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The Obama White House continues to blame the Bush Administration for the economic woes in the United State. The most recent villains targeted by Barack Obama are from the insurance industry. But Wall Street has been another favorite target for liberals seeking villains to prop up their agenda. Not the least of which is so-called healthcare reform. And that is surrounded by record deficits, increases to the national debt, continued job losses and disdain for the private sector, free markets and capitalism in general.

Much of the economic downturn is characterized by the Obama Administration as greed in the private sector and specific criticism for those who engaged in transactions based on derivative investments like collateralized debt obligations or credit default swaps.

The President’s brain trust is in no small way represented by graduates and others from Harvard University. A search engine query featuring ‘obama taps harvard’ as search terms provides plenty of examples.

So what about the esteemed Harvard institution as it relates to the current administration and their take on things economic? A story about the school’s investment decisions, at least one current Obama advisor and the connection between those Obama blames for economic problems and those on his team is enlightening.

Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) — Harvard University’s failed bet that interest rates would rise cost the world’s richest school at least $500 million in payments to escape derivatives that backfired.

Imagine that! The same source for much of President Obama’s brain trust was just as guilty of greed and poor investment decisions as those they choose to blame for an economic crisis.

The annual report provides new details on Harvard’s derivative-related losses. Many were entered into in 2004, said Harvard spokeswoman Christine Heenan. Lawrence Summers, director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, was the university’s president at the time. White House spokesman Matthew Vogel declined to comment.

Say it ain’t so. Larry Summers was running Harvard when the bad investments were transacted?

Harvard has frozen employee salaries, slowed hiring, cut staff and offered other workers early retirement as part of a cost-cutting program to compensate for losses in its endowment. The fund, which dropped to $26 billion in value over the fiscal year from $36.9 billion, paid 38 percent of the school’s bills during that time, the report said.

Does the response to a bad investment decision at Harvard sound anything like what is happening around the country right now? Are we supposed to trust the advice and decisions of the new President if these are the people he has chosen as advisors?

Stanford Matthews
MoreWhat.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Public Affairs, Money Matters, wordpress, Politics, obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.