Fordham University’s $1.1 billion endowment is culling real estate and private credit in favour of higher venture capital and growth equity allocations as the fund looks to juice up performance. 

With an annual spending rate of 4.5 per cent and an ambition to reach $2 billion in assets “as soon as possible”, chief investment officer Geeta Kapadia concedes that the endowment “really needs return” and must lean into risks.  

The portfolio is underpinned by a significant chunk in private equity (31 per cent) and more moderate exposures to real assets (16 per cent) and private credit (7 per cent), according to financial reports as at June 2024. The private markets allocations are at similar levels now, Kapadia says, although she declines to disclose more recent figures. 

“We’re blessed with the ability to take longevity risk, so we should use it to our advantage and be willing to lock up our capital for the chance of earning more return,” she says in an interview with Top1000funds.com in Singapore.  

“Real estate and private credit – that’s just not going to be able to provide us with the return that we need [compared to venture and growth equity].” 

Kapadia also has reservations about private credit as an asset class. The fund’s current allocation consists of core private credit funds with some non-US strategies, which Kapadia mostly inherited from the previous CIO.  

“I’ve never been a huge fan of private credit even way back. Particularly given the change in interest rates, private credit managers’ ability to just financially engineer solutions [is made less likely] by the cost of capital,” Kapadia says. 

The speed at which capital is flowing into private credit has slowed down globally: fundraising activity this year is on track to fall 30 per cent short of the 2024 level ($219.2 billion) and hit the lowest number of funds closed in over a decade, according to PitchBook. 

“The end to that era of free money is truly changing the landscape of private credit managers’ ability to do really well, so if those returns compress and the cost of debt increases, I have a hard time identifying why I want to put more money to work there,” she says.  

“The fees are not as high as private equity, but they’re still high. I would rather pay the fees in private equity and make returns there than lock my money up in private credit.” 

Tight roster 

Kapadia joined the Fordham endowment after a 13-year tenure as assistant treasurer and investment director at Yale New Haven Health, the largest healthcare system in Connecticut. Three years since taking over the university’s top investment job, Kapadia made her mark by condensing the manager roster from 50 or so names to 30-40 – a sweet spot, she says, for the fund’s current size.  

With only five people in the investment team, the fund wants to develop deeper relationships and demonstrate its commitment by handing over more capital to partners it has high conviction in, “as opposed to spreading it far and wide and hoping that some of them will rise to the top”. 

“Maybe when we’re $3 billion. We may have a different conversation, but we don’t see the reason to really expand,” she says, adding that its manager appointments are driven by bottom-up views rather than a top-down quota.  

“I remember long ago, when I was working at my former institution, one of our board members said ‘I’m not going to put money in my 70th best idea, because that’s not a winning strategy for us’. 

“We would much rather have one manager that we feel real conviction about and give them more money than hire three managers and give them only a third of that same dollar amount. For us, it’s a sheer numbers game.” 

Kapadia is generally “not a huge fan of buying a bunch of strategies” but its absolute return hedge fund book, which represented almost 18 per cent of the total portfolio in the June 2024 disclosure, is somewhat of an exception.  

The portfolio is tasked with mitigating potential downturn in equities and is a diversifying return source. While the capital is still tightly allocated to a small group of managers, they represent a wide array of strategies – Kapadia is keen to explore more event-driven and macro opportunities to take advantage of big picture economic developments, but less so for long/short where the fund already has significant European and US exposures.  

It’s important to the fund that the manager stays in its lane, and there are no sudden changes in investment strategy. Transparency and communication are also critical, and she says investor relations staff hindering access to portfolio managers or simply not returning calls are instant red flags.  

“We want to get married to these managers, like we want to really feel like we have a relationship,” she says.  

Kapadia flags that the endowment will conduct a more careful evaluation of private markets manager relationships too. As the exit environment continues to look depressed, she expects investors like herself to be more scrutinising when deploying capital in the space.  

“The fact is that funds keep extending their terms, distributions are at an all-time low, and the terms are not becoming more friendly to us yet. From the LP’s perspective, we’re being asked a lot,” she says.  

“I do think that long-term, we have to have a significant amount of exposure [in private markets]. But over the shorter to medium term, there’s going to be some sort of reassessment of our landscape, the opportunity set, and the managers that we want to partner with. 

“It’s not just putting a bunch of money to work and it should be okay. You have to be much more selective and much more discerning about where you’re going to go.” 

