Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "In short, a reasonably comprehensive strategy for restoring country-level and global growth would include measures to elevate and remove obstacles to public and private investment, thereby contributing to aggregate demand. It would also include a variety of reforms to strengthen private investment incentives. And it would include an inclusiveness agenda directed at structural disequilibrium in labor markets and potentially destructive income inequality. Thus far, with few exceptions, such comprehensive growth strategies have been missing."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- “In [the] V-Lab, we’re recording volatilities of about 22% for January in the S&P, but when you look a little bit further behind, you see, actually that’s small compared to what we had in August. … The Volatility was up to 30% in August, and the VIX was a little higher. … Volatility tends to come in clusters, so when it’s high, it tends to stay high for a while.”

The Macro Financial Modeling (MFM) Group Winter 2016 Meeting is co-sponsored and hosted by the Volatility Institute at the NYU Stern School of Business. Scholars, central bankers and practitioners will discuss interactions between credit risks of financial sectors and their respective sovereigns.

NYU Stern’s MS in Risk Management (MSRM) Program hosted the third Risk Roundtable Series on January 28. Approximately 65 attendees including Stern alumni and industry professionals gathered to hear from Stern Professor Tom Cooley and NYU Professor of Politics and Economics David Denoon, director of NYU’s Center on US-China Relations.

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "So I'm thinking, in 10 years, China will have a per capita income of like $20,000, which puts it in the high income, advance country category... If they get there. You can always have a sudden stop. That can occur anywhere."

Excerpt from the Harvard Business Review -- "From data scientists to web developers to designers, firms are locked in competition for technical talent. You can’t compete with the likes of Google and Facebook without coders, but if you’re not Google or Facebook, it often seems, you can’t afford them. But there’s a catch, according to a recent working paper by Prasanna Tambe and Xuan Ye of New York University, and Peter Cappelli of Wharton. When it comes to attracting technical talent, salary isn’t all that matters. The better the technology at your company, and the greater the learning opportunity, the better your chances of bringing technical employees on board, and of keeping them."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "'Don't [buy Apple stock] because you expect it to become a growth company again. It's not going to become a growth company,' Damodaran told CNBC's 'Squawk on the Street.' 'It's really more like [tobacco company] Altria — it's a dividend-paying, solid cash cow. I mean, people are as addicted to their iPhones as they are to cigarettes.' It might take a while for investors to swallow the transition from growth to value, Damodaran said, comparing Apple to fellow mature tech company Microsoft. But with around $200 billion in cash, Apple could keep paying dividends for the next 25 years and not feel the pain, he said."

Excerpt from CCTV -- "There is this natural bias in the market to buy stock, to own stock, to want stock prices to go up. And nobody likes receiving bad information even if it's true."

Excerpt from BusinessBecause -- "'I would also cite [Bitcoin's] weak governance structure as a huge impediment to reform and repair,' said David Yermack, professor of finance at NYU Stern, which was one of the first top schools to launch a formal course on bitcoin. 'We are exploring a new technology that raises interesting questions about the nature of money and how that is likely to change in the future,' he said of the program."

Excerpt from CNBC -- "'Uber and Lyft are driving down prices for everyone, using their access to capital,' Aswath Damodaran, professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University, said in an email to CNBC. 'So, I guess every ride sharing business is at risk, when competing against these two.'"

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "It’s inevitable that Bloomberg and Trump will be scrutinized as a pair. Both are political outsiders. Neither can claim credibly that immense personal success alone qualifies him to be president. But Bloomberg, unlike Trump, has a record of governance. Trump can use his wealth and style to pander to voters who hate authority. Bloomberg proved as mayor that he need not pander to anyone. We saw that in his defense of construction of the 'Ground Zero Mosque' at a time when a majority of New Yorkers opposed it. Agree or disagree with his opinion, his political courage speaks for itself. At this moment in our history, that’s exactly what the country needs."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "'At its core, it’s about global inequality,' says David Segall, a policy associate at the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. 'Because of that supply and demand, workers have a strong incentive not to ruffle any feathers by asserting their rights,' adds Segall, who focuses on the recruitment and migration of construction workers from South Asia to the Persian Gulf."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "'The high-yield markets have grown so big, you don’t need to have a large default rate to have tons of debt in trouble,' said Altman. At a 2.8 percent rate, as much as $45 billion of U.S. debt defaulted last year. This year, he expects Chapter 11 filings to rise led by companies in energy, coal and metals and mining."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "The move into smaller cities, said Joseph Foudy, an economics professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, presents 'more virgin territory for Apple and an even greater opportunity for growth.'"

