Roberto Robatto is associate professor of finance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said the Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse is the result of two failures of the regulatory framework and serves as a warning sign for industry.
“This interest rate risk is something that banks are supposed to be careful about, and they manage that, but the type of interest rate risk that Silicon Valley Bank took was very high,” he said.
The family first lived in Syracuse, New York, then moved to Urbana Champaign, Illinois where his parent became professors at the University of Illinois, and later to Madison, Wisconsin for the University of Wisconsin. Esipov would later graduate from New York University with a degree in mathematics and finance, which led him to his job at Goldman Sachs before his desire to change directions, get his MBA and start Nova Credit in 2016.
A new partnership aims to expand opportunities between Wisconsin and one of the state’s biggest foreign trade partners.
The Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., or WEDC, and the Wisconsin Alumni Association in Korea signed an agreement last month to promote the state both as a good place to do business and as a welcoming destination for Korean students.
Dane County resident Dominic Ledesma is one hobbyist who jumped on the early warm weather. Ledesma, who is chief diversity officer for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension, started tapping trees at his home and his family’s cabin in Jackson County last year after learning about the craft from his colleagues. He said sap was flowing in when he first tapped his trees in February, but collection slowed down in Jackson County as the weather turned cold again.
“The season really didn’t take off,” he said. “In talking with other colleagues in Extension, I certainly noticed some very significant differences between the southern part of the state and Jackson County.”
“It’s no longer your grandmother’s pickled beets,” said Adam D’Angelo, a UW-Madison graduate student and plant biologist. “You go to the grocery store, and you find beet juice, beet chips, beet this and beet that.” D’Angelo and UW-Madison horticulture professor Irwin Goldman recently appeared on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “The Larry Meiller Show” to discuss their work redesigning beets for modern tastes. Goldman said people often complain “about the fact that they taste like dirt.”
“You look at it, and you think of the huddled masses of our ancestors and their old-style foods,” Goldman said. “But there’s something about its earthiness, about its color and its beauty that I find has grown on me over the years I’ve worked on it.”
The Field Day Lab released a video game called “Wake: Tales from the Aqualab,” a life-sciences-focused game to engage middle and high school students in the classroom.
The Wisconsin School of Business launched a campaign highlighting the unique paths students may take while pursuing their business degrees. While each student’s experience differs slightly, a commonality amongst all University of Wisconsin business students is their ability to lead.
Virent, founded in 2002 and located on Madison’s North Side, uses what’s known as a “BioForming” process to turn agricultural waste products, like corn cobs and stalks, into a compound called synthesized aromatic kerosene that has the same chemical composition as gasoline and jet fuel. That process has roots in UW-Madison research.
Noted: “Milwaukee is this beacon of underrepresented development talent,” said Matt Paschall, a University of Wisconsin-Madison alum who leads the Baker Tilly program.
Quoted: At the 2023 Wisconsin Agricultural Outlook Forum this week, Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said part of the decline is likely from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s move to stop past-due debt collections and farm foreclosures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Quoted: Steven Deller, professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said U.S. and global economic activity is expected to decline in 2023. Deller cited the Wall Street Journal’s Monthly Survey of Economic Forecasters, which averages 68 economic forecasts from individuals, organizations and universities, in a recent presentation.
“There’s pretty much consensus that we’re going to go into a slowdown, and that, if we go into a recession, it is going to be a very mild recession,” he said. “There’s actually a significant number of economists that are actually saying, ‘No, we’re not going to go into a recession. We’re going to go into a serious slowdown.'”
Noted: Chicken flocks are still down 5% to 6%, said Lou Arrington, an emeritus professor of poultry sciences at University of Wisconsin-Extension who works with the Wisconsin Poultry & Egg Association. That may not seem a lot, but it has an outsized impact because demand for eggs is “inelastic” — it doesn’t vary much as prices rise or fall, he said. Bakeries and other food producers’ need for eggs hasn’t changed, and consumers have sucked it up and continue to pay prices that may make them gasp, Arrington said.
“I don’t think the individual producer has a lot to say about it,” he said of the nationwide forces that have driven up prices.
The group (Farm Well Wisconsin), founded in 2020, is funded through a five-year grant associated with the Wisconsin Partnership Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. Through trainings, community members work on building empathetic listening skills, connecting people with resources and discussing issues related to farm culture.
Quoted: Andrew Stevens, assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said this percentage has been fairly consistent over time and includes forestland, pasture and cropland.
