UT Endowment's Gold Bullion Investment (~5%)

By David Mildenberg and Pham-Duy Nguyen
Bloomberg News
Friday, April 15, 2011

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-15/texas-university-endowment-hold...

The University of Texas Investment Management Co., the second-largest U.S. academic endowment, took delivery of almost $1 billion in gold bullion as the metal reaches a record, according to the fund's board.

The fund, whose $19.9 billion in assets ranked it behind Harvard University's endowment as of August, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, last year added about $500 million in gold investments to an existing stake, said Bruce Zimmerman, the endowment's chief executive officer. The holdings reached about $987 million yesterday, as Comex futures closed at $1,486 an ounce.

The decision to turn the fund's investment into gold bars was influenced by Kyle Bass, a Dallas hedge fund manager and member of the endowment's board, Zimmerman said yesterday at its annual meeting. Bass made $500 million on the U.S. subprime mortgage collapse.

"Central banks are printing more money than they ever have, so what's the value of money in terms of purchases of goods and services?” Bass said today in a telephone interview. "I look at gold as just another currency that they can't print any more of."

Gold reached an all-time high of $1,489.10 an ounce today in New York as sovereign debt concerns boosted demand for the metal as a store of value. Gold has climbed 28 percent in the past year on Comex.

The endowment, which oversees funds held by the University of Texas System and Texas A&M University, has 6,643 bars of bullion, or 664,300 ounces, in a Comex-registered vault in New York owned by HSBC Holdings Plc, the London-based bank, according to a report distributed at yesterday’s meeting in Austin.