Wisdom in fragments

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

HIV prevalence among injecting drug users ranges from 20-40% in some countries, and more than 40% in many others. If we estimate the number of injecting drug users worldwide as 60 million, it means that around 3 million people are infected with HIV/AIDS because of this dangerous mode of transmission.

Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

Speaking about the demand side… we have skills and techniques in drug prevention and thousands of advisors have been trained by our programmes around the world to work in the community at school level, especially with children. Children are the most vulnerable group, and we must do our utmost to protect them.

Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

The scale and scope of this threat is extraordinary. It amounts to US$320 billion per annum or, to put it another way, half a percent of global GDP. That is just the economic cost of drug trafficking. As far as the social and health risks are concerned, we believe that around 250,000 people each and every year die because of drugs.

Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

We estimate with the World Bank that US$20-40 billion each year is lost in developing countries through corruption. If you add to that $5 billion each year in stolen assets, it clearly shows that corruption is a serious obstacle to the achievement of the millennium development goals. It is also a threat to human security and human rights.

Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

Corruption is a phenomenon that has existed for thousands of years, but only now is it becoming an unacceptable event. Corruption destroys societies, hinders development and undermines security. Note what happened in the Middle East and North Africa… corruption was one of the triggers of unrest in these countries. It appears that people are fed-up of corruption, they want change, and they want it now.

Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

We have to be careful about just increasing start-up activity. If we are increasing the level of start-up activity of people who are more inclined to employ other people, fine… but I'm not convinced that is the case.