Texas University Endowment Storing About $1 Billion in Gold Bars

Personally I think this is kind of awesome. It's not like the investments consists only of cash in banking accounts. This story is from Bloomberg:

The University of Texas Investment Management Co., the second-largest U.S. academic endowment, took delivery of almost $1 billion in gold bullion and is storing the bars in a New York vault, 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, added about $500 million in gold investments to an existing stake last year, said Bruce Zimmerman, the endowment’s chief executive officer. The holdings are worth about $987 million, based on yesterday’s closing price of $1,486 an ounce for Comex futures.

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 at its annual meeting on April 14. 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 yesterday in a telephone interview. “I look at gold as just another currency that they can’t print any more of.”

Hat-tip for this article goes to Instapundit who made the general comment, "I find their lack of faith in Bernanke disturbing". Makes you wonder since Harvard has a billion-dollar endowment almost do they even invest in gold themselves. They could certainly afford it.

BTW, go Longhorns. :P