From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
At the end of this century 40-50 years from now, the proportion of our world's population who live in the developing world will have gone from 15%, 200 years ago, to over 85% – we'll be left with a very different planet.
Economies are built on free flow of capital within the market, which drives trade. Business and individuals need debt (finance) to invest, develop, trade and grow. This is a fundamental truth of how markets operate.
When you're not in a geopolitical recession, political risk still matters, but it matters largely at a country level and primarily in emerging markets. But in a geopolitical recession, suddenly the biggest macro risks are by their nature political. And you focus less on growth and more on stability and resilience, and that's a problem because the free market model tells you 'don't focus on resilience and stability, focus first and foremost on growth and everything else will take care of itself'.
Crypto-currency is a means by which people can exchange property in a secure way without the use of a central institution like a bank or the Federal Reserve. The currency is digital and particular crypto-currencies like BitCoin go to extreme lengths so that you can only spend your digital currency once.
To give a sense of perspective, consider that an HFT making $0.001 per share in SPY has an alpha that is worth roughly 0.0008%. A one penny spread is ten times this amount. In contrast, long term investors are able to effectively employ active strategies. Their alphas are orders of magnitude greater than the cost of crossing the spread.
The easiest piece of advice to give, but the hardest to follow- is to not let yourself get swept up in the next bubble. You could have said that about tech stocks in the 90's, housing prices around the world in the early 2000's… but people always got swept up in them. The history of financial bubbles does not give cause for optimism.
The original motivation was to develop a sense of what lending rates were among the large money-centre banks. It was really meant as a reference rate of where supply and demand of funds sat at a given point in time. It was meant to be a fairly robust measure of borrowing and lending activity.
causality runs from the latter to the former: in more unequal societies, the return to committing a crime increases, since there is more wealth to be taken away at each crime
The rights of children are not yet acknowledged as the key driver for human progress and development and hence they are not getting priority in economic, social or political discourse.
Over Thousands of Years, globalisation has progressed through travel, trade, migration, spread of cultural influences and dissemination of knowledge and understanding
We have to leave behind the myth that our economies are actually fit for the present that we understand, and the vision of the future we want to create. We need to redesign economics for our times.
It's only the latest iteration of post-1980s capitalism which has disconnected us so much from the common good, our collective interest in care and compassion. Before that, capitalism wasn't really like that – and if you think about the style of capitalism we observe in continental Europe and Asia – there's been a much higher emphasis on community.