Experience Stern | News & Events

As part of NYU Stern’s “Leadership Off the Record” series, Jacob Silverman, who was recently appointed president of Duff & Phelps, a financial advisory and investment banking firm, spoke with MBA students about his career in finance and technology.

Excerpt from The Weather Channel -- "'Our research suggests to rely less on end-of-world scenarios and to emphasize instead the various ways in which our country – and our planet – has a rich and long history that deserves to be preserved,' said NYU Stern researcher Hal Hershfield, Ph.D., in a press release. 'By highlighting the shadow of the past, we may actually help illuminate the path to an environmentally sustainable future.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "The top 20% of income-earning households control 80% of the wealth. And, effectively, Apple controls those people from a technology standpoint. So while everyone's talking about Apple pricing too high and how Android has taken a ton of market share away, the reality is almost everyone that matters, at least economically, is carrying an Apple product. And also, moving to the tablet, three-quarters of the sales done off the iOS platform were done off of tablets, specifically Apple tablets."

Excerpt from Barron's -- "'What we are witnessing in many countries looks like a slow-motion replay of the last housing-market train wreck,' Roubini concludes. 'And, like last time, the bigger the bubbles become, the nastier the collision with reality will be..'"

Excerpt from Business Insider -- "'Indeed, a new NBER paper via Counterparties shows that 'Buffett's returns appear to be neither luck nor magic, but, rather, reward for the use of leverage [combined] with a focus on cheap, safe, quality stocks.' In other words, he buys boring stocks that offer steady, low returns, but he amplifies those returns by betting with borrowed money. 'We estimate that Buffett's leverage is about 1.6-to-1 on average,' write authors Andrea Frazzini, David Kabiller and Lasse H. Pedersen."

Excerpt from Strategy + Business -- "As Nobel prize–winning economist A. Michael Spence pointed out in his book The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)—selected by strategy+business as one of the best business books of 2011—we are living in the middle of a century-long journey during which the rest of the world will catch up with the developed economies of the West."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Putting sell ratings on stocks can make an analyst's job tougher, said Aswath Damodaran, professor of finance at NYU's Leonard N. Stern School of Business. 'You're given this small group of companies to track, and the very little edge you have comes from the access you have to the company,' he said. 'If you put a sell recommendation on the stock, you're burning bridges.'"

Excerpt from Forbes India -- "China is the second-largest economy in the world. Chinese companies are becoming larger so it’s only natural that they would want to expand out of the country. It’s a process of evolution. But there is a major challenge in going from a domestic market to an international market. The domestic market has a lot of fixed variables such as government policies and economic policies for competition. But when you globalize, you have to get used to the dynamics of the global marketplace, a lot of moving parts, and it’s very hard to do that."

Excerpt from Financial News -- "Libor rate-setting rules are being revised, as they should be. The FX investigation may discover individuals that need to be punished, and maybe some market conduct rules that should be changed. But that does not mean that the FX investigations should be allowed to turn into another instance of vengeance against banks to be settled by a round of multibillion-dollar fines paid by their shareholders."

New York University has named Ian Bremmer – political scientist, expert on foreign policy and political risk, and president of Eurasia Group – as a Global Research Professor.

Excerpt from Association for Computing Machinery -- "Data science might therefore imply a focus involving data and, by extension, statistics, or the systematic study of the organization, properties, and analysis of data and its role in inference, including our confidence in the inference. Why then do we need a new term like data science when we have had statistics for centuries? The fact that we now have huge amounts of data should not in and of itself justify the need for a new term. The short answer is data science is different from statistics and other existing disciplines in several important ways."

Excerpt from International Monetary Fund -- “'There is a whole host of problems that are fundamentally global in nature, but that require the additional tools of business to be applied with a broader lens,' Henry says. 'What role does finance play in helping us figure out how to allocate capital efficiently around the world? What role does marketing play in helping us think about how we reach poor consumers through digital media? How do we think about luxury consumers as not just high-income people in the United States and Europe, but also newly salaried female entrepreneurs in Nigeria and Indonesia?'”

