From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
It turns out that for every ipod sold by Apple, it makes the US trade deficit go up by USD 150. Is the US poorer because the world loves ipods? No, we accrue the high-value elements like intellectual property, profit, and so forth, and outsource the lower-value parts of the chain.
Since 1998, the effective return to hedge-fund clients has only been 2.1% a year... never in the history of Finance was so much paid by so many for so little.
These new regulations should (in theory, although there is no research to test it) prevent this psychological risk aversion by ensuring that all counterparties know that at a wholesale and institutional level, they are safe.
Money can't solve many of the problems that truly plague people. It can't solve the problems in a relationship between a husband and wife, beyond the narrow economic front. It can't straighten out the relationships you have with your children—in fact, it can make them worse.
Ultimately, we want to make it unnecessary to be a B Corp – we want it to be just the norm of how all businesses are run, but that means we have to change the rules of the game and the role of business in society.
The majority of US Equity HFT is employed in the strategy of liquidity provisioning, also known as electronic market making. Historically, such a service was provided by NYSE specialists and NASDAQ market makers but, with the advent of decimalization, human specialists and market makers were no longer able to keep up with the liquidity demands of investors and automated technology became necessary for this function.
Around the world, government economists have a paradoxical role. On one hand they have a clear remit to accurately quantify their nation's economy and publish those figures in good faith... but conversely they can be prone (through pressure) to 'engineer' the figures in order to meet political objectives.
The standard models were formulated through a process that started well before computers were in place, and I would say it's undergone a certain lock-in. Once you start going down that path, it's hard to break out of it to another path. As a result, economics is stuck. It's not even that the existing models are wrong, they're just very limited in what they can do, and mainstream economists have gotten very locked in to using those models – and only those models.
We have to acknowledge that the global economic recovery that we started to see in 2009 was the first economic cycle since World War II that was not led by the US, but by China. We're seeing a cycle where China is now a leader, and experiences the biggest rates of marginal growth in the world.
There is a problem with business leaders and the economics profession where we have celebrated the gains from neoliberal policies whilst only paying lip-service to compensating those left-behind.
We are all headed towards aging populations because we are living longer and measuring GDP growth is not the way to decide whether a society or an economy are flourishing. Population aging is evidence that we've been doing a lot of things right.
For four decades, real wages for Americans haven't experienced any significant growth. Prior to the pandemic, it was reported by the Brookings Institute that 53 million Americans were trapped in low wage jobs, where their earnings failed to adequately cover their needs.