From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Unfair taxation cripples economic development in a manner not dissimilar to third-world economic corruption.
When it comes to the growth of knowledge, you need to double down on the capacities you already have; you want to build on cities that possess a foundation. When you build in a remote location, costs skyrocket, attractiveness is hard to engineer, and the complementarities that help knowledge stick to a place simply aren't there.
Classic economic theory simply will not allow governments and regulatory bodies to deal with bubbles effectively, as they will grow to tremendous sizes immensely fast, meaning that the amount of support needed when they burst vastly exceeds the value of most economies.
Central banks all around the world have essentially abused the power of printing money, and they have abused it by using quantitative easing, meaning creating new federal money to kit over fundamental problems, structural problems in the economy. So much of that acceleration in the wealth inequality has come from this quantitative easing.
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. Secondly… if there is ever an event that cause travel to be inhibited it has a ripple-out effect.
We can see, therefore, that sovereign debt has a systemically important role in the stability of the global economy, the economies of individual states and even the very peace of a country. To be able to then treat this as a market instrument- while appropriate at a time when capital flows were gentile and considered- is clearly not when we can write $2 trillion or more from an entire economy in a matter of seconds.
The essence of the evolving global economic system is that all countries are dependent on one another in some way, and this includes finance. Emerging and developing countries are dependent on capital inflows from developed regions. But developed regions are also dependent on funds from the developing world!
While most people are uncomfortable with change we have a business built on analysing it. Our business takes advantage of challenges and the opportunities they provide.
I think you'll see strong growth in the markets in developing economies like Brazil, India, China, Mexico, Malaysia, Singapore and places like that. In that sense, it will be a larger market- a growing pie- risk in that sense will be distributed more.
If corporate profits are high, it suggests performance has been terrific… you can't then complain that governance is broken! You can't have it both ways…. if corporate governance was better, profits would be even higher!
We go to war not because we ignore the costs, but because we know there are costs, but we are willing to pay those costs because we get something from the war which we wouldn't get otherwise.
One of the best ways to make money is not to lose it. If you can learn not to lose money, you're making money. When you lose your own money, it hurts, it makes you careful, but you cannot let it take the mojo… the hunger out of you.