Experience Stern | News & Events

On Friday, March 6th, NYU Stern's Latin American Business Association(LABA) hosted the 6th Annual LABA Conference, themed, “Reinventing Latin America: The Road to Sustained Prosperity.”

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "'The thing that is scary about ISIS is that they have clearly taken content production to a level of quality beyond other terrorist groups,' [Galloway] said. 'The videos they have produced are the production quality of MTV.'"

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Professor Sylla suggested that investors, now twice burned by market plunges in 2000 and 2008, were far more cautious than in the late 1990s. 'The dot-com bubble was just 15, 16 years ago, so just about everyone 35 or older, an age when people begin to have money to invest, remembers it,' he said. 'These folks have learned some lessons about bubbles, fortunately. So current valuations, while high by most historical standards, are more reasonable than they were 15 years ago.'"

Excerpt from CNBC -- “So, I actually broke these companies down to old tech, middle aged tech, young tech and baby tech. And I think the old tech companies actually look like some of the better bargains in the market. If you are a value investor, old tech is where you might want to go.”

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "'Greece has already run out of money and lives with emergency compulsory borrowing from pension funds and from European agricultural support money in transit to farmers,' said Nicholas Economides, a professor at Stern School of Business, in New York. 'Unless there are new loans from Europe or alternatively the ECB allows Greek banks to buy more Greek debt, Greece will default at the end of March,' Economides said in an e-mail."

Excerpt from Business Insider -- "Galloway says he believes 'pure play' retailers that focus on either digital or brick-and-mortar sales cannot survive. He thinks e-commerce companies will be forced to open stores or 'go out of business' and that retailers need to be excellent at digital or they will 'go out of business.'"

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "'Spinoffs are accompanied by a fairly predictable pop in the parent company’s share price,' Marti Subrahmanyam, a senior professor at New York University’s Leonard Stern Business School who co-authored the study, said in a telephone interview. 'Yet there seems to be little focus on this area. Authorities need to adopt a more systematic approach and acknowledge that every type of announcement is fraught with the possibility of insider dealing.'"

Excerpt from LinkedIn -- "As malls crumble and Amazon ascends, Department Stores have been on deathwatch. Yet brick-and-mortar retail remains relevant. While growth in clicks outpaces bricks, 90% of retail sales take place in a physical store. Over the next five years, Department Stores will grow 22% globally, with most of the growth coming from emerging markets, specifically China. Department Store brands, including Nordstrom, are seeing big bets on digital begin to pay off, while brands like Sears and JCPenney are looking to digital as a lifeline."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "For about 150 years, finance has essentially charged a 2 percent fee on financial assets, like stocks, bonds and loans, according to research by a New York University economist, Thomas Philippon. That 'fee' adds up the total costs that investment bankers, asset managers, brokers and other financial middlemen charge their clients. Even as financial assets in the economy doubled over the last few decades, that fee percentage stayed remarkably flat."

Excerpt from The Huffington Post -- "While the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2015 - aka, the 'Audit the Fed' Act - doesn't shut down the Federal Reserve, it would go a long way to putting Congress directly in charge of monetary policy and to weakening the Fed's effectiveness as a lender of last resort."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- “Technology is now the largest single slice of the equity market,” [Damodaran] writes. “Just as growth becomes more difficult for a company as it gets larger and becomes a larger part of the economy, technology collectively is running into a scaling problem, where its growth rate is converging on the growth rate for the economy.”

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "To hear enthusiasts describe them, economic sanctions are trusty swords. By excluding hostile governments and their senior officials from western financial markets, America and its allies can pursue diplomacy with a streak of coercion. The number of US sanctions programmes has doubled in recent years, and they now target the personal assets of a rogue state’s political and economic elite."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "While China probably will avoid prolonged Japan-style stagnation, a major crisis could expose weaknesses that aren't apparent now, according to Smith. 'Most people today are talking about China displacing the United States as the great power of the 21st century,' he said in a telephone interview last week. 'My view is that it is more likely to end up like Japan - that is, the status of a former would-be superpower that isn't.'"

