Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from POTUS 2017 with Brian Lehrer -- "We think that the Volcker Rule basically was a mistake -- that any of the pieces of the Volcker Rule that you look at -- proprietary trading, investing in hedge funds, investing in private equity -- was not the cause of the financial crisis in 2008. It was a solution in search of a problem. Further, the implementation -- the tens of thousands of pages of comments, thousands of pages of regulation -- it's extremely complex. It is hitting small banks who have to still justify actions that are never going to be a serious problem here."

Excerpt from the San Francisco Chronicle -- "Despite Uber’s massive growth in cities served (662), drivers recruited (1.5 million) and fares charged ($20 billion in 2016), Uber has yet to see such rapid improvement in its profits per ride, said New York University business Professor Aswath Damodaran. Classic tech companies enjoy economies of scale, meaning that though they may lose money when they’re smaller, their profits mushroom as they grow. (See Facebook or Amazon.) Uber has yet to do that."

Excerpt from Bloomberg View -- "In an influential 2014 paper, Thomas Philippon speculated that financial industry profits and salaries rose spectacularly since 1980 because banks, securities firms and fund-management companies found new methods for extracting rent."

Excerpt from Global Public Investor -- "Populist rhetoric must not be allowed to lead to actions that could jeopardise the Fed’s independence. Recent US leaders have, for the most part, been supportive of the Fed. Before selecting Ben Bernanke as Fed chair, George W Bush said, ‘It’s this independence of the Fed that gives people not only here in America, but the world, confidence.’ We must hope that Trump is guided by the same spirit of responsibility."

Excerpt from the World Trademark Review -- “The research … casts serious doubt on the validity of the best evidence we have that trademark dilution actually exists. What has been reported as (and assumed to be) evidence of trademark dilution may actually be merely the result of nothing more than the subjects being surprised by seeing ads such as those for MERCEDES and INFINITI toothpaste employed in our studies. We are forced to reconsider the question the title of this paper: is dilution a unicorn?”

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Menachem Brenner, a finance professor at New York University, and Dan Galai of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem called their version 'Sigma' and say they pitched it to various exchanges years before the Chicago Board Options Exchange rolled out its volatility index in 1993."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "I think this is a game-changer. You're going to have Amazon in the wealthiest, most affluent households, not once every other week but twice a week now. This threatens not only retailers, but it potentially disrupts CPG companies who Amazon is conspiring with half a billion consumers and fanatical investors to give it almost infinitely cheap capital to starch the margin from brands on behalf of consumers. And then you talk about potential disruption in the media market as shopper and in-store marketing gets challenged by what Amazon's going to do with their technology to let people bid on in-store marketing. ... I believe this is going to make Facebook's acquisition of Instagram the second-best acquisition of the decade, and this will be number one."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "'It’s quite possible that after a while you just realize it’s not worth the cost of tooling up to take it and you decide to drop it if the publicity has run its course,' said David Yermack, a professor at New York University Stern School of Business who studies bitcoin."

Excerpt from the Associated Press -- "But the $15 million-a-year Human Project is breaking ground with the scope of individual data it plans to collect simultaneously, says Dr. Vasant Dhar, editor-in-chief of the journal Big Data, which published a 2015 paper about the project. 'It is very ambitious,' the NYU information systems professor says."

Excerpt from the Economic Times -- "Experts suggest that both furniture upstarts may have to work hard to compete with the likes of Ikea. 'Innovative and savvy retailers like Ikea are combining customer identification and analytical capabilities of data from internet retailing with the time-tested advantages of face-to-face retailing,' says Anindya Ghose, Heinz Riehl chair professor of business at New York University’s Stern School of Business."

Excerpt from the Financial Times -- "'Aramco is part oil and gas company, part government welfare fund, part sovereign investment fund,' says Aswath Damodaran, a professor at New York University. 'At the same time it’s a symbol of Saudi Arabia to the world. It’s all of these things. How much can you truly separate these functions?'"

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "I’ve seen platforms, like Catalant for management consultants, UpCounsel for legal services, Gigster for high-end machine-learning programming. There are platforms for accounting, for sales—where rather than going to a large branded service provider for certain things, you go to a platform instead. Like, if you struck out on your own as a lawyer now you’d be precluded from a lot of large corporate work because they go to the big firms. What these platforms are doing is trying to strike that middle ground where the individual is running their own tiny business through the platform, but the platform is aggregating demand, giving them scale, giving them a little bit of brand."
 

