Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "Yesterday’s gap was $9.23 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The shortfall reflects an estimate by Damodaran, the author of four books on company valuation, that Yahoo has $8.02 billion in cash. The discount is a sign of 'investor concerns, merited or not, that Yahoo’s management might do something senseless with the cash,' he wrote two days ago in a posting on his Musings on Markets blog."

Excerpt from Greek Reporter -- "The strategy that leads Greece quickly and with certainty to growth and reduction of unemployment is simple. Greece borrows €5bil per year issuing new bonds and uses all the moneys in public investments. Greece does not put a single euro from these moneys in the general budget, and the money is not wasted to 'pay' the IMF, which would send inspectors to Greece even if it extends no further loans. With some attention and care, Greece can reach a 3-5% growth in 2015 and higher in 2016. And by the end of 2016, this growth would result in 600,000 new work positions."

Excerpt from PBS NewsHour -- "Occupy Central has now become Occupy Hong Kong. As of tomorrow it’s likely to become Occupy larger than that. And if the — if local police, through threat and selective arrests, are unable to disperse these demonstrations, we’re likely to see a very significant violent crackdown."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "'It’s six years after the crisis and they are still facing continued litigation, so if you were in that foxhole wouldn’t you do something?' said Roy Smith, a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a former Goldman Sachs partner. 'You protect yourself by causing these restrictions.'"

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "Global markets have not reacted for several reasons. For starters, central banks in advanced economies (the United States, the eurozone, the United Kingdom, and Japan) are holding policy rates near zero, and long-term interest rates have been kept low. This is boosting the prices of other risky assets such as equities and credit."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "[PayPal] has been the crown jewel. This is what CEOs like. They like to be diversified with a number of assets in case one property underperforms, but here's the deal. Investors don't need CEOs to diversify for them. They can diversify on their own. They need to be accountable for one business with one core mission and one core brand and let the best assets go out on the marketplace and get the shareholder return they deserve. The biggest winners here are Icahn because he's going to do a victory lap, and not only that, the people who work specifically on PayPal who will now get options on PayPal stock."

Excerpt from CNC World -- "Tim Cook is gonna have a good legacy, I may even say great legacy. In the sense that a lot what we are seeing is still inventions during Steve Jobs' presence... technology takes a while for products to come out, so what we are seeing are possibly a lot of influences from Steve Jobs, but I wouldn't take credit away from someone like Tim Cook, I'm pretty positive that he will have an amazing legacy as well, especially with wearable technology."

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "'Anything that starts to erode or challenge the 90-day window could be disaster for them,' says Sam Craig, director of the Entertainment, Media and Technology program at NYU. According to Craig, if just 10 percent of theatergoers stayed home, it would mean a loss of more than a billion dollars in ticket sales."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "'The incentive to manipulate is always going to be there: what we have to make sure is the ability to actually do it is reduced,' Rosa Abrantes-Metz, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said in a telephone interview. The FSB report 'talks about many things, such as no sharing of information among traders beyond what is necessary, but that should have been in place for a long time.'"

Excerpt from Fast Company -- "Researchers found the teams where the bosses were asked to take the perspective of their employees did a better job of sharing information and making decisions than their counterparts."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "The cycle certainly seems to be faster. The pattern is still relative to what we see in other industries. The challenge is that, in many industries, the dynamics just don't move as fast. Things don't replace new technologies, steel and airlines and things like that, as often, whereas in the tech world, the life cycles are much more compressed. But the same basic pattern shows up whether we look at manufacturing or retail or technology."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "That significant parts of the global financial system are running on dollars is no surprise. We discussed some of the basics – the fact that the dollar accounts for 80% of trade finance and 87% of foreign currency market transactions – in an earlier post on the reserve currencies. But there is more, much more. The fact of the matter is that there is a parallel dollar-based financial system – call it the 'Global Dollar system' – that operates outside the United States."

