Wisdom in fragments

I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody…

Political Strategist & Democratic Campaign Consultant, "The Ragin' Cajun

We estimate that between 2010 and 2015, there will be 150million new Chinese entering the middle-class. That's a middle-class which increasingly buys diamonds as a gift of love and as a memento of stature.

As I said earlier, the only source of value in our business is the consumer's desire for the product. That desire is built on emotions ascribed to diamonds, and if they believe the way that diamond has been brought to their finger does anything other than live up to the values they ascribe to it, we would have a major problem.

All the market research we have done shows that consumers use diamonds to mark special moments in their lives because they are timeless, have been in the ground 3 billion years and are unique. For all of those reasons, when you ask a consumer, particularly a woman, if they would be happy to have a synthetic diamond engagement ring? the answer is no…

More than just being a luxury item, they are pieces that represent milestone moments- that's why they're important. People also reflect on whether diamonds are a hard asset class. They are the hardest of all assets, being the hardest asset known to man!

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.

The easiest piece of advice to give, but the hardest to follow- is to not let yourself get swept up in the next bubble. You could have said that about tech stocks in the 90's, housing prices around the world in the early 2000's… but people always got swept up in them. The history of financial bubbles does not give cause for optimism.

Prominent Economist & Former Vice Chair of Federal Reserve Board

If you mean magnitude of crisis in the literal sense of comparing it against the one which occurred? I think it's very, very unlikely. This was the hundred-year flood. If you stopped before that phrase and just asked whether we would face another crisis in the financial markets within our generation? Then I'd bet the ranch on that. Markets have an incredible capacity to forget.

Prominent Economist & Former Vice Chair of Federal Reserve Board

The government turned a profit on the financial market aspects of TARP- a profit! One of the many sad legacies about this episode is the bad name given to fiscal stimulus and TARP. You can't even use those terms in the United States any more without thinking of a euphemism. People still think these measures cost American taxpayers a huge amount of money and did no good. The facts are exactly the reverse.

Prominent Economist & Former Vice Chair of Federal Reserve Board

There's a disease shared between individuals who consider themselves the smartest people in the room that makes them think they'll be the ones that get out just in time, while others are left holding the bag. That was true for a few people, but in general… someone will always be left holding the bag.

Prominent Economist & Former Vice Chair of Federal Reserve Board

This is the equivalent of asking how close we came to falling through a big crack in the Earth when it didn't actually happen. However… going on eyewitness accounts from very informed and non-hysterical observers such as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and others, it looks like we were quite close. When people start talking seriously about some of the biggest banks in the world folding? …That says you're pretty close to a meltdown.

Prominent Economist & Former Vice Chair of Federal Reserve Board

This is certainly something that is not without risk. We are pursuing an audacious goal, and we very well might fail. When NASA set the Moon landing challenge, it created a whole series of capabilities and technologies that we previously could not have imagined.

150 years ago, Aluminium was the rarest metal we knew of on the surface of planet Earth. Through technology we learned how to extract it from the bauxite in the Earth's crust, and discovered it was the most abundant metal. We went from Napoleon serving Kings and Queens on the finest Aluminium plate-ware to much more money made on Aluminium within 20 years.

Our mission is to expand the economic sphere of influence of humanity off the surface of the planet and into the solar system. Currently we have a vibrant economy in space that goes out to the geostationary belt- where the communication satellites are- and it stops.

All of the research we've done exploring space has now allowed small teams- with modest funds- to do what it once took entire governments to do. The design and collaborative power of an individual engineer or technologist is more powerful than it's ever been. The tasks themselves are getting more accessible too.

It's multi-fold. Firstly resources that are useful on Earth that we may get from outer space and secondly- which is perhaps a newer idea- is resources that will be useful in space itself. Water is the essence of life. In space it takes on a whole new form. We can use water as a radiation shield. Water is a molecule made of hydrogen and oxygen- and that happens to be rocket fuel.