The financial crisis has sparked a debate about the Yale model, that it doesn’t work as advertised in the current market condition. Here is David Swensen‘s response in an interview with Seth Hettena, Special to ProPublica.

The first thing I’d say is it’s too short a time period over which to judge. If you want to have a fair assessment of any investment strategy, get through the crisis and then look back and see how things performed.

If you look back 10 years from June 30, 2008, Yale’s performance was 16.3 percent per annum. Bonds were 5 percent plus or minus, and stocks were 3 percent plus or minus. So what are you going to do? You’re going to give up that kind of performance to hold a lot of bonds to protect against the financial crisis? Where’s the alternative that performs so much better? 100 percent government bonds? Is that the alternative? Well, then what would have happened if you had held that the decade before? I don’t get it.

They’re not thinking about what happened the 10 years before and they’re not giving us time to get through this crisis and see how it plays out for the Yale model against a more traditional portfolio. That’s one of the really interesting things in these articles that have been critical of the Yale model and sometimes of me personally: Where’s the alternative? What’s the option? Yeah, the model fails. Well, relative to what?

Here is the source.