From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Governments are keen to levy brutal taxes on the very engines that create the market for goods and services; lowering their propensity to spend and invest by removing the surpluses they would normally use to do so.
You must tell yourself the truth about money if you're going to give it away well. If you can't live well with $999 million, there's something clearly wrong with you. Money gets inside us; it creates our perceptions and changes the way we operate. It changes the people among whom we are, and who we are. When we're not in touch with that reality, it can change us in heinous ways.
We have made money, capital, materialism and consumption into our God, it's a disease – you could call it affluenza. It is perhaps because of this context that humanity has lost its way, and the consideration of human rights has been subordinated to the interests of a handful of powerful people who sit at the top of the pyramid.
BitCoin might not be the final model but it is definitely here to stay. Many have criticized BitCoin because it enables illegal transactions. I think the critique is lame. Did you know that 75% of the value of all U.S. cash is in $100 bills? Cash is the problem.
This problem originated in the most sophisticated and advanced financial markets because those are the markets where leverage was the greatest and people took the most advantage of it.
Globalisation is here to stay. You cannot, however, look at it as a natural phenomenon on which you have no influence- it's not like a typhoon or a cyclone. It's a process- and a process on which you can have influence.
Why don't we start with a fundamental step – ceasing to fund our own downfall? For years, we held onto the belief that welcoming China into the international order would prompt them to abide by established rules, liberalize their economy, and make their governance more democratic.
Well credit, as you say, makes the world go around, but we want the right amount of credit. Too little credit and the economy can't grow, too much credit and the economy becomes unstable and we have the great financial crisis. So we need to find that proper Goldilocks point in the middle.
There are many in Europe and America who believe that our current troubles arise from excess debt, at both the household and national level. Those focusing on debt at the national level have warned that debt financed spending will in the long run be counterproductive.
People who haven't benefitted from decades of neo-liberal prosperity are right in their assessment that democracy does work for certain people, but not for them.
People don't know what it is that they're negotiating over… If you don't, then it's hard to know if you've gotten a bad deal, a fair deal, or a great deal! That's going to lead us to the negotiation pie, and with the negotiation pie comes the extra value that negotiators create by coming together.
Instead of looking at hoarded cash as being a 'rainy day fund' we need to view these balances as stores of economic growth. This cash represents potential investments, new jobs, new innovations and the potential for significant wealth creation and diffusion.