book which sent shock waves in the corridors of Littauer. One wonders the effect John K’s satire may have had on young impressionable minds…
The book chronicles the rise to fame of one Montgomery Marvin, a professor of economics who, as an academic teacher, keeps a low profile but who nevertheless is given tenure quite early in his career. While outwardly concerning himself with unspectacular research focusing on “Mathematical Paradigms in an Approach to Refrigerator Pricing” (which is also the title of his Ph.D. thesis), Marvin’s extra-curricular activities centre on becoming very rich in a very short time. For that purpose, Marvin has devised a new formula — a stock forecasting model by means of which he and his wife can cash in on people’s euphoria, greed and, as they call it, dementia. Eventually, while everyone loses money in the wake of the “Black Monday” stock market crash of October 19, 1987, the Marvins gain an awful lot (remember Milken?).
They decide to spend their money wisely, according to their liberal agenda. Intent on strictly observing the code of business ethics, they start to make use of the “positive power of wealth” and embark on a life of philanthropy. They fund a number of chairs in peace studies to be established at, of all places, military academies. They also secure legislation by which companies are required to label their products according to the percentage of female executives employed by them. After they have launched several of their projects, their operations are increasingly considered un-American and officially put under surveillance. But whatever will happen - Marvin knows that he will be able to nourish his family as he has been accorded tenure.
4/28/2007 8:12 pm
In 1991, when he had just turned 30, Harvard Economics Professor Andrei Shleifer was an advisor to Anatoly Chubais, the then vice-premier of Russia, and was one of the engineers of the Russian privatization. During that time, Harvard University was under a contract with the United States Agency for International Development, which paid Harvard and its employees to advise the Russian government.
The privatization efforts did not unfold smoothly in the chaotic years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Under Anatoly Chubais, the privatization led to valuable Russian business assets being acquired at extremely cheap prices, leading to accusations of “rigged” auctions.
Shleifer was also tasked with establishing a stock market for Russia that would be a world-class capital market. That effort was also unsuccessful, and became mired in charges of corruption and self-dealing, with Schleifer channeling business to an investment firm run by his wife.
Under the False Claims Act, the US government sued Harvard, Shleifer, Shleifer’s wife, Shleifer’s assistant Jonathan Hay, and Hay’s girlfriend (now his wife), because these individuals bought Russian stocks and GKOs while they were working on the country’s privatization, which potentially contravened Harvard’s contract with USAID. In 2001, a federal judge dismissed all charges against Shleifer’s wife as meritless. In June 2004, a federal judge, ruling on matters of law, found that Harvard had violated the contract but was not liable for treble damages, but that Shleifer and Hay might be held liable for treble damages (up to $105 million) if found guilty by a jury.
In June 2005, Harvard and Shleifer announced that they had reached a tentative settlement with the US government. On August 3 of the same year, Harvard University, Shleifer and the Justice department reached an agreement under which the university paid $26.5 million to settle the five-year-old lawsuit. Shleifer was also responsible for paying $2 million dollars worth of damages, though he did not admit any wrong doing. A firm owned by his wife previously had paid $1.5 million in an out of court settlement.
Because Harvard University paid most of the damages and allowed Shleifer to retain his faculty position, the settlement provoked allegations of favoritism on the part of Harvard’s outgoing president Lawrence Summers, who is Shleifer’s close friend and mentor. Shleifer’s conduct was reviewed by Harvard’s internal ethics committee. In October 2006, at the close of that review, Schleifer released a statement making it clear that he remains on Harvard’s faculty. However, according to the Boston Globe, he has been stripped of his honorary title of Whipple V.N. Jones Professor of Economics.
Shleifer’s involvement in Russia was investigated by David McClintick, a Harvard alumnus and journalist for Institutional Investor Magazine. His 30-page January 2006 article claims to show that “economics professor Andrei Shleifer, in the mid-1990s, led a Harvard advisory program in Russia that collapsed in disgrace.” The article drew considerable criticism among Shleifer’s colleagues, collaborators, close friends, and students. According to the Harvard Crimson[3], the university’s daily newspaper, Shleifer’s colleague and economics professor Edward Glaeser said that the Institutional Investor article “is a potent piece of hate creationânot quite ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ but it’s in that camp.” But Glaeser later apologized for his statement.
4/28/2007 8:22 pm
So why did the trial take three days? Why did Harvard spend all that money on a question that took a laughing jury, unanimous from the start of its deliberations (by jurors’ own accounts), little more than two hours to decide?
That is the really interesting question. There’s something unexplained about Harvard continuing to defend the integrity of its professor, the expert on corruption who began investing in Russian securities with his deputy almost as soon as he got the advisor’s job, who argues now that the conflict of interest rules didn’t apply to him.
That’s what makes this such a fascinating case. In putting the meaning of “assigned-to” to a jury, Judge Woodlock gave Harvard the benefit of every doubt. The university replied with sophistry and technicalities, and nothing more. The sheer audacity of putting so weak a case before a jury makes you think there must be something more at stake.
