From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
In a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The more money can buy, the more affluence (or the lack of it) matters.
The potential for blockchain is to accelerate the digitization of financial markets. Blockchain gets everyone excited as it has the potential to convene these different parties together to reach the necessary agreements, in that sense it is a unique enabler, a coordination mechanism. That has massive implications on the structure of our financial markets.
....by preventing extreme price variations, random investments [we] also help to identify the equilibrium price.
The real scarcity today is attention to the importance of the question, to what end are we deploying this capital. The knowledge age economy is aspirational and that is where I believe we should aim for as we are clearly not there yet. We are in a limbo now, an interregnum phase and this is when everything is particularly unsettling.
The modifications are not expected to lead to tighter financial conditions for households and businesses and do not signal any change in the outlook for the economy or for monetary policy.
We will not employ capital unless we can find an opportunity that has a minimum of 50% upside to our intrinsic value over the term of our investment.
We can't only rely on consumers making individual choices. If you switched your energy to someone who told you they are selling you 100% renewable energy, that's great, but it doesn't shift the energy system to renewables. You need to have energy markets that are designed to encourage investment into renewable energy.
A lot of businesses these days are markets. Companies like Google make markets for advertisements, Amazon is a market in and of its own right. Uber, AirBnB and many more are becoming big businesses by creating markets.
When credit in an economy is growing faster than the economy itself, a countercyclical capital buffer kicks in, which essentially says that banks need to have more capital in good times.
In the United States, we had over $940 billion dollars of fraud in 2017, that's almost $1 trillion. There isn't enough law enforcement in the world to deal with that.
Diamonds are rare, there haven't been any major finds for over 20years, and there are no major mines on the horizon. Demand- particularly in China and India- is growing rapidly, and in the very near future we will see demand outpace plateauing supply.
Typically, when you ask a business person about their progress, their immediate response tends to revolve around growth figures – 'We're 20% up from last year' – under the assumption that growth equates to robustness and sustainability. However, empirical evidence doesn't support this assumption.