Resilience has become the buzzword of our time. Literally, it’s ubiquitous, it’s everywhere. The French language has a less cerebral word for it – resilience is a passe-partout; it works well in every context.

The Latin resilire means “to bounce back,” and it’s no surprise that with the advent of industrialisation in the early 1800s, it came to denote the elasticity or power of materials to return to their original shape after being stressed (“bend, don’t break”).

It remained confined to materials science for a while, entering psychology (to mean thriving despite challenges) only by the mid-1900s. By the 2000s, its evocative meaning had spread far and wide across various disciplines and contexts. The concept’s diffusion has grown tenfold since 2004, according to Google Trends.

Trend in Google Searches for “resilience” (2004-2025)

There are likely many reasons behind the rise in interest in the concept. To us, one reason is particularly compelling because it provides a coherent macro picture: the system has become increasingly complex. Resilience, at its core, has a very defensive-reactive connotation and in a more complex world – with unprecedented pressure exerted on planet Earth – it makes perfect sense for humans to think about how to ‘bounce back’ from potential shocks ahead.

But there is no bouncing-back in the Anthropocene

We humans have become the dominant force shaping the planet, even to the point of outgrowing the biosphere [1]. We have grown so much that the emergent complexity is:

  • eroding our agency, and
  • amplifying systemic risk.

Consider perhaps the most systemic example – we feel increasingly vulnerable to climate change while simultaneously incapable of delivering the urgently needed reduction in global GHG emissions. We can recognise and verbalise what’s needed but struggle to enact it within the system.

So why are we struggling to enact the change that is needed? Either, because we believe the damage will not be so severe as to justify the cost of change. Or, because we believe our current system is resilient enough – sure, it will take some damage but we will change and adapt as we need to.

However science is warning us of irreversible tipping points and non-linear ripple effects within the broader ecosystem. In simple language, we may soon forget about the stable, normal (climate) state we thrived in.

Now, where are we expecting to bounce back from, or to, if irreversible states open out in front of us?

The concept of resilience assumes the recovery to some equilibrium trajectory or steady state at least, but climate change is a mean aversion process: “there is no mean, there is no average, there is no return to normal. It’s one way into the unknown”[2]. That’s definitely not an adaptable environment, let alone one where we could build an even better ‘bounced-back’ version of our system.

If it can’t be about recovery, it must be about transformation

Pointing to resilience in response to systemic risk means hoping for a mild systemic outcome – an inconvenient disruption while we repair the system. By implication, it means we are choosing to ignore the systemic outcomes which irreversibly break our system. And that means we are abdicating from the type of change we need – transformational or systemic change; in other words, at a minimum, abandoning our current economic system for a different one.

Resilience reveals unwavering faith in business as usual. We admit the ‘usual’ might be patched up here and there (eg leaving fossil fuels in the ground and going with wind and sunlight), but we don’t believe it needs to undergo any real test of transformation. It’s like anticipating potholes ahead, pulling over the car and replacing the tires and suspension, then getting back on the road – confident we’ll bounce our way through. But what if there’s no road left whatsoever to take us home? What if the only way forward is to rethink – or even entirely transform or ditch – our mode of transport?

As noted, resilience as a palatable concept has entered every imaginable human context, expanding our perceived capacity for determination and endurance in the face of adversity. The risk is that we forget that there is only one ultimate level of resilience that matters – planet Earth’s resilience.

What do we make of our cherished human resilience when one of the most internationally recognised scientists on global sustainability tells us that Earth is losing resilience?[3] Consider accelerating warming trends, record-breaking temperatures, unexpected anomalies, a potential shift in climate sensitivity, reductions in aerosol emissions, etc.

Resilience appears to be the quintessential form of adaptation when mitigation has failed. In other words, we will continue to tell each other about the greatness of human resilience so much that it will be the only strategy left to cope with climate change/systemic risk. But because recovery and adaptation without mitigation (a pillar of systems change) is doubtful at best, it will likely turn out to be an empty box in the face of a collapsing system.

Systems change demands the opposite: “break, don’t bend” 

Let me wrap up with a play on words – for business as usual to continue, we need to bend without breaking. In this piece, I argued that the destabilisation caused by human activity on this planet, and the resulting climate change, leaves no room for bouncing back. Now, if we are to bend but not bounce, it likely means the bending will continue until we break – and that’s not what we want.

