Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from the Financial Times -- "The former governor of the Bank of England is entitled to say that we have been warned. Those who do not agree with his recommendations will still have to concede that his book is an outstandingly lucid account of postwar economic policymaking and the dilemmas we now face. For good measure he is a master of the well-turned phrase, the apposite quote and the pungent boutade. It is rare to encounter a book on economics quite as intellectually exhilarating as The End of Alchemy — a dazzling performance indeed."

Excerpt from Newsday -- "'The problem with the system was that there was one person who had two roles — one role was depositing the cash in the bank and the other role was passing on the information about the revenues that were collected the previous Sunday onto the comptroller’s office,' Dontoh said. 'Those roles should have been separated.'"

Excerpt from China Radio International -- "I think the overall jobless rate is not an issue. I mean, 4% is a relatively low number. Think of that number in comparison, for example, to the unemployment rate in the US, which is about 5% or much worse, the unemployment rates in Europe, say in France, is running at about 10%. More troubling perhaps is the 1.8 million workers that look like they're going to be laid off from the coal and steel industry."

Excerpt from Accounting Today -- "...FASB must hit the pause button on issuing new standards. Uninformative or confusing financial statements enhance share price noise and investor uncertainty. Then, FASB must seriously assess the mounting evidence on the ineffectiveness of current accounting and reporting regulations. Both investors and executives will appreciate a fresh direction."

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "Why do so many disgruntled voters threaten to leave the country, only to see so few actually follow through? Because people overestimate how much pain they’ll feel when they experience a dreaded outcome."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "Two dismal months for financial markets may give way in March to a relief rally for assets such as global equities, as some key central banks (the People’s Bank of China, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of Japan) ease more, while others (the Fed and the Bank of England) will remain on hold for longer. But repeated eruptions from some of the seven sources of global tail risk will make the rest of this year – unlike the previous seven – a bad one for risky assets and anemic for global growth."

Excerpt from The Nation -- "The sprawling lattice of local newsrooms is shrinking—105 newspapers closed in 2009 alone—whittled away by the rise of the Internet and decline of display ads, with the migration of classified advertising to Craigslist hitting particularly hard. Between 2000 and 2007, a thousand newspapers lost $5 billion to the free site, according to a 2013 study by Robert Seamans of New York University’s Stern School of Business and Feng Zhu of the Harvard Business School. Falling circulation numbers have also taken their toll."

Excerpt from HousingWire -- "'If you’re only embracing incremental change, instead of disruptive change, your path becomes narrower and narrower. By the time you’re at the end of that path your customers have forsaken you.' Williams cited the example of Blockbuster — wildly successful at the time — shunning the idea of Netflix when they were presented with it. And Blackberry, the symbol of success a few years ago, now akin to the Motorola brick phone."

Excerpt from Vox -- "It is as if, the NYU professor Jonathan Haidt has written, a button is pushed that says, 'In case of moral threat, lock down the borders, kick out those who are different, and punish those who are morally deviant.' 'Authoritarians are a real constituency that exists independently of Trump — and will persist as a force in American politics.'"

Excerpt from Business Cornwall -- "According to a new study by Jason Greenberg (New York University), women are outperforming men on crowdfunding platforms, with female-owned businesses reaching their targets far more often than male-owned ones. This is good news for women looking to fund a business start-up or growth opportunity, especially when other routes may seem closed off."

Excerpt from WFPL -- "Disruption and innovation, it's not another transient measurement fad. It's what drives economic growth. So if you don't innovate, if you don't disrupt, you can't grow."

Excerpt from Swissquote Magazine -- "The proportion of people who make a living through these platforms will increase dramatically, while the number of people with a full-time job will drop. But we don’t yet know what type of safety net will be created for these people. Their lifestyle doesn’t fit with typical structures, but we can’t ignore them. What should we do with them? That’s the main thing to figure out."

Excerpt from The Korea Times -- "'Ultimately, reforms that promote strong labor force participation — among men and women, the young and the elderly — and retooling of the unemployed; measures that unleash creative and competitive forces in the economy; are what are needed to rekindle and accelerate growth,' [Van Nieuwerburgh] said."

Excerpt from TheStreet.com -- "He added that Walmart, in fact, still struggles with profitability from its Chinese operations. 'They misread the culture,' said Salomon. 'Customers didn't want the same things in China that they wanted in the United States and they ran into trouble with local politicians and national politicians along the way.'"

Excerpt from The Los Angeles Times -- "And Stephen Cecchetti of Brandeis University and Kermit Schoenholtz of New York University observe, the privacy of financial transactions should be seen on balance as a virtue. 'We are what we buy,' they've written,'so protecting our privacy requires controlling information about our payments.'"

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Mr. King has been warning about the possibility of another financial crisis, which he has contended is a near certainty, and says that the European Union is set for an 'economic political crisis.' In his book, he suggested that the monetary union had created a conflict between a centralized elite and democratic forces at the national level. 'This is extraordinarily dangerous,' Mr. King wrote."

Excerpt from TheStreet.com -- "The main thing is to think carefully about the political, cultural and economic hurdles that you'll face in every market, and then adapt your business model to those environments."

Excerpt from The Guardian -- "The economist Paul Romer, whose work in the 1990s shaped our understanding of infocapitalism, defined information as 'instructions for making things.' Because these instructions are reproducible using minute amounts of labour, energy and mass, and not used up in the process of production, Romer concluded they would end up either very cheap or free."

Excerpt from Financial News -- "This year, both parties have been greatly shaken up by populists of the sort that never would have impressed voters in the past. Both Trump and Bernie Sanders, the lifelong socialist seeking the Democratic nomination, are enjoying surprising success because they have tapped into deep-seated anger and frustration of blue collar workers whose real incomes have been stagnant since the 1970s and whose economic future seems bleak and beyond their own control."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "... the principal unaddressed problem affecting China’s financial system is the pervasiveness of state control and ownership, and the implicit guarantees that pervade asset markets. This leads to misallocation of capital (with small and medium-size private enterprises struggling the most) and the mispricing of risk, while contributing to a lax credit culture. The absence of credit discipline is particularly problematic when combined with highly accommodative monetary policy, because it can artificially keep zombie companies afloat."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "As [Baumol] points out, no matter how fast our computers become or how many people worldwide plug into broadband-Internet access, it will still take roughly 30 minutes for four human beings to play Mozart’s String Quartet No. 14. If your business is playing string quartets for live audiences, there’s a fundamental limit to how much more productive, in raw economic terms, your work can become."

Excerpt from The Economist -- "Even with a perfect transport plan, Manila would probably have a problem. The population of the entire capital area rose from 18m to 23m between 2000 and 2010. It is dense: Shlomo Angel of New York University, who measures cities, estimates that it crammed 274 people into each hectare a decade ago, compared with 64 per hectare in Paris—and Manila will have got only more squashed since."

Excerpt from The Chronicle of Higher Education -- "Well before the events of the fall, this group produced a body of work that underlies the narrative that academe suffers from a leftist ideological uniformity that conflicts with free speech. The New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt is a key figure here. Haidt’s article in The Atlantic, 'The Coddling of the American Mind,' written with Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, was the most prominent summation of this view."

Excerpt from the Los Angeles Daily News -- "Technology and globalization, particularly jobs going overseas, have created the highest gap in income equality in more than 30 years, according to a graph he presented. As artificial intelligence increases, the middle class will get pushed to one end of the spectrum, either up to top income earners, or more likely, down to its lowest, Spence said."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "If ever there were a case of coals to Newcastle it must be the announcement by the U.S.-based coffee shop chain Starbucks that it intends to set up in Italy next year. Chief executive Howard Schultz reportedly describes the move as the fulfilment of a 30-year dream. If it in fact turns out to be a nightmare Schultz will at least have the consolation of knowing he was not alone in mis-reading the market. Indeed, a book just out by Robert Salomon, globalization expert at New York University’s Stern School of Business, describes how often companies from all over the world come unstuck by ill-judged expansion into territories they do not understand as well as they think they do."