Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "[The Chinese] realized they have to rebalance the economy because they have too much fixed investment at 50% of the GDP, too much savings and too little private consumption and that model of growth of doubling down on credit-fueled fixed investment is going to lead to a hard landing. The trouble is that I'm sure they're going to do reforms, but those reforms are going to occur only slowly, gradually, incrementally, because plenty of forces are resisting reforms."

Excerpt from TechCrunch -- "My valuation of Twitter yields a value of $18 per share and assumes that revenues will climb to about $11.5 billion in 2023 (giving Twitter about 5 percent to 5.5 percent of the online advertising market then), that the pre-tax operating margin will increase over time to 25 percent (about 5 percent lower than Facebook but about 5 percent higher than Google) and that a dollar in additional capital invested will generate $1.50 in incremental revenues."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "The study, whose other authors are Sumit Agarwal of the National University of Singapore, Souphala Chomsisengphet of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Johannes Stroebel of New York University’s Stern School of Business, estimates that the law is saving American consumers $20.8 billion a year."

Excerpt from CCTV -- "I think we are at the point in which the Greek budget has been balanced and in fact there is a surplus, so... a primary surplus if you exclude interest, so Greece is in pretty good shape financially at this point. In fact, it doesn't need any money right now from the European Union and this negotiation that is happening right now is unique because it's the first time in years that Greece doesn't need the money right away. So what Greece needs is to do more reforms: open closed professions, allow for more competition in labor markets, allow for things that should have happened even if Greece had not borrowed too much. So the structural reform should be the first priority of the government and not cutting expenditures."

Excerpt from Associated Press -- "Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at New York University, says the trend is a global one. Many Indian companies have fared well even as India’s economy has slowed. The French luxury goods company LVMH did only a tenth of its sales in France in 2013. 'It used to be that US companies lived off the US economy and French stocks lived off the French economy,' Damodaran said. 'Now, stock markets are more reflections of the global economy.'"

Excerpt from BBC -- "There are two ways to think about valuation. One is to think about what you're buying, which is a set of cash flows with a lot of risk and growth associated with them, and try to value it, which is the way people have always valued businesses. The other is to price it, which is to look at what other people are paying for something a little bit like what you're buying. Think of buying a house...the realtor tells you it's worth $1 million or $2 million. The way he or she is coming up with that number is by looking at other houses in the neighborhood and what they sold for. So the first thing you have to think about when you think about valuing something like this: are you going to price it or are you going to value it?"

Excerpt from MIT Technology Review -- "Research shows that people weigh these disadvantages [of online shopping] against the benefits of buying online. Along with colleagues Chris Forman and Anindya Ghose, I examined what happened to Amazon’s book sales at 1,497 U.S. locations when a Walmart or Barnes & Noble opened nearby. We found that customers who lived near the newly opened stores bought many fewer best-sellers from Amazon."

Excerpt from WIRED Italy -- (Translated from Italian using Google Translate) "It's a process that starts with what I call disruptive hypothesis. Taking a question that nobody gets in your industry. Innovation is asking the right questions. If you ask an obvious question, you will have an obvious answer. Usually companies seek opportunities and only then formulate hypotheses about how to reach them... They need to reverse the process and start with a hypothesis that is unpredictable and then find the unexpected benefits that can bring. We must not think of solutions as predictable, but rather of unreasonable provocations."

Excerpt from BBC -- "The first step is to 'change all the circumstances that can be changed,' said Aline Wolff, clinical associate professor of management communication at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Begin with small things, such as switching up the venue, shortening the length of time, bringing food and focusing more on the purpose of the meeting. For instance, switching from the board room to someone’s office might be enough to change the dynamic of an anaemic gathering."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- “'The presumption is that if JPMorgan should resign the business, then someone else would do it,' said Roy Smith, a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a former Goldman Sachs partner. 'These people all say we serve our clients, so if our clients get into trouble, we serve them as long as we can.'”

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "There's a group of salespeople calling on advertisers selling them ads on the Amazon platform and the Kindle platform. They also own IMDB and several other sites, so they're like Yahoo or AOL or Facebook. They're selling ads on their platforms."