Excerpt from Forbes -- "When it comes to how evolution impacts our behavior today, there is no one who has influenced my thinking more than Jonathan Haidt. In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, he writes: 'Humans are partially hive creatures, like bees, yet in the modern world we spend nearly all our time outside of the hive.'"

Excerpt from the Financial Times -- "'I’m a big fan of [professors] Aswath Damodaran and Nouriel Roubini and I knew both of them were teaching here so that got me really excited,' he says. Whether or not faculty also work in business is important, says Mijares. 'When you have classes with practitioners, you learn so much more because you’re learning about things that are happening right now.'"

Excerpt from The Economist -- "Science, wrote Paul Romer, an economist, in a paper published last year, leads to broad consensus. Politics does not. ... Anthony Randazzo of the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think-tank, and Jonathan Haidt of New York University recently asked a group of academic economists both moral questions (is it fairer to divide resources equally, or according to effort?) and questions about economics. They found a high correlation between the economists’ views on ethics and on economics."

Excerpt from MarketWatch -- "The NYU economist Nouriel Roubini says improvements in robotics and automation will boost productivity and efficiency, implying significant economic gains for companies. But this also means that many jobs — if not entire occupational categories — will become obsolete. ... ' By contrast, the Nobel laureate economist Michael Spence and James Manyika of McKinsey are considerably more optimistic about a new era of employment opportunity. They reject 'fatalism,' which they believe assumes that we are powerless to harness what we create to improve our lives — and, indeed, our jobs.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Well, the market dynamics between excess supply -- inventory rising -- and demand being soft because of the weather and slow growth in China, emerging markets, and the US, would suggest that oil prices could go lower even from the current level. But if they're going to go lower towards $20 a barrel, I don't think it can stay there for a couple of reasons."

Excerpt from Reuters -- "I would say the good news is that this is not another global financial crisis. This is not another global recession. But I think that this is going to be worse than the recent episodes of risk ... that have been temporary for a month or two, like summer of last year when there was a worry about China. And then the market went down, there was a correction, and then reverted back to the same level by year end."

Excerpt from US News & World Report -- "According to stock return data compiled by Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, the S&P 500 generates average returns to investors of more than 16.8 percent in the third year of presidential cycles, going back to 1928. That's well above the average 11.41 percent return seen between 1928 and 2015 and the 11.03 percent returns seen during election years like 2016."

Excerpt from China Radio International -- "The Chinese economy is just way bigger than it was 25 years ago. It's actually 30 times approximately as large as it was. And so it's absolutely natural that you would expect, as the economy grows bigger, the headline growth number would decline and to some extent, this transition from sort of an investment economy to a more service and consumption-driven economy is, I think, showing up in the numbers that we see."

Excerpt from The Globe and Mail -- "'Every media company in the world has visions of a buy button but it hasn’t worked,' Mr. Galloway says. 'It’s a consumer behaviour thing, when I’m drinking coffee and reading the paper in the morning, I’m not in a buying frame of mind.'"

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "As the economy progresses, technological change is constantly destroying jobs while creating new ones. And so the critical question here is are we at a point where the rate of job disruption has exceeded the rate of job creation or are we ... continuing a trend of creative destruction that leads to some jobs going and some jobs coming back."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "I think the underlying fundamental problem is that there is very broad based weakness and fragility in the underlying global market. And so the asset prices went off on a basis of what, with the benefit of hindsight, are unrealistic growth forecasts in China and the emerging markets, in Europe, and so on. And so I think the asset prices are volatile but in the process of resetting down."