What I Said at the State Hearing on Harvard’s $2 Billion Tax-Exempt Bond Offering

”The bad news is, we have to behave,” says a Harvard slide labeled ”confidential”

“The bad news is, we have to behave” says a “confidential” Harvard slide on the rules governing tax-exempt debt.

One of the consequences of the collapse of the press that I wrote about yesterday (“The Last Los Angeles Times Press Run”) is that newsworthy events, such as yesterday’s public hearing of the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency board on Harvard’s $2 billion tax exempt bond financing, don’t get news coverage. As context, $2 billion is more than the entire amount of bond financing this agency has issued statewide in recent calendar years. The entire Fidelity Massachusetts tax-exempt bond fund is about $2.6 billion and the Vanguard one is about $2.6 billion so $2 billion is just a lot of Massachusetts tax-exempt bonds.

I testified at the hearing. Here’s what I said: