From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
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.
However, imagine living in a place where such financial avenues are virtually non-existent. Where hard work and ambition offer no promise of progress or escape from economic stagnation. This reality is stark for many.
America has a class system, and it's becoming more rigid all the time. As inequality widens the damage spills over to children, and the ladder becomes so long that you have little hope of getting too far up it in your lifetime.
The issue you're worried about, the one you're likely spending most of your time discussing, isn't the only problem in the world. We tend to lose sight of this because we often perceive our immediate tasks as the most crucial. Given the multitude of issues we need to address, the goal shouldn't be to resolve a single problem in an exhaustive and expensive way. Instead, we should aim to find an effective, low-cost strategy that addresses most of the problem, ensuring we preserve resources for other tasks.
Like everyone, investors get hurt by the implicit loss of purchasing power of each dollar inflation implies. However that is only the tip of the iceberg, as this loss is likely to be compounded by the tendency for traditional investments to suffer additional erosion.
For large corporations, globalization opened up opportunities without the correlate responsibilities which usually travel with that- so things that banks must do at home (in terms of being carefully regulated) they didn't have to do abroad... This took globalization out of balance, into a vicious cycle – and we're now dealing with the consequences of that.
Looking at the bond market to provide you protection from inflation is a fools game. If you are really worried about inflation- you have to buy stocks.
What was broken in journalism was not a lack of demand for good stories nor a lack of journalists or the format of stories and distribution – the thing that was broken was the business model.
Over this 99.9% of human existence, when technology advances, population advances and counterbalances any potential increase in human prosperity. Suddenly once technological progress reaches a tipping point, families start to invest in education, they economise on the number of children, and technological progress is converted into richer people rather than into more people.
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.
A speculative bubble exists when the price of something does not equal its market fundamentals for some period of time for reasons other than random shocks. [Fundamental] is usually argued to be a long-run equilibrium consistent with a general equilibrium
The diversity of strategies people use is truly remarkable, I saw people using completely different strategies to the degree that if I had set out to invent 15 different strategies for a fictional work…. I couldn't have made the strategies more different to the ones I saw in real life! This illustrates a point I have made in all my works insofar as there really is no 'holy grail' or single style that is most effective.