What we might actually want is to reasonably ditch business as usual and any tool that faithfully supports it, including the concept of resilience. We may want to break from business as usual and no longer compromise (bend) with a system that doesn’t work.

A system that simultaneously empowers and imperils us

I recently wrote about the Jevons paradox – or what I referred to as the “efficiency trap” – as an example of the double-edged dynamics that populate complex systems[4]. Similarly, human adaptability increasingly carries the seed of its own undoing. The following quote from Christopher Hitchens provocatively captures this idea: “We are an adaptable species and this adaptability has enabled us to survive. However, adaptability can also constitute a threat; we may become habituated to certain dangers and fail to recognize them until it’s too late”.

Andrea Caloisi is a researcher at the Thinking Ahead Institute at WTW, an innovation network of asset owners and asset managers committed to mobilising capital for a sustainable future.

[1] Human CO2 emissions weigh more than the biosphere and built mass (Global Carbon Project, Elhacham et al 2020)

[2] Mark Blyth, “There is no ‘getting back to normal’ with climate breakdown,” The Guardian, August 11, 2021

[3] Johan Rockstrom, Is the Earth losing resilience, and does it matter?, April 1 2025

[4] The efficiency trap

“Investors used to view their allocations to sovereign debt as rock solid, but growing risk now takes up a lot of our head space,” says Charlotte Vincent, co-head of fixed income at the United Kingdom’s £36 billion ($48 billion) master trust the People’s Pension, which has just under £2 billion ($2.6 billion) allocated to UK and US sovereign debt in its £9 billion ($12 billion) fixed income portfolio.

Three years after former UK premier Liz Truss’s budget catastrophically misjudged demand for her government’s debt, causing gilt yields to spike across maturities and forcing thousands of UK pension funds with LDI strategies to fire sell assets such as bonds and equities to meet collateral calls from banking counterparties, Vincent says the long shadow of the crisis remains.

The People’s Pension doesn’t have an LDI strategy but she is concerned about bond market volatility as the government continues to struggle to balance the books.

It’s still relatively straightforward for investors to forecast moves in the short end, referencing the part of the yield curve that plots interest rates over time and refers to bonds with maturities ranging from 1-3 years.

“The Federal Reserve and the Bank of England effectively control short-term market moves via their base rate policy,” she tells Top1000funds.com in an interview. 

However, policymakers have less control over the long end which is subject to ongoing negative pressure, amongst which rising budget deficits is a growing source of volatility as well as long-term fiscal pressure like demographics.

In another negative trend, UK pension fund demand for long-dated bonds which has defined the market for decades is also shifting with the gradual move from defined benefits to defined contribution pension systems, creating less demand for the long end.

“Governments need demand for longer dated debt but there are fewer natural buyers. This is creating bear steepening at the long end – it’s gone up considerably and we are closely monitoring it,” says Vincent.

That monitoring has included creating more optionality to allow the investor to adjust the allocation between short-dated and longer-dated US treasuries and gilts, even though it is a passive strategy.

“We position ourselves within UK gilts and US treasuries to ensure we can move away from the long end if we think there are too many pressures, and then move back in. It is a constant discussion. We have given ourselves optionality so that even though it is a passive allocation tracking the index, we have set it out into maturity buckets.”

The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), a UK fiscal watchdog, projects that UK pension fund ownership of gilts will fall from 29.5 per cent of GDP in 2024-25 to 10.9 per cent in the early 2070s. The OBR estimates that private sector DB pension schemes, which are closed to either new entrants or further accruals, collectively own around £556 billion ($745 billion) of gilts, but as the members of these schemes retire or die in the coming years, these pension funds will liquidate their holdings.

And DC pension funds like the People’s Pension won’t be taking up the slack. Although the size of the country’s DC funds are projected to grow, they are unlikely to plough more into gilts and not enough to offset bond sales by DB funds.

For example, Vincent says the most likely fixed income allocation to grow at the People’s Pension is high yield and emerging market debt – currently at 5-10 per cent of the allocation – at the expense of sovereign debt.

“We are currently conservatively positioned in high-yield and emerging market debt, which are fully active parts of our portfolio. At present, we’re not seeing the right entry points, but these areas are under regular review and we could shift to a more risk-on position if the right opportunities arise,” she says.

