Wisdom in fragments

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.

Nobel Prize-winning economist; Stanford provost and NYU president

The way to think about informational asymmetry is market by market. If you're in a supermarket buying lettuce, there are potential informational asymmetries. Someone may have used a bad fertiliser… even a toxic one… and you wouldn't know it staring at a piece of lettuce.

Nobel Prize-winning economist; Stanford provost and NYU president

To me it was an adventure. I'm a hardened explorer and adventurer, and I remember the whole mission as an adventure with some awesome experiences and beautiful sights.

Astronaut on Apollo 16 Moon Landing Mission

I think those pictures we took did jumpstart the modern environmental movement, but it wasn't a personal change for me at that point.

Astronaut on Apollo 16 Moon Landing Mission

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.