News, information and research from Boston University
March 24, 2009 at 12:21 pm
School of Management Professor Stephen Davidson, in a Reuters commentary, argues that it is false to suggest there are two equally viable paths to true health-care reform, one liberal and one conservative. The author of “In Urgent Need of Reform: Saving the U.S. Healthcare System” explains how competition among private insurers will always produce large numbers of uninsured people and higher spending than necessary.
Contact Stephen Davidson, 617-353-7422, sdavidso@bu.edu
March 24, 2009 at 12:14 pm
In a Reuters commentary, School of Management Dean Louis Lataif argues that bit-by-bit bailouts to the auto industry and its suppliers won't save the industry. The former Ford executive says bridge loans to the auto makers would be more effective while efforts are made to deal with falling housing values and toxic mortgage-backed securities -- which he says are the real "wounds" that need to be treated.
Contact Louis Lataif, 617-353-2668, lelataif@bu.edu
March 23, 2009 at 10:33 am
School of Law Professor Cornelius Hurley, director of the Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law and former counsel to the Fed Board of Overseers, says Treasury's plan to buy up toxic bank assets is thin on inducements for private investors to get involved.
"It appears that the plan is going to be very heavy on the use of public funds and very light in inducing private parties to participate. For the plan to be successful, two elements are essential. First, there must be robust financial inducements for private pools of funds to participate on a significant scale. Second, banks must be required to part with assets that they are carrying at unreasonable values.
"Early indications are that the funds for the program are going to come largely from the taxpayers and that the banks will be free to offer up their dregs for sale and, even then, to resist sales that will negatively impact their capital. The Treasury and the FDIC already have the tools needed to deal with thinly capitalized banks. It's called receivership."
Contact Cornelius Hurley, 617-353-5427, ckhurley@bu.edu
March 20, 2009 at 10:59 am
School of Management Professor N. "Venkat" Venkatraman, chairman of the Information Systems Department, says a would-be acquisition of Sun Microsystems by IBM could well serve IBM's push to lead the effort to create for a "smarter" business infrastructure.
"IBM's supposed move to acquire Sun Microsystems is seen in some quarters as a radical shift in IBM's strategy away from its recent focus on software and services back to hardware. I see it less about going back to hardware but more in tune with IBM's recent push to be a force shaping the new 'smarter' business infrastructure in tune with the Obama administration's vision.
"It is also very consistent with IBM's vision of 'cloud computing' with more and more services delivered from the cloud. Just as IBM's acquisition of Lotus gave them a springboard into middleware in the 1990s, this acquisition will give them a dominant position in their fight against HP and Cisco in the short-term and Google, Salesforce.com and others in the longer-term as the IT architecture shifts to the cloud."
Contact N. "Venkat" Venkatraman, 617-353-7117, venkat@bu.edu
March 20, 2009 at 10:23 am
Former two-term President Festus Mogae of Botswana, beginning his stint as the sixth African President in Residence at BU's African Presidential Archives and Research Center (APARC), talks in a BU Today interview about what he hopes to accomplish during his three-month residency on the Charles River campus.
March 19, 2009 at 1:38 pm
College of Communication Professor Lou Ureneck, chairman of the Journalism Department and former executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, says the Justice Department's willingness to consider easing antitrust policy for newspapers would be good for the struggling industry.
"This is a positive and reasonable government response to the newspaper crisis. Newspapers are the chief source of journalism in the U.S., and the country has an interest in seeing them survive. This intiative doesn't solve root problems, but it may offer some help at a time when it is sorely needed."
Contact Lou Ureneck, 617-353-4095, lureneck@bu.edu
March 19, 2009 at 12:26 pm
School of Management Dean Louis Lataif, a former Ford executive, says rather than providing bailout financing to auto-parts suppliers it would be better for the entire industry for the government to provide bridge loans to the auto makers themselves.
"The American public is growing increasingly dismayed by 'bailouts' and I'm surprised the government continues to trickle out bailout money a few billion at a time. There is another approach which would seem to make more sense.
"If our government believes that auto jobs and the auto industry are so fundamental to the health of the economy that they should not be allowed to collapse (a position I share), then it should function as a 'lender of last resort' and provide bridge loans to the auto companies that will get them through the next 12-18 months.
"The pent-up demand for autos will then be enormous and the companies should be required to first pay back those bridge loans with interest, making the taxpayers whole. The amount involved might be $150 billion (a huge amount, but small in the context of the $787 billion stimulus for thousands of quewstionable probrams not fundamental to the economy). That approach would also help preserve the critical auto-supply base."
Contact Louis Lataif, 617-353-2668, lelataif@bu.edu
March 19, 2009 at 8:46 am
School of Management Professor James Post, an authority on corporate governance and business ethics, in a BU Today Q&A discusses the impact of the furor over the AIG bonuses and how it could impact both the short-term recovery process and the long-term future of executive compensation in the financial services industry.
Contact James Post, 617-353-4162, jepost@bu.edu
March 19, 2009 at 8:00 am
Dean of Metropolitan College Jay Halfond makes predictions for what the recession will mean for adult learning. Metropolitan College's focus is on the educational needs of working professionals; Dean Halfond offers commentary on what to think about when considering an adult education.
March 18, 2009 at 6:22 pm
A team of researchers led by Boston University chemistry professor Thomas D. Tullius, graduate student Stephen Parker and a team at the National Institutes of Health, developed a new method of uncovering functional areas of the human genome by studying DNA's structure instead of the more familiar analysis of the sequence of the DNA bases. Their study in Science revealed that the precise shape of some genomic DNA has been determined by evolution.
"By considering the three-dimensional structure of DNA, you can better explain the biology of the genome," said Tullius.
