CIO Exclusive: NY-Presbyterian’s CIO to Leave in September

William Lee (Art by Chris Buzelli)

William “Bill” Lee, the chief investment officer at NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP) Hospital will step down in September, the hospital has confirmed, “to pursue the next chapter in his accomplished career,” according to a hospital spokeswoman.

Lee has been senior vice president and CIO for NewYork-Presbyterian since 2016.

Lee has overseen the hospital’s $9.5 billion investment portfolio, including its endowment, retirement, and current assets, and managed the Office of Investments team responsible for all the hospital’s investment assets.

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The announcement comes on the heels of an August AA rating from Fitch, which noted NYP’s coronavirus challenges and gave the hospital a “stable” outlook. But the Fitch report also gives an indication of the kind of financial environment Lee was dealing with throughout the pandemic, when New York City became one of the earliest epicenters of the pandemic and one of the first to treat coronavirus patients.

“Even though NYP recognized approximately $900 million in federal stimulus funding in 2020, it was not enough to offset the impact of the pandemic, in terms of additional costs and lost revenue,” according to the report.

The hospital experienced large surges of COVID-19 patients, and its ICUs across the system were full of coronavirus patients until early July 2021 in four of the five boroughs of the city—Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Almost a third of its patients, or 27%, self-pay or rely on Medicaid.

“The rating also reflects expectations that NYP’s performance will return to levels consistent with a strong operating risk assessment after 2022, following lower coronavirus-related performance in 2020 and 2021,” according to Fitch.

Before NYP, Lee was chief investment officer at a few other places, including the Levi Strauss Foundation and Red Tab Foundation, as well as Kaiser Permanente, where he also served as chairman of the investment committee starting in 2005, overseeing approximately $71 billion in defined contribution (DC), pension, and foundation assets.

Earlier in his career, Lee managed interest rate and foreign exchange risk, and developed equity and fixed income risk models for Bank of America.

He also left the industry for eight years to work as a police detective.

Lee is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and a 2010 graduate of Harvard Business School’s Executive Leadership Program.

At NYP, Lee followed CIO Gloria Reeg, who retired in 2016.

Lee could not be reached for comment by press time.

“Since 2016, his effective financial stewardship has helped strengthen NYP’s ability to achieve our mission to provide exceptional care for all of our patients and the communities we serve, and we wish him continued success,” said the spokeswoman for New York-Presbyterian.

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Tags: Bill Lee, CIO, Gloria Reeg, Health Care, NewYork-Presbyterian, NYP, William Lee

“Crypto turns 50.” Say what? That’s what BTIG researchers contend, saying digital currency can trace its origins back to 1971. Or, at least, that’s when the seeds were planted. And, it says, this insight may help us understand where crypto could end up in the current era.

See, 1971 was when President Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of US dollars into gold. The bad inflation that went on to mar the 1970s was mounting at the time, and Nixon calculated that severing the greenback-bullion link would thwart rising prices. He also imposed wage-price controls. Neither strategy did much to curb inflation, but the newly free-floating dollar, its price no longer tethered to gold at $35 per ounce, had a more profound effect on the financial field.

As other nations’ denominations followed the US lead, today’s busy foreign exchange (forex) system took shape. While electronic currency trading didn’t come along until the late 1980s, forex took place over the telephone and telex (telegraph-connected printers), according to a study from the University of California Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

True, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin “white paper” appeared in 2008, leading to the development of Bitcoin that same year. “Factually, digital assets are 13 years old, but somewhere a futurist/hard money enthusiast started to dream of a technological alternative” on August 15, 1971, the day Nixon acted, BTIG said in a research note.

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“The seeds for digital assets,” including inflation, blockchain technology, and easy electronic trading, BTIG said, were “planted in the distant past and watered more recently” through increasingly widespread adoption.

Institutions, notably Yale and other university endowments, have taken positions in crypto, although most pension funds and other asset allocators have been more circumspect about crypto holdings. Grayscale Investments has told Bloomberg that institutions have invested in its $25 billion trove of digital assets (but the firm wasn’t more specific).

Bitcoin and its brethren have a long way to go before they are fully accepted in the financial world. And the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has expressed skepticism toward crypto. That’s why BTIG expects Bitcoin to stay in a band between $28,000 and $65,000 (it now changes hands at about $48,000). BTIG speculates that, if crypto were to overcome these impediments, it would have a market cap of around $2 trillion, and “ultimately approach that of gold’s, at $11 trillion, implying a Bitcoin price of $250,000 to $300,000.”

Nixon strove for a world based on order and rules, with the US predominant. Crypto, if it really catches on, may have the opposite effect. “The rationale for digital assets,” the BTIG paper read, “50 golden years after the world entered a new, less certain monetary regime, intensifies with each passing day.”