(Bloomberg) — Inside Eastman Kodak Co., the once-iconic camera maker, a small pension investment team reaped such large gains in recent years that they windfalled themselves out of a job.
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The group, managing a pool of retirement assets for more than 37,000 people, poured money into hedge funds and private equity and, in seven years, turned a $255 million deficit into a $1.1 billion surplus.
That represents a potential fortune for a company that spent the past decade stumbling to find a post-bankruptcy direction, lurching from crypto to Covid vaccines and back to a niche resurgence in film. Earlier this month, Kodak said it was moving management of the pension to an outside firm while it weighed how best to utilize the extra assets, which amount to almost triple the company’s market value.
The photography pioneer isn’t alone.
Across corporate America, buoyant…
