Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "While many Americans have stabilized their balance sheets, Thomas Cooley, a business professor at NYU’s Stern School, said young people have staggered under the weight of growing student debt. 'That’s a constraining factor in their ability to and their willingness to take on mortgage debt and more auto loan debt and so on,' he said."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "NYU Stern School of Business professor and sharing economy expert Arun Sundararajan explains the importance of this trend, 'As the scale of peer-to-peer expands. . . society needs new ways of keeping consumers safe and of protecting workers. . . Governments need to understand and embrace this ongoing transition rather than impeding it, realizing that society’s interests are best served if they wield regulatory power to proactively partner with or delegate responsibility to the platforms.'"

Excerpt from CNBC -- "For firms like Facebook, China presents two risks. First, not only does the Chinese market remain a very difficult one to crack, but favoritism toward domestic firms could quickly reappear if the firm is too successful... Second, in answering the siren call of 1.3 billion potential users, the firm risks alienating its global user base."

Excerpt from MSNBC -- "'Increasingly, platforms like these are going to be the source of creating new work,' which could create tension between states or cities with tougher or looser regulations, Sundararajan said. 'It will be a conversation of "do we want to constrain the platforms in the interest of consumer protection or do we want them to let them flourish in the interest of work creation?"'"

Excerpt from LinkedIn -- "But last night, I was reading an enlightening book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt. I thought the book was about the politics of the left and right, but it’s more about how we make any type of important life decisions. From a hiring perspective, the big 'aha' moment for me was that people are programmed to make instantaneous intuitive judgments for just about everything and then look for evidence to justify them. According to Haidt and his years of research, it’s at the core of our evolutionary human nature. Given the fact that intuition drives reasoning, I offer the following techniques for preventing bad hiring decisions due to the impact of first impressions."

Excerpt from Salt Lake Tribune -- "The desire for parking in a private garage or driveway appears to trump other so-called 'smart growth' choices, putting residents of the wider Salt Lake Valley at odds with urban land-use trends now gaining national popularity. Smart growth strategies include higher density development, reduced use of land and water, neighborhood designs that encourage walkability and access to public transit."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The austerity measures worked. In fact, Greece has a balanced budget. It even has a surplus, so that worked very well. The real problem is that people are very unhappy that their incomes have declined. There is a five-year recession and there is a lot of support for an opposition party, which, given the intricacies of the parliamentary system in Greece, might have a chance to be elected in March or so. And that has, of course, slumped the market because that left-wing party doesn't have any reasonable policies."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "The Google/Luxottica partnership is a brilliant one. Google glasses speak to technology but not fashion and Luxottica’s brands speak to fashion and not tech. The partnership will result in attractive Google glasses that could be purchased based on looks alone, and the cutting edge technology can give Luxottica brands a reason for purchase that justifies a premium price. Luxottica’s glasses are increasingly being undercut on price by retailers such as Costco, TJ Maxx and Warby Parker."
 

Excerpt from Science 2.0 -- "A recent economic model by Ben Hermalin, of the UC Berkeley Haas Economics Analysis and Policy Group, and Nicholas Economides, of NYU'S Stern School of Business, finds there is little reason to think broadband traffic congestion will improve if the Federal Communications Commission abandons net neutrality."

Excerpt from Business Insider -- "Looking back as 2014 winds to a close, I see that a lot has changed in the world economy this year. For example, there is a new perception of the role of technology. Innovators and tech CEOs both seem positively giddy with optimism. And while it is true that some wondrous opportunities may lie ahead, there are also dangers to be wary of as we look to the future."

