Kyle Bass, the Dallas hedge-fund manager, urged overseers of Texas (STOTX1)’s state university endowment, the second-largest U.S. college fund, to stick with a $1 billion investment in gold bullion even as the fund’s assets decline.
“I’m against selling any of the gold,” Bass said today at a meeting of fund directors in Austin, citing the need for a hedge against mounting risks driven by government deficits in the U.S. and Europe. “As every day goes by, I see deflation in the things you own and inflation in the things you need.”
The $19.1 billion in endowment funds overseen by the University of Texas Investment Management Co., or Utimco, lost almost 3.8 percent on invested assets in the four months through December, preliminary figures distributed today show. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index of shares gained almost 4 percent over the same period, including reinvested dividends. In 2011, the Texas fund’s allocations rose
Wary Outlook
Charles Tate, chairman of Capital Royalty LP in Houston, and other Utimco trustees echoed the wary outlook held by Bass, citing concern that the Federal Reserve’s plan to keep interest rates low for two years may only delay an economic decline.
The Fed’s governors, led by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, “are scared as they can be of deflation,” said Ardon Moore, president of Lee M. Bass Inc., an energy company in Fort Worth, Texas. “This is a grand experiment and they typically never
