Wisdom in fragments

They used two wires hooked up to a car battery to give me electric shocks. They used electric stun-guns on my genitals twice. I thought I would never see my family again.

They forced me to undress. Then they started squeezing my fingers with pliers. They put staples in my fingers, chest and ears. I was only allowed to take them out if I spoke. The nails in the ears were the most painful.

The guards hung me by my wrists from the ceiling for eight days…. After a few days of hanging, being denied sleep, it felt like my brain stopped working. I was imagining things. My feet got swollen on the third day. I felt pain that I have never felt in my entire life.

That experience [of being tortured] has altered my whole life. You can never be the same person and anything you do is in reference to that moment. I have never been able to pass it.

China for example, aims to increase their buying by 400,000 barrels a day in the last quarter of 2012, and will be adding over 750,000 barrels of new refining capacity. That economic engine is still turning.

We have open and transparent pricing through our futures exchange- that means price is determined by buyers and sellers and not an 'official' selling price set by a producer.

Even though Brent has been successful in terms of becoming a larger and more liquid benchmark, it is the 'least worst' option.

The DME was a bit of a unique experiment, we created an exchange before all parts of the ecosystem were in place.

You are only ever one click away from looking at another alternative… The ability for the consumer to shop-around has made it difficult for some operators to realise the need for transparency in pricing… particularly when your product is built around opacity.

The consumer is far better educated today than he ever was. Consumers don't need to rely on intermediaries to tell them what is good or bad- people are social, they share information with friends and strangers, and go to a broader community for help and assistance.

Travel is a market that will always do well, in the absence of one of two factors. Firstly… if the global economy goes soft- since travel is a discretionary spend- it will go soft faster than the rest of the economy.

The industry is so big that it's difficult to give a general read of its state. It's a bit like saying 'what's the state of the global banking industry?' You could do a broad-brush and say that the banking industry is full of corrupt individuals intent on defrauding the world, or you could say that in some markets banking is doing very well- and in others it's doing terribly.

There's definitely a sense that regulators don't understand how firms operate and the practicalities of what they do- and hence that regulations won't help resolve the issues, such as governance issues, that are there.

You can't stop risks completely, that's the whole point of a free market.

Following the crisis, nobody actually pinpointed its cause and hence where the deficiencies were. There were knee-jerk reactions to say hedge-funds caused it with leverage, they're bad and must be regulated…. but nobody looked at the fact that the market created a load of products that nobody understood, and then failed to manage them properly.

The key danger is that regulators try to remove all the risk from the marketplace- this cannot be the case. There has to be risk in all these products, and if they try to remove them too much, they'll create vanilla products that simply cannot deliver.