“The analyses that have been done with the data that are currently available really show that foreign ownership of agricultural land in the United States is a pretty miniscule issue, if it’s an issue at all,” he said. “There are no systematic differences across communities with more or less foreign ownership. Land prices don’t seem to systematically differ.”
Quoted: Brad Tank, an investment management expert and University of Wisconsin-Madison alumnus, thinks federal officials will be successful in limiting inflation in 2023.
Tank explained in a recent UW Now livestream, “Predictions for 2023,” that he expects inflation to remain above 4% up until the middle of 2023. The rate most likely wouldn’t hit 2% until 2024.
There might be a new way to think of one particular species of invasive snail being found in Wisconsin’s water: as a part of a gourmet meal.
At least that’s the approach Minneapolis chef Yia Vang and Titus Sielheimer, a fisheries outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant, made this summer, when they filmed themselves harvesting and cooking up Chinese mystery snails in northern Wisconsin.
Noted: I was interviewed for a Forbes article with the title “A Computer Can Now Write Your College Essay—Maybe Better Than You Can.” Forbes fed ChatGPT two college essay prompts, one the 650-word Common Application prompt—“Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story”—and the other the “Why Wisconsin?” essay from the University of Wisconsin at Madison supplement. According to the article, each essay took ChatGPT less than 10 minutes to complete. That is both far less time than we hope students would spend composing essays and far more time than most admissions officers spend reading essays.
Wisconsin will join the growing list of states to ban the use of the popular social media site TikTok on all state-issued devices over cybersecurity concerns.
Gov. Tony Evers said Friday he would issue an executive order by early next week. As of Friday, it wasn’t immediately clear what the executive order would include or if the University of Wisconsin System would have to abide by the TikTok ban
Noted: Soaring prices for cattle, land, and everything else, have made it difficult for someone to get started in dairy farming.
And soon there will be one fewer educational resource available as University of Wisconsin-Madison shuts down its School for Beginning Dairy and Livestock Farmers, which has graduated around 600 budding farmers since the 1990s.
The non-degree program has offered instruction in what’s called “grazing,” a type of dairy farming where cows graze on pastures for most of their food rather than consuming a diet of grain and spending most of their time indoors. In addition to classroom instruction, the program has offered on-farm internships, business planning assistance and mentoring.
Even after a year of record high inflation, economic forecasts show 2022 was a good year to be farming.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service estimated that national net farm income will reach $160.5 billion for the year. That’s 13.8 percent higher than in 2021 and roughly 50 percent higher than the 20-year average, according to ag economist Paul Mitchell.
Mitchell, who leads the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said part of the prosperity comes from COVID-19 aid from the federal government, which helped kick-start demand after an initial downturn at the start of the pandemic.
“We’ve had unprecedented levels of commodity support for agriculture for a couple years and then really good prices,” he said.
When a heart stops, survival rates fall with every passing minute. A University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher thinks minutes and lives can be saved in rural areas with fleets of autonomous drones equipped with defibrillators.
And saving lives is in UW-Madison assistant professor and researcher Justin Boutilier’s blood. When he was growing up in Canada, his mother was a nurse and his father was a paramedic and firefighter.
Quoted: Mark Markel, dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine, said many vets are no longer willing to work the brutal hours they did in the past.
“If veterinarians used to work 70 hours a week or 80 hours a week, and now they’re working 40, we’ve got a workforce shortage by almost half — even if we’re seeing the same number of patients,” he said.
The cost of delivering safe, clean tap water to every household and business in a community is massive. In fact, it may be among the most expensive of all human undertakings. That is why only the wealthiest countries have achieved it at high rates and why 2 billion people on our planet still lack it.
Co-authored by Manny Teodoro, an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: At the heart of Great Lakes medical physics research is the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Medical Physics. It was the first such department in the country and is the largest in terms of faculty members and graduate students, said Brian Pogue, department chair and a professor in the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
“We have close to 100 grad students working on medical imaging technologies,” Pogue said. “We have an army.”
Medical Physics’ faculty are among the university’s top royalty recipients and have developed world class technologies like the tomotherapy radiation technique, the ubiquitous pinnacle radiation treatment planning software, and lunar bone mineral densitometry to detect osteoporosis.
Also in Wisconsin, Realta Fusion is in the development phases of trying to produce fusion energy, and UW-Madison is working with a German lab affiliated with the Max Planck Institute to advance fusion research.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison Economist Alan Sorensen said mergers may give hospitals more leverage in negotiations with insurance companies.
He said insurance companies want to pay as low a price as they can negotiate, while health care providers want to get paid as much as they can negotiate.
