Experience Stern | News & Events

Academics, practitioners and policymakers gathered at NYU Stern on September 23 for a roundtable discussion on “Big GAAP vs. Little GAAP: Public Company and Private Company Reporting.”

President John Sexton and Dean Peter Henry welcomed Stern alumnus Nicolas Berggruen (BS '81), chairman of the Berggruen Institute on Governance, to campus this month for a discussion with NYU students on his new book, "Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century."

Excerpt from Financial News -- "So far, the argument against spin-offs of troublesome investment banking units has been that the banks derive too much of their consolidated profits from them and that significant capital may have to be added before allowing them to become independent. But the Amex deal showed that these issues can be resolved. And a spin-off can be beneficial to shareholders who made significant gains from the increases in the stock prices of both units. The share prices of Citigroup, Bank of America, Barclays and Deutsche Bank are, on average, still 75% lower than they were in January 2008. Their boards could do well to monitor closely GE’s proposal and keep an open mind."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Is there a way that we can explain supporting Medicare while cutting Medicaid, Social Security but not welfare checks, farm subsidies but not food stamps? For readers of Jonathan Haidt’s amazing book, 'The Righteous Mind,' the answer should be 'yes.' It lies in reciprocity."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "'The U.S. is much more advanced and has much more success than other economies. The growth in the U.S. is going to be much faster than Europe, the U.K. and Japan,' Roubini said. 'Gradually the dollar is going to increase in value rather than collapse the way some dollar doomsday folks believe.'"

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "NYU Stern School of Business is launching a new event series for prospective applicants interested in their full-time MBA and executive MBA programmes. The series will start this month by introducing participants to Stern’s faculty, who will share their views on the future of a diverse set of industries."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "Around the world, policies, technologies, and extended learning processes have combined to erode barriers to economic interaction among countries. Pick any indicator: trade relative to global GDP, capital flows relative to the global capital stock, and so forth – all are rising. But economic policies are set at the national level, and, with a few notable exceptions like trade negotiations and the tracking of terrorist funding and money laundering, policymakers set goals with a view to benefiting the domestic economy."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Ukraine should work with the European Union rather than a Russian-led customs union in order to boost its economy, said Nouriel Roubini, a professor of economics and international business at New York University. Ukraine’s 'macroeconomic condition is fragile' because of widening current-account and fiscal deficits and growing needs for external financing, Roubini said today at the annual Yalta European Strategy Conference on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast."

Excerpt from the Institute for New Economic Thinking -- "On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and ushered in the worst part of the recent financial crisis. Today, we still discuss whether taxpayer money should have been used to rescue Lehman. My colleagues at NYU and I have developed measures of systemic risk, and this fifth anniversary affords us a good opportunity to look at what these measures would have indicated to Treasury Secretary Paulsen if they had been available at that time. The answer is quite surprising."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "'Policy makers need some way to gauge the relative likelihood of future events,' Kocherlakota said today in slides prepared for a speech in New York. 'For policy makers that care about social welfare, the relevant probability is a risk-neutral probability.'”

The Conference on Extracting & Understanding the Risk Neutral Probability Density from Options Prices will bring together researchers from NYU Stern and the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Minneapolis to describe the work they have been doing on extracting the risk neutral density from options prices and analyzing the information it contains.

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Arun Sundararajan, a professor at NYU Stern who studies the sharing economy, said the decision was a good example of regulation nurturing innovation. 'I like that it shifts a set of responsibilities that used to be the government’s to the platforms themselves,' he said. 'This is the right direction for the digital economy.'”

Excerpt from USA Today -- "Commercial paper outstanding shrunk by 15% a month after the Reserve fund's collapse, to $1.43 billion, according to a paper written by Kacperczyk and Philipp Schnabl, then with the Stern School of Business. Financial commercial paper — the type used by investment banks and finance companies to fund their operations — plunged 30% in the wake of the Reserve collapse, in large part because money funds aggressively reduced their holdings."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota speaks at 1:45 p.m. at a conference at New York University Stern School."

Excerpt from Clear Admit -- "This generation of students is incredibly sophisticated in terms of their self-awareness. We encourage them and give them the flexibility to determine their strengths, values and interests. There is not a pack mentality. Our career development process is a very personalized one."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "We are in the process of learning how to manage growing policy interdependence without much policy coordination. The challenge is to identify policy circuit breakers that have relatively high benefit/cost ratios. Time and experience will help – that is, so long as high volatility does not destabilize many economies in the interim."

Excerpt from the Los Angeles Times -- "The Stern School of Business at New York University, Fuld's alma mater, has adapted its required course on professional responsibility in the years since Lehman's collapse. 'The crisis gives us such amazing material on how you can get terrible, terrible outcomes — sometimes not involving terrible people,' said Jonathan Haidt, a specialist in moral psychology who co-teaches the course."

Excerpt from Dhaka Tribune -- “'Meeting at Stern encouraged a frank discussion of the challenges and opportunities in Bangladesh. It underscored the need for greater coordination among the various national and international actors, for greater transparency and for a longer term look at the sustainability of the current sourcing model,' Labowitz said."

Excerpt from The Takeaway -- "[Sundararajan] says the new investment in renting is fueled by the rise of the internet and urbanization, and he sees the focus on sharing as an innovative avenue of consumption with potential to expand the economy."

Stern's Center for Global Economy and Business (CGEB) will host a public talk with Philipp Hildebrand, vice chairman of BlackRock and former chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank.

Excerpt from Forbes -- "Bernanke’s church in this instance is our monetary church, the institution that ordains easier money no matter what direction interest rates take or what history’s record suggests we do."

Excerpt from BBC Capital -- “'Part of the issue is that investors are starting to recognize the inherent risk in the markets — political, cultural, and economic — that makes it very difficult for foreign investors to understand these markets,' said Robert Salomon, associate professor of management and organisations at New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'They underestimate the cost and overestimate the benefits associated with investing in foreign countries.'”

Excerpt from Minnesota Public Radio -- "I think his strategy just didn't have enough time to succeed. I don't think as a strategy, in and of itself, it was flawed. One of our most successful retailers is Walmart. They have an EDLP. They've built it over a period of time. You can't build it overnight. It takes time. It takes a change in merchandise, it takes a change in brand building, all of which was leading to J.C. Penney bleeding and therefore really the strategy didn't really have a chance to succeed. Maybe in three years' time, had the company been able to have taken the losses, we would have seen a different company today."

On Monday, September 16, NYU trustee Ken Langone, educator Geoffrey Canada and investor Stanley Druckenmiller discussed "Generational Theft: How Entitlement Spending is Stealing Opportunity from America's Youth." The discussion was moderated by Bloomberg TV's Stephanie Ruhle.

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "This was such a huge missed opportunity. If you look back at what the Gap did with Old Navy, they came in with 80% of the value of the Gap with 50% of the price. This is sort of 80% of an iPhone at 80% of the price and I just don't think that's that compelling a value proposition when you have all these other competitors who are narrowing the gap of innovation between Apple and the others, but at the same time, Apple just hasn't recognized that and lowered the price."