"The Treasury Buyback Program Is Lipstick On A Pig" With Jeremy Lakosh

About this episode

Jeremy Lakosh — retirement community executive, longtime friend of Vance's, and Eureka College alum — returns to break down the near-collapse of Eureka College (Ronald Reagan's alma mater, in Vance's hometown), which Lakosh estimates has a 95% chance of closing. Using publicly filed financial and enrollment data, he documents plunging retention (82% to 57% since 2015), a collapsed four-year graduation rate (40% to 24%), a $2.2 million operating cash-flow swing, and a disengaged, geographically absent board of trustees (all 19 members live outside the county) hiding behind NDAs. The conversation broadens into a case study on how nonprofit and for-profit boards alike drift into "LARPing" governance — collecting fees and status without real oversight — and the value of a deliberately "disagreeable" board member (the "hair shirt"). The second half shifts to macroeconomics: the Fed's treasury buyback program as "lipstick on a pig," quantitative tightening, ballooning federal deficits and Social Security's own treasury sales draining market liquidity, and Lakosh's brief, exited foray into Bitcoin as a store-of-value hedge against currency debasement.

“I think that the social technology about contributing to a board has been almost completely lost. It, it's, it's like taking night classes that happen to have the word Harvard in them somewhere and then telling everybody you have a Harvard degree, that it's just play acting. It's, you know, another word for it is LARPing, where you're live active role playing, but you're not actually, you don't, you don't inhabit what it is that you're doing. I sense that this is not just Eureka College, I actually sense that this is most boards including for-profit boards.”

“If you get a person that is willing to tell you like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't agree with that, or I don't like that, or You better explain that to me in the moment, you can be like, this is a pain. But the value of it is that most of the time people won't tell you if there's something in your teeth and they'll go ahead and sign something because everybody else around them is signing it.”

“You know, that my largest fear has always, and probably will always be the mobs that come from, from inflation hitting people hard. Right? All of a sudden things are too expensive. You can't buy the things that you used to be able to afford. You're not getting paid in the same way that you were.”

Key moments

• Cold open: the "adult daycare" framing of college as four years of low-responsibility living funded by loans that amount to "a form of indentured servitude" (~0-2%).
• Eureka College crisis overview: enrollment cliff hitting higher ed broadly, comparison to bank failures in 2023 as a signal of poorly-run institutions going first (~15-22%).
• Kurt Barth's sudden football-coach resignation and the community backlash that spawned a 1,500-member alumni Facebook group tracking the college's finances (~22-27%).
• Retention collapse: from 82% (2015) to 57% (2022), against a national average around 75%; four-year graduation rate fell from over 40% to 24% (~27-32%).
• Board dysfunction: all 19 trustees live outside Woodford County, an NDA culture prevents public accountability, and a January 2024 board letter misspelled "Vennum Bingley" — evidence, per Lakosh, that engagement is thin (~30-35%).
• "Social technology of boards" riff: Vance's framing of board membership as often becoming "LARPing" rather than genuine stewardship, and the value of a deliberately disagreeable "hair shirt" board member (~36-42%).
• Eureka's 2022 strategic plan critique — a trifold pamphlet proposing a campus hotel, pub, and daycare with no mention of liberal arts or a plan to fix retention (~42-44%).
• Turn to macroeconomics: the Fed's treasury buyback program described as "lipstick on a pig," an arbitrage tool to lower federal interest expense rather than a liquidity fix (~51-54%).
• Quantitative tightening and the "bond vigilante" thesis: shrinking liquidity plus a growing supply of treasuries (federal deficits, Fed sales, and now Social Security Trust deficits) pushing yields toward 6% (~54-57%).