“Those negotiations are enormously important for the bottom lines of these companies,” Sorensen said. “A lot of times what’s driving the mergers is that (hospital systems) feel like if they’re bigger, they’ll do better in those negotiations, they’ll have more bargaining power, they’ll be more indispensable to the insurance company.”
If health systems can negotiate for higher rates, he said, it could raise prices for patients.
“If the insurance companies have to pay higher prices to the hospitals, some of the increase is going to get passed through to the consumer in the form of higher insurance premiums,” Sorensen said.
An expert at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls hopes a new focus on humane handling of animals at slaughter facilities will help the meat industry build a more sustainable future.
UW-River Falls launched the new Humane Handling Institute at the end of October through funding from the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection’s Meat Talent Development program. Starting next fall, the program plans to offer five different 2.5-day workshops designed primarily for people already working in the meat industry. The topics focus on everything from the safe transport of animals to the operation and maintenance of equipment.
Quoted: “Farm fatality numbers remain alarmingly high, and because a farm is like any other dangerous industrial workplace, the types of hazards are many,” said John Shutske, Ph.D., professor and agricultural safety specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Many continue to be concerned with the high number of deaths on public roadways. Clearly, as farms get bigger and farmers need to spend more time on the road moving from farm to farm/field to field, we are going to see more and more risk on roadways.”
Quoted: “It may be hard to set another record in 2023, but there is a possibility of increased exports,” Robert Cropp, professor emeritus at University of Wisconsin-Madison Cooperative Extension professor said in a recent column.
Each dollar of net farm income results in an additional 60 cents of economic activity as farmers spend money in their local communities, according to University of Wisconsin research.
Quoted: “I think it’s going to be a giant goat rodeo,” said Barry Orton, telecommunications professor emeritus from University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Even with its flaws, most agree the new mapping system is much better than the one it replaced.
“I’d say it’s five to 10 times more accurate. The previous one was absolutely worthless,” Orton said.
The chief executive officer of a UW-Madison spinoff start-up company says Ukraine officials are interested in the firm’s landmine detection technology.
Quoted: Burying critical transmission lines is one method to make the grid less vulnerable, according to Vicki Bier, an energy expert and professor emerita in industrial engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“But, that again, is expensive and not something we want to do every place all across the country,” Bier said. “Maybe just a few places might justify that kind of investment.”
Bier said it would likely take insider-level knowledge of the power grid to have a high likelihood of success on a larger scale than the incident in North Carolina. Federal documents obtained by one media outlet indicate other attempts to disrupt Duke Energy substations that authorities say likely involved inside knowledge of critical substations. She noted one of the largest threats facing the grid is that it’s spread out.
“There are not a small number of critical electric facilities where after you’ve protected those, the risk is really small,” Bier said. “There’s a very wide range of facilities and all pose potential risk.”
Brands behind conventional period products aren’t required by the US Food and Drug Administration to list every material included in their products, so knowing exactly what you’re putting in contact with your body is another great reason to use period underwear, said Sarah Frank, a doctoral student and lecturer in the departments of sociology and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: At a time that has seen record inflation and soaring housing costs, it’s even more important poverty is measured accurately and low-income families access benefits that can help them, said Timothy Smeeding, a leading expert on the poverty line and professor of public affairs and economics at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Just being over the poverty line isn’t enough to really help a kid reach the middle class or for a kid to grow well. You need lots of help,” Smeeding told USA TODAY.
A technology startup has developed a novel approach to detecting landmines and concealed explosives that could save lives.
Clandestine Materials Detection Inc., a spin-out of University of Wisconsin-Madison, says it’s been contacted by Ukraine for help in finding explosive devices that are a threat to civilians and soldiers. Some areas have thousands of landmines set to be triggered by footsteps, vehicles or farm equipment.
Although new data shows that inflation slowed in October, prices have still gone up significantly — nearly 8 percent –– compared to 2021. We talk about how to keep your holiday gift-giving affordable in spite of inflation. Interview with Christine Whelan, a clinical professor in the School of Human Ecology at UW-Madison
A ribbon-cutting event for a former storage room marked a milestone for Milwaukee Area Technical College.
MATC converted the small space at its Walker’s Square campus into a food pantry that opened Tuesday. It’s the last of MATC’s five campuses to open a food pantry for students, all of which launched within the last year.
The pantries couldn’t have come at a better time.
Soaring food costs have college students feeling the pinch. The need is especially great at Walker’s Square, which is on the near south side in the heart of Milwaukee’s Latino community. Many students at the campus are enrolled in the GED or English as a Second Language programs while working minimum wage jobs that don’t provide enough to cover rent, gas, groceries and other expenses.
