Jenny Anderson moves
the El-Erian story forwards today, talking to a number of former endowment
chiefs about how tough the job is, and finding one startling statistic:
Nationally, more than 40 percent of the top investment executives within
universities and endowments left in 2005 and 2006, according to a 2007 compensation
survey by Mercer Human Resource Consulting (now Mercer) that excluded Harvard
and Yale.
Now 2005 and 2006 were admittedly exceptional years, the height of the hedge-fund
bubble, when anybody with experience in the alternative-investments space became
incredibly valuable. So I’m sure the 40% number will fall in the near future.
But Anderson also notes that a lot of endowment managers are now setting up
companies which seek to pool and manage endowments specifically. Given that
El-Erian knows
all about endowments at this point, and that he is helping to move Pimco
into the alternative-investments space, it stands to reason that he’ll be going
after the smaller-endowment market himself.
Eventually, he could end up running just as much endowment money at Pimco as
he was at Harvard.