From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
By founding my own charities, I solved that problem. Charity occupies around a third of my life, it's a big challenge and a big responsibility. Around eight years ago, I decided to donate at least half my wealth to charitable causes during my lifetime or upon my death.
Today, we have the worst of the 1970s, with multiple different types of negative supply shocks and not just one.
The absolute biggest risk out there I can identify would be if something went really wrong with China as it is so important to the BRIC and global economic future. Luckily, I think it is a small risk.
Our system has never defined what it means to be 'good' – what is the ideal human being in capitalism? Is it Jeff Bezos? Is it Steve Jobs? They thrived, they profited, are they 'moral'? Even though they exploit the labour of millions of people?
No more throwing any old garbage into the Tier 1 bucket and calling it capital: the new standards for common equity are significantly tougher than the old standards for Tier 1 capital in total.
The truth is nobody needs a diamond. You don't need a diamond to heat your home, run your car or power your cell-phone. As a business, it's clear to us that there is only one source of value for diamonds- and that is the consumer's desire for the product. 99% of diamond demand is from the jewellery industry, less than 1% goes to industrial uses.
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!
inequality [was] a better predictor of violence than economic development… Increasing inequality was found to predispose more to lethal violence
My observation is if we make a parallel between biology and economics, the role of the economy is like the role of metabolism in an organism. Because what does the metabolism do? It takes in food, resources from the environment, and breaks them down and rearranges them to make other things that we need. Similarly, the economy takes in natural resources from the environment, combines them with labour to make goods and services that we use.
No nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.
I fully believe the future of financial infrastructure will be built on blockchain. Today, we have a USDT on Tron Network. We handle around US$5 billion per day for all transactions, around 3x more than PayPal. This is only the beginning. Future generations will handle their payments through cryptocurrencies and all the settlements will be on blockchain.
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.