It’s a bitter-cold January afternoon in Battle Creek, Michigan, and Paul Lawler is glued to his computer monitor, grimly reviewing another day of losses in the U.S. stock market. As vice president and chief investment officer of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Lawler, 60, has a lot to worry about.
"We’re an institution in the middle of the Midwest, facing a severe economic downturn," he notes. "Yet companies like Kellogg and institutions like the foundation must continue to do a good job providing the necessities of life to the global community."
Like his counterparts at other foundations, endowments and pension funds, Lawler has seen the value of the assets under his care decline, slowly through the first half of 2008, then straight off a cliff last fall.
That’s a sharp contrast to what was happening in August 2007, when the Kellogg portfolio had a record $8.4 billion...