I thought we already knew this.
From CBS News, May 14:
Every religion has its mysteries. One of the closest guarded secrets of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been its wealth. Tonight you will hear for the first time about its remarkable size, from a former manager at the church's investment firm. David Nielsen says that during his nine years managing money at the church firm…the value of its investments ballooned past $100 billion. That would make it the largest treasure held by any religious fund in america. But instead of spending that money to do good, David Nielsen alleges it was used in ways that bent the law..and broke his faith.
David Nielsen: I thought I was gonna work for a charity. I thought that's what my skills were gonna do…was help build the charity and do good with things. And the funds were never used for that. It was really a clandestine hedge fund.
Sharyn Alfonsi: A clandestine hedge fund. How so?
David Nielsen: Those funds weren't used the way they were appropriated to be used.
Sharyn Alfonsi: So how were they being used?
David Nielsen: Well, once the money went in, it didn't go out.
David Nielsen was a senior portfolio manager for the investment arm of the church…called Ensign Peak Advisors.
In 2009, Nielsen, who says he was a devout Mormon, was recruited away from a lucrative job on Wall Street to work for the firm... a block from church headquarters in Salt Lake City...
David Nielsen: You know this. Wall Street, you spend your skills workin' to make really rich people a little bit more rich - but there is something different about the prospect of puttin' your skills to work for somethin' that you think is really gonna build the kingdom. It's really gonna make a difference.
But Nielsen says he grew troubled by what he saw at Ensign Peak. He says the firm used false records and statements to masquerade as a charity, stockpiling money and misleading church members.
Every year, the church collects an estimated $7 billion in contributions from its 17 million members.
The church expects members to contribute about 10% of their income…a practice known as tithing.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Explain how the tithe is supposed to be used.
David Nielsen: Tithing is what's used to build buildings, it's what's used to pay light bills. Tithing is what's used to-- operate some of the church's programs.
Whatever is left over…about a billion dollars a year…is put into a reserve fund at Ensign Peak and invested...because Ensign Peak is registered as a nonprofit…it all grows tax free.
David Nielsen says since it was created in 1997, the reserve fund has swelled beyond $100 billion …twice the size of Harvard's endowment or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation....
....MUCH MORE, including a sidebar story
Ensign Peak seems to have a more consistent (semivariance) approach than the Church of England which can top the leaderboard one year and get crippled in multi-family housing the next.
And the Catholics! Half the time she was alive Mother Teresa kept the Vatican Bank afloat. Obviously sticky deposits but rather more concentrated than even Silicon Valley Bank.
If interested:
Big Money: Mormon Church Connected Group Outbids Bill Gates Connected Group On $200 Million Farm/Ranch Properties
Our third and final (today) link to DTN Progressive Farmer:
June 24, 2021
Winning Bid on Easterday Assets: $209M
Mormon Church Group Outbids Bill Gates on Easterday Farm, Ranch Assets
This article was originally posted on Wednesday, June 23. It was last updated with additional information at 11:36 a.m. CDT on Thursday, June 24.
LINCOLN, Neb. (DTN) -- A company connected to the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints was the winning bidder for the assets of southeast Washington rancher Cody Easterday, according to court documents filed in federal bankruptcy court. The second-highest bidder was an investment company tied to Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Back in April, Mesa, Washington, rancher Easterday pleaded guilty to wire fraud for defrauding Tyson Foods and another unnamed company $244 million in costs for buying and feeding hundreds of thousands of cattle that didn't exist. Easterday, 49, faces up to 20 years in prison.
The criminal case and connected Chapter 11 bankruptcy of Easterday Ranches Inc. and Easterday Farms could lead to the liquidation of an extensive family farm operation in eastern Washington involved in cattle feeding, as well as having 22,500 acres of potatoes, onions, corn and wheat in the Columbia Basin....
....MORE, including an interesting detail or two
And how were they able to outbid Farmer Bill?
They have access to large-by-large assets
A friend of the blog sent us this Wall Street Journal story when it came out last year:
Salt Lake CityFor more than half a century, the Mormon Church quietly built one of the world’s largest investment funds. Almost no one outside the church knew about it.Some of that mystery evaporated late last year when a former employee revealed in a whistleblower complaint with the Internal Revenue Service that the fund, called Ensign Peak Advisors, had stockpiled $100 billion. The whistleblower also alleged that the church had improperly used some Ensign Peak funds. Officials of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, colloquially known as the Mormon Church, denied those claims.
They also declined to comment on how much money their investment fund controls. “We’ve tried to be somewhat anonymous,” Roger Clarke, the head of Ensign Peak, said from the firm’s fourth-floor office, above a Salt Lake City food court. Ensign Peak doesn’t appear in that building’s directory.
Interviews with more than a dozen former employees and business partners provide a deeper look inside an organization that ballooned from a shoestring operation in the 1990s into a behemoth rivaling Wall Street’s largest firms.
Its assets did total roughly $80 billion to $100 billion as of last year, some of the former employees said. That is at least double the size of Harvard University’s endowment and as large as the size of SoftBank’s Vision Fund, the world’s largest tech-investment fund. Its holdings include $40 billion of U.S. stock, timberland in the Florida panhandle and investments in prominent hedge funds such as Bridgewater Associates LP, according to some current and former fund employees.
Church officials acknowledged the size of the fund is a tightly held secret, which they said was because Ensign Peak depends on donations—known as tithing—from the church’s 16 million world-wide members. The church is under no legal obligation to publicly report its finances.
But the whistleblower report—filed by David Nielsen, a former Ensign Peak portfolio manager—has heaped pressure on the church to be more transparent about its finances, something the church has avoided for decades.The firm doesn’t tell business partners how much money it manages, an unusual practice on Wall Street. Ensign Peak employees sign lifetime confidentiality agreements. Most current employees are no longer told the firm’s total assets under management, according to some of the former employees; few employees understand what the money is intended for....