At a minimum, when the collective judgment of those who run America’s oldest university differs so radically from the common sense of its everyday citizens, as expressed by the jury last week, the institution itself must be alarmed, and enter into a deeper self-examination.
And at a maximum? What if the men and women at the pinnacle of American education simply don’t know wrong from right? The “narrow and technical issue” at the heart of Harvard’s ill-fated Russia Project may be one of those innumerable pivots on which American history regularly turns.
http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/04.12.12.html
4/28/2007 8:26 pm
In July 2005, Harvard and Shleifer finally settled the case. Harvard agreed to pay $26.5 million, Shleifer $2 million. Shleifer defiantly insisted to the end that he had done nothing wrong. Or, rather, that it had not been wrong of him to invest up, down, left and right in the same games he was being handsomely paid with US government funds to referee. Summers, and Harvard stood by throughout. And now Summers and Shleifer will, apparently, be teaching econ together next year at Harvard.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=508343
4/28/2007 8:27 pm
What are the bonds that tie A.S. and L.S. together?
4/28/2007 8:30 pm
J. Bradford DeLong, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann (1991), “The Survival of Noise Traders in Financial Markets,” Journal of Business 64: 1 (January), pp. 1-20.:
4/28/2007 8:55 pm
Rich, didn’t your grandfather endow the chair that was given to Shleifer? Is that the reason you have never written about the scandal he was involved in?
4/28/2007 9:09 pm
If the three of them were friends, read similar things and had comparable intellects, why did A.S. and L.S. became rich while Brad DeLong remained a middle class professor?
4/28/2007 9:18 pm
Brad never had the guts of his colleagues… but he is a great blogger and writes good reviews:
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050501fareviewessay84312/j-bradford-delong/sisyphus-as-social-democrat.html
4/28/2007 9:35 pm
There’s a new blog at Harvard:
http://rodrik.typepad.com/
4/29/2007 7:55 am
The problem with blogs is that people can post all kind of trash in them. For a real conspiracy theory naming Summers and Shleifer read the following wich, of course, has to be totally untrue.
http://oldatlanticlighthouse.blogspot.com/2006/07/issues-us-v-harvard-bush-v-gore.html
4/29/2007 8:10 am
In the following pages investigative journalist David McClintick, a Harvard alumnus, chronicles Shleifer’s role in the university’s Russia Project and how his friendship with Summers has protected him from the consequences of that debacle inside America’s premier academic institution.
ff duty and in swimsuits, the mentor and his protégé strolled the beach at Truro. For years, with their families, they had summered together along this stretch of Massachusetts’ famed Cape Cod. Close personally and professionally, the two friends confided in each other the most private matters of family and finance. The topic of the day was the former Soviet Union.
http://www.dailyii.com/article.asp?ArticleID=1020662
4/29/2007 8:17 am
The only winners with the Russia scandal are the commissars who saw Harvard Professors botch a historic opportunity to transform Russia’s legal and market institutions. Putin himself has cracked jokes about the corrupt american advisors who were trying to help transform Russia.
Good Dean Knowles will now take with him all he knows about how Summers was involved in this affair.
4/29/2007 8:51 am
Shleifer remained close to his friend and mentor Summers; they talked to and saw each other frequently and continued vacationing together in the summer on the Cape. Then it became known in early 2001 that Summers was on the short list of candidates to succeed Neil Rudenstine as the president of Harvard University. Shleifer and Zimmerman began campaigning for Summers to get the Harvard post, giving meet-and-greet parties for him at their home. Summers stayed with them when he visited Harvard.
In March 2001, Summers was named president of Harvard. Shleifer, who had been courted by New York University’s Stern School of Business, decided to stay put.
Having his close friend as his boss would turn out to be quite helpful to Shleifer. Summers asserted in his deposition that he recused himself from any involvement in the university’s handling of the Shleifer matter, but the new president stayed involved anyway. Early in his presidency he told the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, Jeremy Knowles, to keep Shleifer at Harvard.
“I expressed to Dean Knowles,” Summers testified in a deposition in 2002, “. . . that I was concerned to make sure that Professor Shleifer remained at Harvard because I felt that he made a great contribution to the economics department . . . and expressed the hope that Dean Knowles would be attentive to that. . . . I think he recognized and shared the concern.”
Summers hinted in the deposition that although he didn’t know all the facts and wasn’t a lawyer, he felt his friend Shleifer might have been unfairly accused — that there was nothing necessarily wrong with “providing advice on a financial issue in which one had an interest.”
Summers said conflict-of-interest “issues,” in his Washington experience, were “left to the lawyers.” He said he was sensitive to “ethics rules,” but testified that “in Washington I wasn’t ever smart enough to predict them . . . things that seemed very ethical to me were thought of as problematic and things that seemed quite problematic to me were thought of as perfectly fine. . . .”