Excerpt from CityLab -- "Cities can invest in 'invisible infrastructure,' said Arun Sundararajan, professor of information sciences at New York University, 'without having to spend on steel and concrete.'"

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "For investing in college, the analysis is complicated by the fact that you need to compute the difference between expected income with and without going to college. People have done that, and the answer is that the payoff usually remains quite attractive, but it depends on where and what you study, and whether you complete your degree."

Excerpt from Salon -- "Rationality is not hardwired. Indeed, when isolated from one another, we are not particularly good at reasoning. But as even Jonathan Haidt acknowledges, 'if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.'"

Excerpt from USA Today -- "'The overall size of the auto loan market is less than one-tenth of the overall size of the mortgage market,' White said. 'The magnitude is smaller. Nobody expects the price of the underlying collateral to be always going up.' He added, 'I can't imagine the same economy-shaking consequences that the collapse of subprime mortgage lending had.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "When the Fed eventually tightens credit, it risks causing financial-market turmoil similar to the 'tantrum' that occurred last year after the central bank said it was considering trimming its bond purchases, according to the paper, which was also written by Anil Kashyap of the University of Chicago, Kermit Schoenholtz of New York University’s Stern School of Business and Hyun Song Shin of Princeton University."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "In 2008 the Growth Commission--a group of prominent economists chaired by Nobel Prize winner Michael Spence--included Brazil in a group of just thirteen countries that stood out by achieving very high growth over a 30-year period."

Excerpt from CBC Radio -- "It really comes down to the four entities of the marketing environment. One is the consumer and their shifting tastes and preferences towards healthier products. The other is the company and what makes sense for their marketing and production efficiencies. What the company's competitors are doing is something that is always on their radar. They don't want the competition to move too far ahead or beyond them. And then, finally, there's the public voice, or community, and the educational initiatives, efforts, and governmental policies and initiatives that have worked to educate the consumer on the importance of proper nutrition for adults and children."

Excerpt from The BRICS Post -- "Mr. Modi has political capital to spend in India, and he ought to use some of it to winnow government subsidies, reduce protection of certain economic sectors, and to do all he can to increase basic competition in goods and services. Infrastructure and education are important too, but these take a long time to improve. The most immediate need is to get the growth rate back to a 9-10 per cent level."

Excerpt from NHK -- "It is possible that only those people that have bad credit who cannot get loans from banks are the ones who borrow from these platforms. And so, if I'm the lender, my risk is a high default rate."

Excerpt from Business Insider -- "...Galloway’s basic premise is this: Everyone thinks the 'digital age' is a rising tide that will lift all boats. But really, it’s a shift in tides that favors a few super yachts and will leave everyone else stuck in the sand or worse. With this perspective, he examines the players in three arenas: Social media, retail, and the world economy."

Excerpt from New York Observer -- "Manhattan is home to some of the world’s most iconic skyscrapers. But despite its abundance of upward real-estate, a map created by Shlomo Angel shows the city actually has a lower population density as of 2010 versus 1910. Mr. Angel’s map comes from his book Planet of Cities, part of an upcoming New York Public Library presentation by the NYU Stern Urbanization Project and the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "Apple has become the ultimate symbol of luxury. And as the luxury sector has been the most robust part of the retail industry, particularly amid the nation’s vanishing middle class, the darling of the tech world is poised for explosion growth — particularly as it tip toes into upscale fashion accessories with its new smart watch, Scott Galloway, founder and chairman of L2 and clinical professor of marketing at NYU Stern, said during the conference. More than Cartier or Hermes, 'Apple is becoming the new indicator of wealth in our society,” said Galloway, who called Apple the hands-down winner today in the digital age."

Excerpt from Bloomberg View -- "Today's chart comes from a very interesting article on stock buybacks from Aswath Damodaran, a professor at New York University. He writes: This has been a big year for stock buybacks, continuing a return to a trend that started more than two decades ago and was broken only briefly by the crisis in 2008."