Not actually for the student's debt, more likely Harvard

Crossville TN

Description

More about bailing out Harvard, since the highly indebted real-estate developer from China "Evergrande"... The Evergrande centers were only the beginning of Harvard’s relationship with the company. In July 2018, Larry Bacow — then just ten days into his tenure as president — welcomed Xi to Cambridge, hosting a banquet in his honor and giving him a personal tour of campus and research facilities. As recently as 2019, Bacow visited Xi Jinping and gave a speech at Peking University, an institution run by a senior intelligence official from the Ministry of State Security, in which he praised ties between the two institutions for “defending academic values that transcend the boundaries of any one country.” The $115 million donation to Harvard Medical School came at a critical moment. For nine of the previous ten years, HMS had run a staggering deficit. Despite Harvard’s gargantuan endowment, the university famously uses a financial practice known as “every tub on its own bottom” (or ETOB), meaning each school is responsible for its own bottom line. In 2016, HMS reported a $49 million loss; in 2017 it lost $44 million. For 2020, the year of the donation, HMS projected a loss of $65 million. In this context, the Evergrande money indeed represented, in the words of the op-ed announcing it, a “historic opportunity.” For Evergrande, the timing was also significant — albeit for different reasons. Between 2016 and 2020, Evergrande’s debt doubled. In 2018, China’s central bank identified Evergrande as “one of few financial holding conglomerates on its watch that it said could cause systemic risk.” By March 2020 — the same month it pledged $115 million to Harvard — Evergrande set a target to reduce its debt by $23.3 billion each year for three years. Less than six months later, Evergrande was reportedly “pleading” for cash, its meltdown coming to be seen as potentially the single biggest threat to the entire Chinese financial system, drawing the ire of the government, which was clamping down on private debt. It was in this context that the beleaguered company promised nine figures to a US university with an eleven-figure endowment. Why? According to a senior figure from the US science establishment, three campaigns in early 2020 laid the groundwork for the false narrative that the possibility of a lab-accident origin is a mere “conspiracy theory” promulgated by “fringe” elements. According to the scientist, the first of these campaigns was the Lancet letter organized by Daszak, the second was the “proximal origin” commentary in Nature Medicine, organized by Fauci and Farrar, and the third, run through the National Academy of Sciences, was organized primarily by Daszak, Fauci and Ralph Baric. The Evergrande payment to Harvard Medical School may have been another, the scientist says. “Harvard Medical School has lots of faculty. Lots of experts regularly consulted by the media. With millions from Evergrande on the table, those experts could be relied on to support, or at least not oppose, the false narrative concerning the origin of the pandemic.” Harvard Medical School had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication. On January 16, 2022, almost two years after Evergrande’s landmark donation announcement, the Boston Globe reported that the embattled real estate firm had “reneged” on its pledge to Harvard Medical School. All in all, HMS would see just $12 million of the promised $115 million donation. For Evergrande, which attached its brand to numerous scientific studies and enjoyed a channel to America’s top science officials at a bargain price, this was the deal of the century. But the rest of us are left wondering why Fauci, America’s most powerful science official and the man entrusted with running its pandemic response, would not only take time from a schedule in which every minute counted not only to entertain but to endorse a deal with a colossally indebted Chinese real estate firm.