If you invested in Japan’s public stock market index, for example, you would own a chunk of SoftBank, which in turn represented a bet on global tech that was neither Japanese nor public. Moreover, in chasing the mirage of safe diversification, the university endowments were paying a high price: by dividing the investment world into separate boxes, they were killing the culture of debate within their organizations. When the specialist in charge of commodity investments proposed a bet on nickel, for example, the other specialists were not equipped to push back. They focused only on their own
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