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "'I don’t see the lunacy I saw in the dot-com bubble,' said financial historian Richard Sylla of New York University’s Stern School of Business. 'Computer clicks are still important in our lives, but we don’t use the number of clicks to decide how promising a company is, as people did then. Investors are much more circumspect about thinking, is this thing really going to pay off?'"

NYU Stern’s Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation hosted a conversation with Regina Dugan, leader of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects Group, this March.

Academics, practitioners and policymakers gathered at NYU Stern on March 2 for a roundtable discussion on “The Biggest Change in Accounting Rules Ever: Proposed Global Standard on Accounting for Leases,” hosted by the Vincent C. Ross Institute of Accounting Research. 

Excerpt from The Washington Post -- "Alexander Ljungqvist, one of the authors of that study and an economist at New York University, said that investors are not necessarily at fault for the inertia at public firms. When the leadership of a publicly traded corporation becomes aware of a new opportunity to invest, they have to find a way to explain their plans to shareholders without divulging any sensitive information their competitors can use against them, he noted. That could be one reason why public firms hesitate to invest."

Excerpt from NBC -- "J.P. Eggers, an associate professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, compared the phenomenon to pop-up stores, increasingly popular in high-traffic areas where rents are high. A seasonal shop in a vacation location has little value once visitors go home, but real estate costs remain high for a store in a place like Brooklyn, he noted. 'The idea of leaving it with either no business because it’s closed or with a business that is just not going to make any money at that time of day or in that season just doesn’t make any sense,' he said. 'It’s far too valuable a property to do that.'"

Excerpt from Fortune -- "Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) formalized the non-discrimination tradition on the Internet and preserved net neutrality. This is good news to ensure that the Internet remains a free market for innovation and provides consumers with unbiased choices when it comes to content."

The NYU Stern Center for Global Economy and Business welcomed Sheila Bair, former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, for a talk and Q&A session.

Excerpt from Quartz -- "There is no such thing as a real conversation over email. Period. The back-and-forth of emails and text messages offer the appearance of intimacy. Unfortunately, it’s a false one, as Justin Kruger of New York University and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago proved. The two psychologists showed that people could only accurately determine sentiment in text-based communications about half of the time."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "Thomas Philippon, a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is another academic who has studied the role of finance in the economy. In a November 2012 article in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Mr. Philippon and Ariell Reshef, an economist at the University of Virginia, reported on wages in the United States financial industry from 1909 to 2006. Among their findings: Finance accounted for 15 to 25 percent of the overall increase in wage inequality between 1980 and 2006."

Excerpt from Project Syndicate -- "Over time, of course, negative nominal and real returns may lead savers to save less and spend more. And that is precisely the goal of negative interest rates: In a world where supply outstrips demand and too much saving chases too few productive investments, the equilibrium interest rate is low, if not negative. Indeed, if the advanced economies were to suffer from secular stagnation, a world with negative interest rates on both short- and long-term bonds could become the new normal."

Excerpt from The Economist -- "A recent paper* by Uma Karmarkar of Harvard Business School and Bryan Bollinger of Duke Fuqua School of Business finds that shoppers who bring their own bags when they buy groceries like to reward themselves for it. For two years the authors tracked transactions at a supermarket in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, shoppers who brought their own bags bought more green products than those who used the store’s bags. But the eco-shoppers were also more likely to buy sweets, ice cream and crisps."

Excerpt from Fox Business -- "When you're talking about economic growth, it is innovation that's the driver of that growth. So the way you increase growth, you have to have a vested increase in increasing the pace of innovation. And the way you increase the pace of innovation is increase the exchange of ideas - or between different industries. So, New York has a tremendous advantage because it's not just tech.... you know, fashion, media... it's all mixing of ideas."