New York Times movie critics say the Black Panther films have underlying messages about the politics of colonization and the African diaspora. We hear from Ramzi Faraz, a UW-Madison English professor and author, about how political movements influence comics and the ways characters shape identity.
Health insurance can be confusing.
Meet Quentella Perry, who helps people plow through the complexities while working for Covering Wisconsin, a nonprofit organization based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that educates people about health insurance and helps them choose a plan.
Just as accountants are busy during tax time, Perry and her colleagues have their hands full helping people navigate the choices offered during the Affordable Care Act open enrollment period from Nov. 1 to Jan. 15.
UW Health does not have to recognize a union that nurses have fought to restore, according to a ruling from the state’s labor commission released Friday.
The decision is a setback for the health care workers who have spent the last few years pushing for recognition. However, the effort is far from over.
A proposed development that would bring a new soccer stadium to downtown Milwaukee should include guarantees of good wages and a path to union representation for workers in the stadium district in return for public subsidies, a new report recommends.
The report, “Worker Power Levels the Playing Field,” was released Tuesday by COWS, a think tank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It says taxpayer-funded support for the proposed Milwaukee soccer stadium project, dubbed the Iron District, should come with strings that ensure local hiring and strong job standards even after the project is built out.
“It’s important for Milwaukee to see itself as a national leader in this way and to reapply the lessons from the Deer District as new development is considered,” says Laura Dresser, associate director of COWS. Dresser is coauthor of the report along with Pablo Aquiles-Sanchez, a COWS research analyst.
Fujifilm Cellular Dynamics, the company founded 18 years ago by UW-Madison stem cell pioneer James Thomson, plans to triple its footprint in Madison by building a new headquarters on the Far West Side.
Quoted: Laura Dresser, associate director of COWS, a University of Wisconsin-Madison think-tank, said there’s also been a fundamental change in how employers and employees navigate illness.
“There is this thing that’s changed about what we do when we’re sick, when our kids are sick, what our child cares will accept or tolerate when our kids are sick,” Dresser said. “I think people send their kids or themselves to school or work sick less often than we used to.”
She expects people having more access to sick time hasn’t had a major impact in their decision to take time off.
“The fact that more workers get paid now when they’re sick than used to makes it slightly more likely that they’ll stay home,” Dresser said. “But even in the olden days, they stayed home when their kid was sick, they just didn’t get paid.”
The state commission that oversees employment relations ruled Friday that UW Health hospital is not required by law to negotiate a collective bargaining contract or recognize its recently created nurses union.
J. Michael Collins is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs and School of Human Ecology director. He also serves as the director for the Center for Financial Security.
Noted: Additionally, $174,000 in funding will go toward scholarships at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Nursing to establish a pipeline for future school nurses.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin–Madison urban planning professor Kurt Paulsen describes the overarching narrative in Dane County as a shortage of housing, which means prices are rising and affordability will continue to be a struggle in Madison.
“On the extreme end, people who have [lower] income spend more than 50% of their income on rent,” said Paulsen. “You see people being doubled up [which] is overcrowding the housing. Young people can’t afford to buy a starter home. You see homelessness and of course it manifests itself in tremendous racial disparities in housing burdens and homeownership.”
Quoted: Laura Dresser, associate director of the COWS economic think tank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the labor shortage may make some companies more likely to violate protections for minors.
“It is probably the case that tight labor markets mean that there may be more sorts of violations like this because firms are desperate to fill jobs and may cut corners in order to do so,” she said.
Child labor laws help to ensure that minors are able to gain an education and receive a high school diploma, Dresser said.
“If we’re going to prioritize and require that students be enrolled in school and do everything we can to encourage them to graduate, then kids shouldn’t be working on overnight shifts (and) they shouldn’t be working excessive numbers of hours,” she said.
Quoted: In fact, the state’s higher education system is a major reason the industry is thriving, according to Dr. Zachary Morris, a researcher and associate professor for the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health.
He said colleges and universities throughout Wisconsin are producing the highly-skilled workers that the biohealth sector needs, and research being done at those institutions also is helping to strengthen the industry.
“The universities, through the faculty, are in many cases steering or developing innovative technologies that these companies are then helping to spin out and commercialize,” he said.
An unconventional yet burgeoning project looming on the horizon of the grow-your-own movement is the development of cultivated, or cultured meat. It is real animal meat and seafood that is produced by cultivating animal cells, according to the Good Food Institute (GFI). Backers say it reduces the land and water pollution caused by large-scale meat agriculture.
