Shots in the Dark

Larry Summers appeared on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, although the show was guest-hosted by Terry Moran. (It’s late August. GS is probably at the US Open, where I should be.)

He was not optimistic about the state of the stock market and the economy, but stuck up for the little guy, saying that the focus of economic policy should not be bailing out big investors, but addressing the needs of homeowners who are facing the loss of their homes.

Sound economic policy—or political positioning?

Summers’ best-delivered line of the show: “The Wall Street editorial page is wrong when it tries to deny the American dream” of homeownership to working families.

LHS has gone almost entirely gray in the past year; he’s looking more distinguished these days.

Newsweek has a list of the “hottest” colleges just out, and it’s amusing if basically worthless.

Case in point: the magazine lists Cornell as the “hottest Ivy.”

Here’s why:

Unlike the other Ivies, Cornell is a land-grant college emphasizing problem solving as well as scholarly debate. The university boasts a world-class engineering college and top-flight liberal arts, science and fine arts. The hotel school is considered the world’s best. Cornellians, proud of the variety on campus, point to the president, David Skorton, a cardiologist, jazz musician and computer scientist who is the first in his family to have a college education.

Okay, that’s all true, and I’m imagine Wikipedia will confirm it. So what exactly makes Cornell “hot”? Newsweek does not elaborate.

Silly mainstream media. If you’re going to say that something is hot, you should at least say why.

Okay, here’s the Harvard entry:

This was a close one. Harvard rejected 91.03 percent of its applicants to the class of 2011. It seemed likely, once again, to win the trophy for Stingiest Admissions. But wait: Columbia College, part of Columbia University, rejected 91.05 of applicants. Its student newspaper declared it the winner. Some Columbia freshmen, however, attend the School of Engineering and Applied Science or the School of General Studies, which means that only 89.6 percent of applicants felt the pain.

Well, that is a tortured logic, and what the heck is “hottest for rejecting you” supposed to mean anyway?

The comments do a fine job of deconstructing of this particular feature.

A financial blog says the endowments could do just as well using a buy-and-hold strategy rather than the management systems the two universities have in place….

…try PlayboyU, the company’s new social networking site.

Motto: “Join our student body.”

Here’s yesterday’s Globe write-up on last year’s endowment returns.

The growth of Harvard’s endowment in a single year, $5.7 billion, dwarfs similar gains in the academic world. Other than Harvard, only six American universities held entire endowments larger than $5.7 billion at the end of the previous fiscal year, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

One thing the Globe doesn’t mention that the Times did: El-Erian’s plan to start a website devoted to HMC that will make make the university’s investments more “transparent.”

It’ll be interesting to see what this means, but it’s an encouraging note to strike….

Bridget Moynihan just gave birth to Tom Brady’s child!

You know, it really might make more sense for Brady, who’s now dating NYC-based model Giselle Bunchen, and whose ex-girlfriend and child also live in New York, to play for the Giants….

Trade you Eli Manning for him?

And I do mean offensive.

Today he had the audacity to say that we should stay in Iraq in order to prevent the kind of bloodshed that happened after we withdrew from Vietnam. (The Times blog has a nice analysis of this argument.)

Perhaps the president should say that to this Iraq veteran and his bride, who were photographed by Nina Berman, whose remarkable work is written up in today’s Times.

A poster below says that Harvard’s endowment has done so well, I should reconsider my sense that Harvard’s loss of $350 million in a hedge fund was big news.

Hmmm….

Well, the Times has a piece on Harvard’s returns for the past year, and the results are impressive.

The Harvard Management Company, which oversees the endowment of Harvard University, reported yesterday that the endowment had posted a 22.4 percent gain for the fiscal year ended June 30.

..Together with other assets and related accounts, the total value at the end of June rose to $41 billion, from $33.5 billion a year ago. Its 22.4 percent total gain exceeded the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, which was up 20.6 percent for the same period.

The Times notes that the June 30 closing date for this report predates the troubles in the credit markets.

22.4% sounds great, but could it be better?

Several specialists involved in the endowment world said that although Harvard’s figures were very good, they were perhaps not as stellar as what Yale is expected to report next month. Though few universities have reported, last week the University of Virginia said its endowment had returned 25.2 percent.

Nonetheless, it does seem petty to quibble with 22.4%…and Harvard’s endowment is now worth $40 billion. That is astonishing.

Perhaps Yale’s returns will provide a more meaningful context.

Media critic Jon Friedman has gotten even worse.

His column today is all about how hard it is to be Steve Nieve, a classical musician who feels like he doesn’t get the respect that he deserves from music critics.

Inexplicable, no? Yes. Until you reach this sentence…

I caught up with Nieve and Teodori last Saturday at the house they were renting in Amagansett, on the eastern tip of Long Island….

Ah…the old, “I’m on vacation but if I can find something to write about it won’t count as vacation” trick…..