From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The notion of 'alternative' as an asset class sits badly with me because for me, saying hedge-funds – as an example – are an asset class is akin to comparing mutual-funds to being an asset class. The sheer diversity within these groups makes it difficult to define them as a class in their own right, given the complete lack of commonalities across the board.
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.
We define the credit risk of a bond portfolio as the volatility of the CDS basket which would perfectly hedge the sovereign risk of the portfolio.
We needed to shift the media economy off a dependence on online advertising, and we needed to change who the customer is. Both things are possible with paid subscriptions because it's trust rather than content that gets monetised.
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.
inequality [was] a better predictor of violence than economic development… Increasing inequality was found to predispose more to lethal violence
When your business becomes a unicorn and heads for the stratosphere, there's a temptation to slide into the primary activity of the business being turning capital, and so customer focus can get lost. Once you stop putting customer first, the competition will destroy you.
Western societies have to heed the strategies of the east where innovation and progress are fundamental parts of their attitudes to business. Japanese carmakers built their sustainability from their constant ability to innovate rather than being cheaper.
We're moving towards a world of increasing abundance. The poorest and wealthiest can access the same information because of Google; the same information Larry Page has! That same democratisation and demonetisation will occur in other critically important areas of our life.
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!
Bubbles are driven by people piling into ideas now, that they think will make them lots and lots of money in the future. The more people that pile in, the more quickly innovation can spread... But if the capital is misallocated? then when the money meets common sense, you get a bust.
Markets are human artefacts; however we often treat them as natural phenomenon in the same way we might treat a language. Markets are emergent phenomenon too, but individual market-places have proprietors and groups of users and therefore markets are more amenable to change. When something isn't working, we can change the rules!