Excerpt from the Financial Times -- "For Menachem Brenner, co-academic director of the programme, the crisis sharpened his ambitions for the programme. He had been teaching on the course but became its director just as the crisis erupted. 'It had so many lessons for us worldwide,' he says. 'And one of the things I saw as a mission was to bring into the programme those lessons drawn from the crisis.'"

Excerpt from CGTN -- "I think that many of the business models are quite solid because of so much excitement around the sharing economy, especially in China. My book came in out in China a couple of months ago and I think it sold way more in China than it did in the United States already. But because of the excitement, there's going to be over-investment, so there are bound to be some high-profile failures over the next few years. But, fundamentally, we are looking at a multi-trillion-dollar sector of the economy in the years to come, as many of these business models, like Didi Chuxing's business model, become the dominant way of organizing economic activity and getting the services in the coming years."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "'The bottom line is that, although default was averted, no measures were taken that would create a path leading Greece to financial markets,' said Nicholas Economides, professor of economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University. 'At present, a fourth loan agreement in 2018 seems likely.'"

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "By coming under the Amazon umbrella, Whole Foods may develop new methods for distributing food that could also allow it to reach more customers, Eggers says. A strategy that lowers the prices on its high quality organic products could help it win more market share away from competitors, Eggers says. It could also put pressure on other stores to lower their prices as well, he says."

Excerpt from USA Today -- "'If you look at the whole grocery world, Amazon is a relatively small player, as is Whole Foods. I don't see any red flags on antitrust grounds,' said Nicholas Economides, a mergers and acquisitions professor at New York University’s business school."

Excerpt from The Australian -- "Claudine Gartenberg, Andrea Prat and George Serafeim analysed responses from 456,666 employees in 429 firms over six years and across a broad range of industries. In their paper, Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance (hbswk.hbs.edu/item/corporate-purpose-and-financial-performance), published by Harvard Business School last year, the trio found that 'firms exhibiting both high purpose and clarity have systematically higher future accounting and stock market performance'."

Excerpt from VentureBeat -- "Adam Alter, a marketing professor at NYU-Stern, tries to explain this in Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. He cites a 2015 study that shows 6 in 10 people (59 percent) admit they are dependent on social media sites but say their reliance on these sites ultimately makes them unhappy."

Excerpt from The Economist -- "In some areas red tape surely has choked lending—notably residential mortgages, where recklessness led to catastrophe a decade ago. But the report pays scant attention to the possibility that slow growth may instead cause weak demand for credit. 'I don’t think the economy is credit-constrained,' says Kim Schoenholtz of New York University’s Stern School of Business."

Excerpt from Quartz -- "'They have been able to utilise the manufacturing infrastructure in Shenzhen and thus build high-quality smartphones with flagship-standard specs at low cost,' NYU’s Ghose said, adding that they also enjoy tax breaks and more lenient labour and environmental standards. Now, with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s 'Make in India' push, Chinese phone-makers like Huawei are bringing their production to India, driving down costs further by bypassing import charges."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "The Gatorade Gx platform, including customizable hydration pods, creates a new, direct-to-consumer business model for Gatorade and more sustainable product delivery system. Building on years of science and research at the Gatorade Sports Science Institute, Gx incorporates compelling aspects of the latest trends in personalization and customization."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "I think there are positive aspects to both the CHOICE Act and to the Treasury proposal. I think it makes a lot of sense to reduce the regulatory burden on most banks, which are, in fact, rather small and pose very little threat to the financial system. However, unfortunately, both the CHOICE Act and the Treasury's proposal also appear to reduce the capital needs for the largest, most interconnected, most opaque banks, the ones that can really threaten the system."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "As Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at the New York University Stern School of Business, put it, 'It’s always tough to follow a legend.'"

Excerpt from CCTV -- "GM is trying to announce that it's a player on the stage of autonomous vehicles now. It's competing with the likes of Google and Apple. And GM is moving into that business. It's not content just to be an automobile assembler, an automobile manufacturer -- but also wants to be a technology player as well. So this announcement says, hey, we have the entire capabilities right now to go ahead and mass-produce not just the vehicle portion, but the vehicle portion plus the technology portion."