Excerpt from Forbes -- "BCG's analysis has been eviscerated by Ralph Gomory, an iconoclastic economic analyst whose authority is not diminished by the fact that in a previous life he headed IBM's research and development department. As Gomory points out, BCG based its analysis on a crucially false assumption that East Asian economies work on American free-market principles. His conclusion is chastening: 'A real manufacturing renaissance in America - at least one based on reshoring from China - is not something we can expect.'"

Excerpt from PBS -- "I really don’t think globalization is the heart of the matter, it’s just a manifestation … a way in which corporations which are dedicated to profit only make a profit. It happens to be an unusually destructive way. But as long as that’s their dedication … then … that’s a problem."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo argues that the amendment would create jobs, increase school aid and lower property taxes. And, yes, it would do all those things. But it’s still a bad idea. Other strategies would accomplish the same goals more effectively, without the disastrous spillovers that invariably accompany expanded gambling."

Excerpt from Harvard Business Review -- "A few finance scholars, most persistently Thomas Philippon, of New York University, have also been looking into whether there’s a point at which the financial sector is simply too big and too rich—when it stops fueling economic growth and starts weighing on it."

Excerpt from Bill Moyers -- "Jonathan Haidt is a pioneer in the psychology of morality and how that feeds into politics, and it really helps with something like this where you have strong emotional passions that are irreconcilable on the left and the right."

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "'It's like a waterfall: If you think Facebook's worth $110 billion, then Twitter's worth $50 billion, and Snapchat's worth $4 billion,' says Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. 'If you change your frame of reference, are they paying because they think it's worth $4 billion, or are they paying because they think they can flip it to someone else to $6 billion? As long as I can sell it to someone else for more in six months, who cares what it's really worth?'"

Excerpt from Seeking Alpha -- "Aswath Damodaran, a Professor of Finance at the New York University, may not be a household name, but he's made some of the most accurate share valuations in the recent past - predicting Apple's peak and Facebook's low, to name a couple. And now, after doing his math on Tesla, Damodaran concluded that Tesla is worth $67.12. When he came up with this figure, Tesla was trading at $170.62, and after working out a comparative index, I believe he may be right."

Excerpt from Bloomberg Businessweek -- "Robert Engle, who won the Nobel prize in 2003 for his method of analyzing unpredictable movements in financial market prices, has a few unpredictable movements of his own: He won a celebrity skating competition in New York in May."

Excerpt from The Atlantic Cities -- "'If something becomes better,' Sundararajan says, 'people want more of it, not less.' In other words, an expansion of consumption possibilities leads to an increase in consumption. This is essentially a story of economic progress, Sundararajan says: new technology leads to more efficiency, which leads to an expansion in production and consumption possibilities."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "For now, policymakers in countries with frothy credit, equity, and housing markets have avoided raising policy rates, given slow economic growth. But it is still too early to tell whether the macro-pru [macro-prudential] policies on which they are relying will ensure financial stability."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- “'Some of this is just old deeds coming home to roost, and it’s taken this amount of time,' Thomas F. Cooley, the former dean of New York University’s Stern School of Business, said about the recent onslaught of fines. Cooley, who now teaches economics there, said he wonders if the global banks have the right oversight and compliance now. 'We’re a long way from there yet.'”

Excerpt from This View of Life -- "Professor Haidt is one of the world’s most famous psychologists and leading public intellectuals—having been named, for example, a 'top world thinker' by Prospect magazine and a 'top global thinker' by Foreign Policy magazine. He is especially well-known for his work on the foundations of the moral emotions. In his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, he goes further than he ever had previously in theorizing about the evolutionary origins of these emotions, and his interview proved to be a rich source of insights about the nature and development of his theoretical approach."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Mr. Damodaran sees Facebook as worth between $25 and $30 a share. The shift to mobile advertising doesn’t excite him because that is integral to the 40% or so revenue growth that analysts project for the next few years. 'You’d need evidence that Facebook is entering a new business' to raise those forecasts, Mr. Damodaran says. 'Nothing that Facebook has said in their quarterly reports leads me to believe that’s changed.'”

Excerpt from NPR -- "Anindya Ghose, an NYU professor who studies consumer reviews, said Vine members might review things more positively than people who had to pay for their stuff. 'As humans we are hard-wired to give in to this sort of enticement where if you continuously get things for free, then you're more likely to be biased positively than biased negatively,' he said."