Wisdom in fragments

The key for the development of the poor is to include them in the democratic process as well as in the market economy. Therefore, inclusion is the key for getting rid of poverty. Political inclusion… social inclusion… environmental inclusion… education and knowledge inclusion… network inclusion… all these types of inclusion which are taken for granted by people who are inside the growth process.

French Economist, Advisor to Mitterrand & Founder of EBRD

Despite these needs, the reality is that more than half of the estimated 2.7 billion working age adults globally are excluded from formal financial services. Poor families, as far as access to financial services is concerned, are doubly penalised. They need financial access more than we do, but they only have access to inferior informal services.

Poor families in the informal economy are both producers and consumers. In both roles, they need access to financial services at least as much as wealthier producers and consumers. They may even need it more because they have far less regular income and expense streams and less of an economic cushion to begin with.

When you consider that wealth transfer internally in western countries is around 15-25% of GDP… and that is not enough to solve the problem of poverty in the west… then you compare that to a transfer of less than 0.5% between North and South… that is just nothing compared to the needs.

French Economist, Advisor to Mitterrand & Founder of EBRD

Inequality is strong because wealth goes to wealth. The economic and political organisations of the world are such that the negotiation power of the poor is minimal if not zero. There are no trade-unions, no capacity to negotiate… even in the US, Europe and elsewhere… the level of concentration of wealth is bigger than ever.

French Economist, Advisor to Mitterrand & Founder of EBRD

The only serious mechanisms which have made progress in this sense are growth, microfinance and democracy. Economic growth will naturally have some spill-over to the poor, democracy helps transparency together with political consciousness and microfinance helps the very poor to develop their own business and allows them to control their own lives without expecting the help of anyone.

French Economist, Advisor to Mitterrand & Founder of EBRD

Chinese global trade went down 20% and Chinese exports collapsed by 25%. This had an immediate effect whereby factories along the coast, in the last quarter of 2008 alone, fired between 20-30 million migrant workers.

Founder of Gavekal Research & Investment Strategist

China's main comparative advantage for the past couple of decades has been cheap labour. What if we move to a world where, because robots are so cheap… cheap labour doesn't really matter anymore? What will be China's main comparative advantage after that?

Founder of Gavekal Research & Investment Strategist

This is a very tough question because the correlation between growth and returns on assets in China has been completely non-existent. You have had this tremendous growth, with fairly lame returns for equity investors!

Founder of Gavekal Research & Investment Strategist

One way to think about reserve currencies is to liken them to an operating system for a computer. Today, everybody is on Microsoft… People complain that it crashes, it's slow and so on.. but nobody changes… why? because everybody else is on Microsoft and if you want to exchange files and work together, you have to be on the same platform.

Founder of Gavekal Research & Investment Strategist

We have to acknowledge that the global economic recovery that we started to see in 2009 was the first economic cycle since World War II that was not led by the US, but by China. We're seeing a cycle where China is now a leader, and experiences the biggest rates of marginal growth in the world.

Founder of Gavekal Research & Investment Strategist

I genuinely believe that you can train yourself to see trouble as opportunity and realise that the best time to make money is when other people are most fearful.

Value investor and niece of legendary investor John Templeton

He told me that his returns got so much better in the Bahamas, why? Because he got the Wall Street Journal a few days late! It's so difficult to mentally distance yourself from the herd and so perhaps physically distancing yourself from the herd is a good idea.

Value investor and niece of legendary investor John Templeton

Human beings have a real tendency to overreact on the upside and the downside. We are not rational investors. I do not believe that people make rational financial decisions! If you study financial decision-making you will find that human beings are irrational in a very predictable manner.

Value investor and niece of legendary investor John Templeton

The point of maximum pessimism is the ultimate time to buy a stock because at this point, all the sellers are gone… and only buyers remain. How do you determine this point? Even Uncle John said it's impossible…. You never know until it has passed!

Value investor and niece of legendary investor John Templeton

We tend to see two scenarios that come up time and time again. The first and most common scenario is that security prices become inefficient or show large departures from intrinsic value when there are few investors paying attention to the company. The second is a crisis situation. Uncle John always had a desk-plate in his office that said 'trouble is opportunity' and that's very much how we see the markets.

Value investor and niece of legendary investor John Templeton