4/30/2007 12:04 am
Did Summers and Shleifer, ultimately, give us Putin? Excellent piece in David Warsh’s good column:
http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/07.04.29.html
The Un-Marshall Plan
The death last week of Boris Yeltsin called to mind an important truth — policy never gets made in a vacuum. The US seriously mishandled its relationship with Russia in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in large measure because of its own internal tax-cut politics. With the benefit of hindsight, three major inflection points stand out.
The first had to do with the failure to extend any sort of helping hand to the Soviet Union during the period of its breakup. Mikhail Gorbachev appealed for aid, privately, then publicly, but was rebuffed. “[W]e need some oxygen,” he told Secretary of State James Baker when they met at one point. “We are not asking for a gift. We are asking for a loan we are asking for specifically targeted loans for specific purposes,” perhaps $15 billion or $20 billion “to tide us over.” Out of the question, Baker told him. Before long, Gorbachev was outmaneuvered by Boris Yeltsin, who, in effect, declared Russia bankrupt and distributed a large portion of the nation’s assets to a handful of insiders.
Had some measure of aid been available, Brent Scowcroft later wrote (he was national security adviser to George H.W. Bush), Gorbachev might have succeeded in shunting the painful process of reform on to some different path. A serious program of assistance to Russia in making the transition to a market economy might not have worked, but it is significant that the Bush administration didn’t feel it could try.
The second mis-step had to do with the rapid expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization during the 1990s. When Gorbachev met Bush in Malta in December 1989, a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he handed the American president a map depicting US bases and fleets around the world, in order to argue that while the Soviet Union had adopted a strictly defensive posture, the US as yet had not stood down.
It turned out that Russia hadn’t seen anything yet. Fifteen years later, NATO has admitted to its ranks Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Governments friendly to the United States have been supported in Ukraine and Georgia. American bases have been established in Central Asia to wage war in Afghanistan. And the US has pressed a “coalition of the willing” — including Polish troops — into its occupation of Iraq.
These were the circumstances behind Vladimir Putin’s angry speech in February to the Munich Conference on Security Policy, the one in which he complained of “an almost uncontained hyper-use of force — military force — in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts.” Not long thereafter New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote, “We helped create a mood in Russia hospitable to a conservative cold warrior like Mr. Putin by forcing NATO on a liberal democrat like Mr. Yeltsin.”
Finally, there was the advisory role that Americans played in helping the Russians pursue their internal reforms during the 1990s. Specifically, there was Harvard University’s tainted Russia Project, the Clinton administration’s flagship program to help the Russians build a market economy. When the team leader, a young Harvard professor who had emigrated from Russia at 16, was discovered to be enriching himself, the US Agency for International Development fired him; the Russians then shut down the entire. Harvard eventually was ordered to pay back most of the sum it had collected.
By then, however, the damage had been done. The old-line Russian intelligentsia was especially unamused. As political commentator William Pfaff wrote the other day in The International Herald Tribune, “The naïve and usually self-serving recommendations by the western governments, institutions and consultants heavily contributed to the chaos produced in the 1990s by the collapse of Soviet-era institutions, which is the principal reason for the opinions expressed in Russia today.”
It didn’t have to be this way. The US decisively succeeded in its Cold War competition with the Soviet Union and its satellites. It could have well-afforded to be magnanimous in victory, at least in some degree. Instead, Washington found itself hobbled by massive deficits and tempted by unexpected opportunities. So it backed a weak and ineffective Russian leader.
No wonder, then, that Yeltsin’s obituaries stressed the extent to which ordinary Russians view of their first elected president as a man that brought their country to the brink of chaos. He didn’t do it all himself, though. He had help, in the form of short-sighted US policies almost guaranteed to return the country’s leadership to more authoritarian hands.
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4/30/2007 12:25 am
Look, I hate Summers with the best of them, but whoever is throwing all this crap against the wall to see what sticks is doing himself no favors by proceeding in this manner. Make some allegations or something, but don’t do this stupid fishing-expedition thing.
I have no idea what the relation was between Winokur and Summers, but I seriously doubt that Summers had any interest in the shady and lucrative underworld of Enron when he had the shady and lucrative overworld of Citigroup available.
On the other hand, Rodrik’s blog looks good.
4/30/2007 1:29 am
True on Winokur/Summers, but the Shleifer/Summers thing is both uncontestable and of ongoing importance, no? I found the 12:04 post of Warsh’s blog quite interesting in this respect, particularly thinking about how much Putin may have profited and been empowered indirectly by the collapse and damage that came from the legally established wrongdoings of a Harvard economist — who will be teaching Harvard’s students in the Fall, along with his ex-presidential mentor. Do you want us to pretend there isn’t an issue there?
4/30/2007 9:29 pm
Bill Kristol has also been teaching Harvard’s students. Where is the outrage?
5/1/2024 9:08 pm
Sorry, but like I said, those unproductive rhetorical comments are just going to get deleted.