Getty Trust to Slash Budget as Investments Tumble

The strategy is known as the endowment model or the Yale model, in deference to the university that pioneered it in the 1980s, reaping huge returns and begetting many imitators among universities and other nonprofit institutions that could afford to invest huge sums over a long term.

Williams said that over the last year and a half, the Getty had tried to minimize what he considered the approach's two pitfalls: investing in ventures that are loaded with debt and tying up too much money in assets that are hard to sell quickly.