“If we do make changes, we’d most likely go to trustees to increase high yield and emerging markets and reduce the sovereign allocation.”

The OBR has also warned that the UK government will need to pay a higher interest rate to draw more buyers like domestic DC funds and overseas investors into the UK gilt market if the DB pension sector’s holdings drop away.

Vincent acknowledges that reduced pension fund demand for long dated gilts could mean higher yields for investors, but she says the volatility is still an issue. “Everything has a price and as the long end moves, prices can become attractive. But right now the long end is in a state of  flux, and this is where it becomes an issue for investors.”

Invesco manages the entire fixed income portfolio, and the fund has no plans to add managers yet. Vincent says the sole manager risk isn’t an issue because the People’s Pension only accounts for a small percentage of Invesco’s total assets under management of $2 trillion. Still, the pension fund receives an estimated £4.2 billion ($5.6 billion) in annual contributions and as its AUM grows, new satellite fixed income managers could be added over time. 

“We could get to the point where we are too big for one manager, so we will keep an eye on it.”

Historical tights

The largest part of the fund’s fixed income allocation (65 per cent) is invested in investment-grade credit in a semi-active strategy that seeks “to avoid the losers” in a buy and maintain approach. Vincent explains that this allocation is currently conservatively positioned because strong technical indicators in corporate bonds continue to drive “massive demand,” putting pressure on spreads.

“We are seeing tights we haven’t seen since 1997 – they are in the top percentile across the board,” she says. “The trajectory of rates is heading down so investors are locking in returns now. The market is priced to perfection.”

Investment grade is split into European, US and UK corporate bonds with different maturity buckets, allowing the manager to shift between geographies and duration in a strategy that aims to strike a balance between being strategic and also enabling any opportunity to change those allocations.

Corporates want to talk about responsible investment

The portfolio is fully hedged and has a net zero overlay that includes a bespoke engagement solution with Invesco.

She concludes that responsible investment is now a key seam to strategy.

“Engagement in fixed income is growing, with managers working alongside corporate ESG teams to achieve the best outcomes. To ensure consistency of message, asset managers are increasingly bringing credit, equity, and responsible investment analysts to meetings with corporates,” she says. 

“As fixed income investors, we find corporates want to engage with us because we own their debt, and asset managers are able to clearly explain and express their investors’ priorities, helping to bring alignment. For example, we have an exclusion policy and net zero alignment across our investment-grade portfolio.”

Dutch pension giant APG Asset Management has built a three-pronged framework for public infrastructure investments, linking each prong to the government’s level of control and guiding its own ownership and cash flow decisions.  

It has become increasingly relevant as global asset owners face pressure to invest domestically, with politicians turning to private capital to fund national priorities amid growing budget deficits.  

In the UK, the 17 largest workplace pension providers have pledged to invest at least 10 per cent of their defined contribution assets in private markets (half of that is earmarked for the UK) by 2030, under the Mansion House accord which is touted to release up to £50 billion in capital. 

Real assets in particular are under the spotlight due to their connection with key economic and social issues including housing, energy and digitisation. Their importance is exemplified by the Future Fund’s move to partially internalise its direct infrastructure and property investments in Australia this June, opening doors to defence-related investments and other areas of national priorities where there is a lack of manager coverage.  

A report by the International Centre for Pension Management (ICPM) found infrastructure investors share a common gripe when dealing with the public sector: they argue governments often struggle to articulate the desired outcomes, investment timelines or exit strategies, which could lead to poorly structured projects or unrealistic expectations. 

APG is addressing this ambiguity by segmenting its public infrastructure investments into three models – regulated business, concession and public-private partnership (PPP) – which have different degrees of involvement from the government. 

 

[click to enlarge]
The models assess government requirements on an infrastructure project including the preferred length of investment holdings, degree of control, and types of cash flow. 

For example, investors can own the assets indefinitely in the regulatory business model but only for a pre-defined period in the concession model. The government retains asset ownership in the PPP model while allowing private investors to develop or operate the asset, leading to a higher degree of control. 

In terms of cash flow, while private investors make an upfront payment to the government and try to recoup the cost via ongoing revenue in the regulated business model (such as consumer energy bills), they receive a fixed remuneration over time from the government under PPP for developing and operating the asset.  

One asset owner surveyed by the ICPM report noted the discrepancy between short political cycles and long-term investment horizons as a key challenge.  

