{"id":193597,"date":"2008-12-04T00:12:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-04T05:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/12\/04\/illiquid\/"},"modified":"2008-12-04T00:12:00","modified_gmt":"2008-12-04T05:12:00","slug":"illiquid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/12\/04\/illiquid\/","title":{"rendered":"Illiquid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Remember how I said that it <a href=\"http:\/\/40yrs.blogspot.com\/2008\/02\/illiquid.html\">was the scariest word in finance<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>Well, now that Harvard is trying to get its endowment out of some private-equity stakes, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=20601109&amp;sid=azBqn85_aRXE&amp;refer=home\">we are seeing illiquidity in these markets<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A push by the richest U.S. universities to unload their stakes in private-equity funds is flooding the market, driving down prices for the world\u2019s best- known buyout firms.<\/p>\n<p>Investors led by Harvard University, which manages the largest U.S. endowment at $36.9 billion, may increase so-called secondary sales of private-equity funds to more than $100 billion during the next year, overwhelming available pools of capital. Interests in funds managed by KKR &amp; Co., Madison Dearborn LLC and Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd. all are being offered at discounts of <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">at least 50 percent<\/span>, according to people familiar with the sales<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">emphasis mine<\/span>)<\/p>\n<p>Illiquid:  You have assets, but no buyers, so those assets are worthless, or near worthless.  This is what Greenspan&#8217;s &#8220;financial innovation&#8221; have gotten us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Remember how I said that it was the scariest word in finance? Well, now that Harvard is trying to get its endowment out of some private-equity stakes, we are seeing illiquidity in these markets: A push by the richest U.S. universities to unload their stakes in private-equity funds is flooding the market, driving down prices &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1004],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-finance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193597"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193597\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}