Excerpt from Harvard Business Review -- "Research tells us there are certain 'competence cues,' such as speaking up, taking the initiative, and expressing confidence, that suggest leadership potential. These proactive behaviors can be good indications that a person has useful expertise and experience, or they might simply reflect deep-seated personality traits such as extroversion and dominance. However, there’s increasing evidence that people can propel themselves into proactivity by temporarily shifting their psychological frame of mind."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "We all value freedom. But while classical economics encourages the complaint that safety regulations violate workers’ freedom, that complaint is misguided. It is little different from complaining that helmet rules violate athletes’ freedom. Of course they do — but with athletes as with workers, that’s precisely what people wanted."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- [Speaking of direct investing] "'You have to ask yourself, "Do I want to be a mini venture-capital firm?" and if the answer is no, then you're biting off more than you can chew,' says Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "Signs that home prices are entering bubble territory in these economies include fast-rising home prices, high and rising price-to-income ratios, and high levels of mortgage debt as a share of household debt. In most advanced economies, bubbles are being inflated by very low short- and long-term interest rates. Given anemic GDP growth, high unemployment, and low inflation, the wall of liquidity generated by conventional and unconventional monetary easing is driving up asset prices, starting with home prices."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Silber’s account of Volcker’s indispensable role in economic history shows how he retained his integrity in the face of relentless political pressure."

Excerpt from CFO -- "In a 2010 study of risk management, Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business, breaks risk down into three categories: risks that firms can pass through to investors, risks they can avoid or hedge, and risks they can exploit more effectively than their competitors can. 'Successful firms, over time, can attribute their successes not to avoiding risk but to seeking out and taking the ‘right risks,’ writes Damodaran."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Perhaps the marriage was doomed from the start. The partners had marriage rings  —  a common currency  —  but they did not have the common values of marital behavior. Historically, successful monetary unions also include a banking union with common deposit insurance and rules for bailing out banks; a fiscal union in which rich regions transfer resources to poor ones and where revenue and spending are pooled; an economic union with a single market, with policies in place to ensure convergence of economic growth rates; and a political union to give democratic legitimacy to the central fiscal and economic management."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- “'You can connect a brand to a product,' he said, 'but branding today is a lot more about emotional attachment.'”

Excerpt from The New Yorker -- "When you remind people that they’re deprived, they become drawn to whatever happens to be scarce nearby, as though possessing a scarce object corrects the imbalance. Of course, nature also plays a role in determining how people respond to scarcity, as do a number of other factors. Yet a lifetime of waiting also appears to teach you to snatch fleeting opportunities that other people might ignore."

Excerpt from Reuters -- "Nouriel Roubini, chairman of Roubini Global Economics and an economics professor at New York University's Stern School of Business said that at this stage, the sanctions lifted would not make a big difference. 'It will still be an economy severely constrained by the fact that most of the most important sanctions are still there and, rightly, the U.S. and great powers are cautious,' he said on the sidelines of a financial conference in Dubai."

Excerpt from NPR -- "Our thinking is that the countries who have a longer past are better able to see farther forward into the future and think about extending the time period that they've already been around into the distant future. And that might make them care a bit more about how environmental outcomes are going to play out down the line."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Transparency generally benefits employees and the company. Management sets norms and expectations through its actions. If management establishes a record of being fair and honest, and consistently shows consideration by sharing information, employees will respond in kind, exhibiting similar behaviours in dealings with suppliers, customers, co-workers, etc."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- “'There is a huge incentive for these banks to try and influence where the benchmark is set depending on their trading positions, and there is almost no scrutiny,' she said. Abrantes-Metz said the gold fix should be replaced with a benchmark calculated by taking a snapshot of trading in a market where $19.6 trillion of the precious metal circulated last year, according to CPM Group, a New York-based research company."