Aligning the expectations between public and private sectors early would help make sure the project falls inside the “investible window” – defined as a set of sound legal, financial, and governance conditions that must simultaneously exist for an investment to fulfil the fiduciary duty, the report said.  

Having institutional investors assess investments in a robust way will only benefit governments and attract investors. 

Ultimately, the key to incentivising domestic investments is a structural one, and only if governments acknowledge the institutional constraints that asset owners work with can they design projects that would attract capital, the report said. 

“Patriotic appeals and mandates are not the solution. Institutional capital is not deterred by a lack of interest but by a lack of fit,” the ICPM report said. 

Staying vigilant 

The report also outlined that even when contractual frameworks and governance mechanisms appear sound, success is never guaranteed with the shadow of troubled projects like the UK’s Thames Water still looming large.  

On paper, Thames Water counts typical infrastructure traits including stable and predictable cash flows that are attractive to investors, but its practice of using an over-leveraged balance sheet to pay dividends pushed the company to the edge of insolvency. Canada’s OMERS wrote off its entire 31.7 per cent stake, which was valued at £990 million ($1.32 billion) at the end of 2021, among other investors who took significant losses including BCI and PGGM.  

The ICPM report emphasised the importance of having a sound governance structure when managing operationally complex infrastructure projects, which means establishing a special purpose entity (SPE). It protects investor rights by overseeing significant corporate actions such as material asset dispositions, ensuring clear exit pathways and mitigating equity dilution risks. 

Investors should also rigorously self-assess their alignment with different domestic investment projects, starting with aligning their fund types with project briefs, the report said.  

For example, large corporate pension funds tend to be more compatible with risk-averse projects due to liability needs and should look for briefs with clear return prospects and liquidity, while avoiding “early-stage or politically sensitive investments”.  

Large public pension and sovereign wealth funds can be early investors in commercially viable projects provided they have strong governance, while development and infrastructure banks have a crucial role in de-risking projects and providing institutional guarantees.  

A revitalised approach that prioritises active management, value-add strategies and the hunt for alpha in CalPERS $168.6 billion global fixed income portfolio is starting to pay off. Speaking during the pension fund’s annual review of the asset class, which accounts for around 30 per cent of the $556 billion portfolio, investment staff said fixed income has garnered around $600 million in value-add over the last five years despite a honed-down team.

The wholly active and internally managed allocation to investment-grade corporate debt has been one of the star performers amongst the five strategy seams in the portfolio that also spans sovereign bonds, high-yield, mortgage-backed securities and emerging market debt.

Investment-grade credit has posted a one-year absolute return of 6.5 per cent, amounting to an excess return of 31 basis points on an active basis, equivalent to $100 million in value-add driven by strong income from elevated bond yields.

Active value has come from overweighting and underweighting strong and weak companies in the index in an approach that came into its own during April’s Liberation Day volatility, when the team added risk at attractive valuations as the dispersion between corporate winners and losers widened.

Moreover, the performance of investment-grade credit particularly stands out given CalPERS has been underweight and defensively positioned the entire fiscal year, investment manager Brian Parks told the board.

ESG integration within investment-grade fixed income has also given the allocation a valuable edge.

For example, CalPERS profited after fundamental ESG analysis drawn from sister teams in sustainability and governance led by Peter Cashion and Drew Hambly informed the belief that last year’s strike action at defence giant Boeing would end, and production at the company would get back on stream.

CalPERS positioned accordingly, overweighting the company on the basis that it would get compensated for governance risk and there was an advantage in adopting a larger position because Boeing’s bonds were “trading cheap.”

“Once we came to that conclusion, [Boeing] became overweight in the portfolio,” said Parks.

ESG analysis in investment-grade credit explores ESG scores and the relevance of any downgrades to CalPERS underwriting processes. Parks said the team are currently focused on about 15 companies. Engagement is led by the CalPERS corporate governance team, which acts on behalf of both the credit and equity teams.

High-yield strategy in action

A similar active strategy of positive security selection also boosted returns in emerging market debt, an allocation that CalPERS only began two and a half years ago. Since then, it has added around $240 million to performance in a strategy where expert external managers still play a central role. Only 10 per cent of the allocation is internally managed.

In another step change, the high yield allocation has shifted from mostly passive to mostly active. Like investment-grade, the approach paid off during this year’s April volatility. More recently, CalPERS seeded $2 billion to J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s active high-yield ETF, drawn from an existing high-yield mandate.