Excerpt from Yahoo! Finance -- "Roubini predicts that global growth will increase slightly next year. He sees growth in developed economies mediocre but within emerging markets things will be very stratified—some will remain fragile (China and much of Asia), but others will do very well. 'Those that are benefiting from being importers and those that aren’t linked to China and instead to the United States,' he says. He singles out India, Indonesia and Mexico as nations that will see vast growth."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "As chief investment strategist of $1.5 billion (assets) IndexIQ (which New York Life Insurance Co. just agreed to buy) Whitelaw is attempting to replicate hedge fund strategies on the cheap with combinations of ETFs. Underlying this effort is his belief that there’s a good reason to own hedge funds: Their performance isn’t correlated with the ups and downs of the rest of your portfolio because they invest in alternative markets (or strategies) most retail investors don’t have access to."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "On October 27, Professors Viral Acharya and Sascha Steffen published an alternative estimate, using a different methodology, for 39 publicly listed eurozone banks with a combined balance sheet of €12.5tn (a subset of the banks in the EBA stress test and the ECB’s AQR). They calculated a shortfall of €450bn at the end of 2013 — about 3.6 per cent of assets."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "'The Bank of Japan's effort to weaken the yen is a beggar-thy-neighbor approach that is inducing policy reactions throughout Asia and around the world,' Nouriel Roubini warned in a recent op-ed. 'Central banks in China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Thailand, fearful of losing competitiveness relative to Japan, are easing their own monetary policies, or will soon ease more.'"

Excerpt from AFP -- "'We are transitioning to an economy where more people are providing a service using a platform' such as Uber, he told a forum in Washington this week. 'We need to see what the market provides so that any government intervention is surgical. So it is not there when the market is taking care of itself.'"

Excerpt from The Daily Star -- "'The inspection of some factories that were outside the purview of Accord and Alliance are being carried out under the National Action Plan. It is necessary to discuss how they will carry on remediation,' said Sarah Labowitz, co-director of NY University Stern Centre for Business and Human Rights. 'I hope that real discussions will take place on the practical solutions to how finance comes to small and medium sized factories.'"

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "'The demand is starting to dry up,' said David L. Yermack, a professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'I think a lot of the excitement may have bled out of investors."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The regulations that we have today for hotels, for taxis... they were built for an old sharing economy in which we hail yellow cabs, in which we call black car services, we stay at hotels... So now we've got the digital platforms. We've got someone who's sort of sitting in between the person who's providing you with the service and the person who's demanding the service. And so I think we should give that entity some of the responsibility that we used to call on the government for."

Excerpt from The Atlantic -- "The fact these new jobs pay so little, and are often staffed through 'temporary' arrangements, means that any supposed economic 'gains' brought about by their arrival are precarious.'This [DCs] could create short-term jobs, but I see no sort of long-term or even medium-term benefit or clustering effect for the local economy out of this,' says Foudy."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "I think it's a misunderstanding of the way the system works. It's a meritocratic system with almost imperial-like sort of bureaucracy guiding the economy through transitions as it becomes a market economy... Most banks are state-owned at some level. Historically, they have not been strictly market-oriented. They do the government's bidding when it's important... They are a different breed of animal."

Excerpt from Roll Call -- "'We may thus need to figure out new ways of funding capital contributions to society,' Sundararajan said. 'In the long run, the sharing economy also calls into question the logic of some existing taxes like hotel taxes.'"

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "Another worry, as pointed out by Stephen Cecchetti and Kermit Schoenholtz in their blog Money, Banking and Financial Markets, is that if much of the loss-absorbing debt is held by leveraged investors such as hedge funds then there is a risk of contagion across the financial system and back to banks."

Excerpt from Financial News -- "China is the 'miracle economy' of today. It has much in common with the centralised, export-led economy of Japan before 1990. And it is vulnerable to similar sorts of asset bubbles that can devastate its economic momentum and progress."

Excerpt from Straits Times -- "In 2015, China's economy will deliver strong growth, and its talented leaders will maintain their monopoly on power. And China's fate will become even more important for international politics and the entire global economy."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, says that services like Spare5 can be empowering to people who want more control over when and how they work, even if it’s for peanuts. But he says that can be taken too far. 'Spare time is a good thing to have,” he said. “You don’t want to spend every minute making money.'"