Masatoshi Suzuki is a researcher and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In recent years, Suzuki’s lab has worked in collaboration with GFI to create a prototype of a beef patty grown from the stem cells of a cow.
It looks as if the University of Wisconsin-Madison is getting ready to close down the School for Beginning Dairy and Livestock Farmers, which has graduated almost 600 budding farmers after training them in grazing practices as well as business planning for their new operations.
The school was founded and directed by Dick Cates, a Spring Green beef farmer who also served on the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection’s citizen policy board and various state sustainability panels.
Quoted: Ross Milton, an assistant professor at La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the pass-through provision is “still a hotly debated topic among tax policy people.”
“I think these pass-through provisions have been criticized because much of the benefit of them goes to very high income and/or high wealth households,” Milton said. “And presumably the Johnson family is a high-income household.”
Quoted: Prior to the Great Recession, University of Wisconsin-Madison applied economics professor and community development specialist Steven Deller said there was a typical “flow” of new houses being developed.
Construction of new housing “plummeted” after the housing bubble burst in 2008 and never came back, Deller said.
He said many of the developers in the starter home market were crushed during the Great Recession, banks have become hesitant to make loans for starter home developments and the cost of building materials continues to rise.
“The economics are just not in favor of building those starter homes,” he said. “And that’s where a lot of communities are really struggling because the developers that they do have that are interested are saying, ‘I just can’t make it pencil out.'”
Autonomous flying drones could deliver life-saving defibrillators to people experiencing cardiac arrest, says a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who’s been involved in the research.
Ambulances aren’t always fast enough, especially in rural areas where an automated external defibrillator, or AED, isn’t available.
Survival rates drop by as much as 10% for each minute that passes without treatment, according to Justin Boutilier, an assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering and co-author of several medical journal articles on the use of drones to deliver AEDs.
Quoted: Some studies have shown more than 60% of the inflation Americans are feeling today can be directly attributed to the supply chain shortages of last year, said Mark Copelovitch, a political science and public affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Second is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine is a major exporter of grain and Russia is a major supplier of oil, so wartime disruptions and U.S sanctions on Russia have contributed to rising food and gas prices.
Stimulus spending has also been a factor.
“The other part of the inflation is the demand side, especially when we were all sitting home, spending out stimulus checks when we could not go out (during the pandemic),” Copelovitch said.
Quoted: Ross Milton is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs. He said the study offers a clear picture of the state’s tax levels.
“There’s a sense among many people that Wisconsin is a high-tax state, and that we should change that,” he said. “This report reflects the fact that Wisconsin is really a moderate tax state.”
Milton said states that relied heavily on hospitality and tourism taxes during the pandemic may have fared worse due to closures and stay-at-home orders. But Wisconsin relies heavily on property taxes, which remained relatively stable at that time.
Quoted: Laura Dresser, associate director of the COWS economic think tank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said tight labor markets and the COVID-19 pandemic have put more power in the hands of workers.
“I think workers feel like they learned something about their value during the pandemic, and they don’t see that honored,” Dresser said. “And so, I think that you see workers stepping up more for that reason.”
Following recessions in 2001 and 2007, she said unions made concessions to companies during negotiations as they faced threats of shuttering plants when the manufacturing sector contracted.
“The dynamics there were about firms threatening to shut plants or move production without concessions, (telling workers), ‘If you don’t concede this, we’ll just move,'” Dresser said. “It was a credible threat. A lot of plants did move.”
Quoted: Simeon Alder, a visiting assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he thinks new ideas “are the fundamental engine of growth.”
“To get these extra ideas, you just need more and more people as sort of a general result,” he explained.
“Sea Grant celebrates a 50-year anniversary this fall. Through the decades, our staff and funded researchers have strived to enhance those Great Lakes’ uses and address conservation challenges, fulfilling a research, education and outreach mission,” writes James Hurley, director of the UW Aquatic Sciences Center.
Quoted: “We know that our needs change from month to month,” said Roberts Crall, who works at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “So one month, it might be that families need a little bit of extra cash to pay for gas and the next month, it might be for rent and the month after that it might be for diapers or school supplies. And so giving people that flexibility to be able to manage their own budget seemed really important and (an) important idea to test.”
City officials are partnering with UW-Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty and the Center for Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania to compare outcomes for families getting the payments to those in a control group. Participating households got debit cards to receive the payments, and researchers plan to study how people spent the funds (which will published as broad categories) as well as how the payments affected overall wellbeing, Roberts Crall said.
