In a segment for Planet Money, Greg Rosalsky spotlights a paper co-authored by Prof. Lawrence Schmidt that examines investor performance and finds that elite financiers often excel at buying stocks but perform poorly when it comes to selling stocks. "My big takeaway from this paper is even when we look at a sample of extremely talented, highly incentivized expert investors, they are still people," says Schmidt.
CNBC reporter Dain Evans writes about how researchers from MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative and the Federal Reserve of Boston are exploring what a digital currency might look like in America. “I think that if there is a digital dollar, privacy is going to be a very, very important part of that,” says Neha Narula, director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab.
New York Times reporter Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz spotlights a study by Prof. Amy Finkelstein that demonstrated how Medicaid coverage could improve Americans’ financial health. “It’s a misnomer — it’s not just to insure your health,” says Finkelstein. “It’s actually to protect you economically in the event of poor health.”
In a letter to the Financial Times, graduate student Daniel Aronoff makes the case that banks should not serve as the gatekeepers of digital currencies. Aronoff writes that anointing “banks as the gatekeepers would keep the current oligopoly in place and jeopardise many of the possible benefits of digital currency.”
Provost Marty Schmidt speaks with TopUniversities.com reporter Chloe Lane about how MIT has maintained its position as the top university in the world on the QS World University Rankings for 10 consecutive years. “I am honored to have been a part of the MIT community for almost 40 years,” says Schmidt. “It’s a truly interdisciplinary, collaborative, thought-provoking place that encourages experimentation and pushes you to expand your mind. I think it’s a wonderful place to call home.”
A new study co-authored by Professor Scott Stern finds that stimulus measures enacted during the pandemic may have contributed to a surge in start-ups in America, particularly in Black neighborhoods, reports Quoctrung Bui for The New York Times. “The idea that the pandemic has kind of restarted America’s start-up engine is a real thing,” says Stern. “Sometimes you need to turn off the car in order to turn it back on.”
Senior lecturer Edward Golding speaks with NPR’s Code Switch about how risk-based pricing has impacted Black homebuyers and their wealth. "It's inherently unfair that basically we raised the prices during the financial crisis so that these people who were hurt by the financial crisis could bail out the financial institutions," he says.
Bloomberg reporter Benjamin Bain writes that Prof. Gary Gensler has been confirmed as the new head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Bain writes that Gensler is “poised to confront everything from the fallout of the GameStop Corp. trading frenzy to the deluge of special purpose acquisition companies and the collapse of Archegos Capital Management.”
Prof. Gary Gensler has been approved to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, reports Marcy Gordon for the AP. The appointment signals “an emphasis on investor protection for the Wall Street watchdog agency after a deregulatory stretch during the Trump administration,” writes Gordon.
In a letter to the Financial Times, graduate student Daniel Aronoff writes that “the US may avoid inflation, but it cannot escape the consequences of increased government spending, for good or ill.”
A new study by MIT researchers finds that using credit cards stimulates the brain’s rewards system and can stimulate cravings for further spending, writes Cory Stieg for CNBC. The researchers found “people were more willing to buy more expensive items with credit than cash and spent more overall when using a credit card,” Steig explains.
Bloomberg reporter Craig Torres spotlights alumna Stacey Tevlin PhD ’95 who leads the Federal Reserve’s Research and Statistics division and is “the most important person in U.S. economics that you have probably never heard of.” Tevlin’s team is entrusted with “the forecasts for policy makers as they weigh interest rates every six weeks,” writes Torres.
Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Peter Coy spotlights how the loss of several people close to Prof. Andrew Lo inspired him to explore how the field of finance could help advance treatments for orphan diseases. “Finance plays a huge role, sometimes way too big a role, in how drugs get developed,” says Lo. Fixing the financing model, could have a “tremendous, tremendous impact on health care.”
Bloomberg reporters Benjamin Bain, Jennifer Epstein and Robert Schmidt spotlight the work Prof. Gary Gensler, who has been nominated as the next chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Gensler “not only knows how to mobilize a bureaucratic federal agency but also understands the often impenetrable ways that Wall Street makes money -- and how firms use that complexity to turn regulation in their favor.”
President-elect Joe Biden has selected Prof. Gary Gensler to serve as the next chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, reports Marcy Gordon and Zeke Miller for the AP. Gensler “was an assistant Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration and later headed the CFTC during Barack Obama’s term. With a background of having worked for nearly 20 years at Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs, Gensler surprised many by being a tough regulator of big banks as CFTC chairman.”