“This is the first active high yield ETF – they tend to be passive [but it] fits with our active high yield strategy [and] it ultimately adds the ability to capture volatility going forward in the world and we are looking for more active opportunities,” said board president Theresa Taylor.

Elsewhere, the allocation to mortgage-backed securities tapped alpha in active, relative value trades and by increasing exposure to securitised credit.

Concerns about Fed independence

CalPERS staff said the current fixed income market is characterised by attractive yields. However, because credit spreads relative to US treasuries are historically “on the richer side,” the investor has a cautious outlook.

“We take more risk when assets are cheap – that may not be today,” said managing investment director Arnie Phillips, who also reflected on looming risks.

Federal Reserve independence and the size of the US budget deficit are front of minds.

“A world that loses faith that the Federal Reserve is independent will have a potential impact on the portfolio,” he said.

He said that a large deficit comes with large sovereign issuance which can crowd out other forms of financing, and he warned that the government will have to pay more to sell its bonds.

In another alarm bell, CalPERS investment advisor also warned that history shows indebted governments often resort to printing money in a short-term strategy that specifically benefits assets with a limited supply.

Alignment with TPA

The fixed income allocation is beginning to shift in line with CalPERS’ progress towards a total portfolio approach (TPA) that requires cultural and structural changes as the investor puts more emphasis on total performance and team effort, rather than individual asset classes.

For example, cross asset class collaboration is visible in investment director Justin Scripps crossing the floor to temporarily join the private debt teams working in insurance-linked securities and investment grade corporates, blurring the lines between public and private fixed income.

Moreover, the fixed income team already closely collaborates with the CalPERS treasury team on liquidity and leverage strategies, pushing the envelope on cultural, and staff, development.

The board heard that TPA will likely lead to higher correlations between equity and credit risk in global fixed income, requiring monitoring in the overall portfolio construction process and leveraging the ability TPA gives to invest anywhere in the capital structure.

Chief investment officer Stephen Gilmore has formally recommended adopting TPA with a 75/25 equity-bond reference portfolio and a 400-basis-point active risk limit whereby management has the discretion to pursue value-add and risk-mitigating strategies. TPA will replace 11 different benchmarks with a single view to evaluate management decisions.

There will be no change to CalPERS’ 6.8 per cent discount rate.

If TPA is adopted at the November board meeting, the strategy will go live from July 2026. The months in between will be spent on priming governance, reporting and collaboration strategies ahead of the off.

The introduction of TPA has been supported by nine board education sessions so far.

Condoleezza Rice, the 66th US Secretary of State and current director of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said that the new world order is likely to have several characteristics, of which there are already signs: countries will be more protectionist in their trade policies; the world will see a redistribution of security burdens; and those who fail to receive the benefits of globalisation will become louder voices.

At the Top1000funds.com Fiduciary Investors Symposium, Rice highlighted that some of these systemic shifts are not dictated by short-term events such as the Liberation Day tariffs (although they contributed to the overall momentum of change).

But what is certain is that the borderless economic cooperation between countries which the world has thrived under is being dismantled.

“Some of what we’re sensing and feeling are long-term, secular trends that have been developing for some time, and so a change in administration, one way or the other, will not change the international economic and security picture,” she told delegates at Stanford University.

“They [the rules] are not going to come from other great powers – Russia in particular is a disruptive power, and China thinks about an alternative system. So in some sense, it has to come from the United States and other like-minded players.

“Of course, floating over all of it is what is going to happen to the job anyway when we’re looking at technological progress like AI or robots, which already make it more difficult.”

As the US heads into its 250th anniversary next year, Rice said it’s a good opportunity to retrace early challenges in its history and how democracy guided it through periods of turbulence.

“When people ask ‘why do democracies fail’, they really ought to be asking ‘why did democracy succeed?’,” she said.

“It’s hard to get hundreds of millions of Americans to use these institutions, which are to channel – as the founders would have said – the passions, the values and the interests of human beings into something which we just don’t fight about… [but into] everything we actually agree.

“I would then make a case that for all of our problems, this is an extraordinary success.

“But this idea that because I disagree with you politically, somehow you’re not just my political opponent, you’re my political enemy; and the sense that you don’t have the best interest of the country or the people at heart if you disagree with me… I do think that rhetoric needs to calm down.”