From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Out of the 1,800 companies we measured, 250 created more environmental damage a year than profit. 600 created environmental damage of 25% or more of their profits. Together, the 1,800 businesses we researched created over $3 trillion of environmental damage in a single year.
If you look at the balance sheets of Fortune 500 companies 50 years ago and today, 50 years ago, 80% of the value was physical stuff. Today, more than 85% of the value consists of intangibles. Companies must become so much more now that their value comes from their ability to inspire, drive and organise human beings.
I think transparency in this sense is a red-herring. A multi-strategy hedge fund could give an investor or the SEC it's daily trade blotter and accomplish 'transparency,' and the recipient would have no idea what to make of the trades.
...a more dangerous situation now than in 2008
Unless women have the chance to take up an active role in our economies and fulfil their potential, our ambitions for a fairer and more prosperous world simply won't be realised.
The best analogy I can give for an IPO is that it's like a wedding. There's a whole lot of attention directed toward the wedding, and less toward the 20 years of marriage after the wedding. IPO has the word initial in it, it's the starting line for being a public company.
Thanks to monetary policy, business cycles are far less volatile today than they were in the 19th century, when we had huge swings. But if cryptocurrency takes over the way its proponents would like, we could return to the ups and downs of the pre-monetary policy era.
Sovereign debt is reasonably unique in that there are no underlying assets one can claim unlike corporate bonds.
In a geopolitical recession, suddenly the biggest macro risks are by their nature political. And you focus less on growth and more on stability and resilience, and that's a problem because the free market model tells you 'don't focus on resilience and stability, focus first and foremost on growth and everything else will take care of itself'.
Banning a market in which some people nevertheless want to participate may be the first step in designing the illegal black market that will emerge.
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.
If the government is too abrupt is abandoning a century-old social convention, it will destabilize inflation expectations, introduce a risk premium into bond pricing, and generally induce unexpected macroeconomic instabilities.