Wisdom in fragments

Once you land, it's total excitement, 'I'm on the Moon!' – you're bubbling with enthusiasm like a little kid on holiday.

Astronaut on Apollo 16 Moon Landing Mission

From 20,000 miles away however, you couldn't see any civilisation- just the land mass and those three colours… the brown of the land, the white of the clouds and the ice, and the crystal blue of the ocean. Earth was just suspended in the blackness of space and it was an incredibly beautiful sight.

Astronaut on Apollo 16 Moon Landing Mission

Everything you do in life that's worthwhile entails some risk, that's the nature of exploration and the nature of adventure.

Astronaut on Apollo 16 Moon Landing Mission

They should be stress-testing their balance sheets and portfolios under a range of negative scenarios, and have sufficient capital and liquidity to withstand scenarios that are far out on the tail of the distribution of possible outcomes. The stress tests should account for potential bubbles in global asset markets.

Chief Economist of Moody's Analytics & Economic Forecaster

Global investors were awash in cash due to current account surpluses in emerging economies and easy monetary policies. Investors from emerging economies first invested their rapidly rising wealth in risk-free Treasuries, but once they had their fill of Treasuries they looked for higher yield in what they thought was the next safest thing, U.S. residential mortgages.

Chief Economist of Moody's Analytics & Economic Forecaster

Most fundamentally, the subprime bubble was created by- a surfeit of global liquidity due to large current account surpluses in China and other emerging economies and easy global monetary policies; a flawed private mortgage securitization process that funnelled the liquidity into poorly underwritten mortgage and other loans; and weak regulatory oversight that failed to catch and rectify the problems in the securitization process.

Chief Economist of Moody's Analytics & Economic Forecaster

As soon as such actions are taken, I think a lot of entrepreneurs will see Greece as being the right place to invest.

Professor of Economics specializing in network economics and digital markets

Germany for example, has decided to close-down its nuclear industry. That creates a huge electricity deficit, and there is the potential to produce a large amount of renewable energy in Greece and export it to countries like that.

Professor of Economics specializing in network economics and digital markets

There is a significant part of the Greek economy- maybe 30-40%- is not in the 'official' books. That has to be reined in. To put this in context, if that is reined in… to a large extent, the revenue side of the Greek problem would be fixed.

Professor of Economics specializing in network economics and digital markets

Essentially therefore you have a three-pronged approach. Firstly privatisation, secondly cutting the size of the state and thirdly- collecting existing taxes (rather than imposing any new ones).

Professor of Economics specializing in network economics and digital markets

When it came to Avatar… James Cameron's track record was just second to none- phenomenal. The creative vision he had to that film, tied to Fox's commitment in the movie and the advances in technology made it seem- at the time- quite an easy decision.

The great thing about film is that the capital structures allow you to pick where you want to be on the risk-return spectrum. If you're looking for lower risk, you can sit where the banks used to- advancing money against known collateral.

The first thing I'd say is to quote an old saying by William Goldman which is, 'in this business, nobody knows anything' – otherwise it would be sure fire and completely fail-safe!

We're platform agnostic. People tend to see the market in terms of discrete sectors such as film, TV, music, video games, live and so on. We like to invest in content you can view many different ways- and that gives us depth and diversity within our portfolio.

Our model is very much investing in media cash-flows. We don't take positions in quoted media stocks, as that introduces too much exposure to volatile equity markets- and media tends to get hammered more than other sectors when the markets have any degree of turbulence in them.

The ability for hedge funds and other private investment product to advertise is certainly a big deal that will have lasting impact on the manner which these products are distributed and marketed.