From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
With this change, women can now approach early pregnancy units instead of rushing to A&E or can seek progesterone from their GPs to potentially save their baby. This could result in up to 8,500 babies being saved annually. Now, there's a clearer path for both the affected individuals and their healthcare providers.
We can see, therefore, that sovereign debt has a systemically important role in the stability of the global economy, the economies of individual states and even the very peace of a country. To be able to then treat this as a market instrument- while appropriate at a time when capital flows were gentile and considered- is clearly not when we can write $2 trillion or more from an entire economy in a matter of seconds.
Free trade, openness, security, and a stable government framework have been the key factors behind the emergence of Dubai as an international business hub.
When you're not in a geopolitical recession, political risk still matters, but it matters largely at a country level and primarily in emerging markets. But in a geopolitical recession, suddenly the biggest macro risks are by their nature political. And you focus less on growth and more on stability and resilience, and that's a problem because the free market model tells you 'don't focus on resilience and stability, focus first and foremost on growth and everything else will take care of itself'.
Only a handful of diplomats and governments are prepared to put the global good before the national interest. Seldom is it the case for any diplomat that they put the global good high up on the agenda; in my career I've seen it very rarely. Only 30 of the 193 or so ambassadors at the UN in NY will be devoted to a multilateral context. Most are pursuing bilateral interests in a multilateral context.
After the Holocaust, political antisemitism became widely discredited. However, what persisted were the cultural stereotypes – the entrenched narratives and stereotypes about Jews within the culture, ready to be drawn upon whenever they seemed relevant or useful.
China will soon be the world's largest economy and is a state-capitalist nation meaning that the government controls the largest part of the economy. Unlike free markets, that means that finance is necessarily a critical tool of government. In China though, major corporations are a tool of government and so if we're moving to a world where China is going to be dominant economy, by definition finance will be their weapon.
There's a cliché that astronauts don't see borders- but we do. The India-Pakistan border is clearly visible from space, as is the North-South Korea border. You can see our politics playing out – you can see the glow of humanity thriving, and the absence of light where it doesn't. We need to figure out our politics – it really determines the quality of life for all.
If the government is too abrupt is abandoning a century-old social convention, it will destabilize inflation expectations, introduce a risk premium into bond pricing, and generally induce unexpected macroeconomic instabilities.
When social distrust mounts- when people feel like the game is rigged against them- they are especially vulnerable to demagogues who come along and want them to channel their rage, anxiety and distrust toward scapegoats who have nothing to do with the underlying problems.
Since citizens' militias are anachronistic, gun owners now use the second amendment merely to defend individual gun ownership, as if that somehow offers protection against tyranny. A reckless, right-wing Supreme Court has agreed with them. As a result, gun ownership has become perversely linked to freedom in the vast gun-owning American sub-culture. But, instead of protection of freedom, Americans nowadays are getting massive bloodshed and fear.
There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.