From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Taken together, mass migration, mass starvation and mass extinctions are what we will see if we sleep walk into a future of unmitigated climate change. These stresses will ruin economies and drive competition over dwindling resources.
Economies are built on free flow of capital within the market, which drives trade. Business and individuals need debt (finance) to invest, develop, trade and grow. This is a fundamental truth of how markets operate.
The inconvenient-truth of this situation is that however many observers and commentators espouse rhetoric about solutions for this crisis, without buy-in from the individuals who are responsible for our economy? those words are in vain.
If you or I buy an organic veggie-burger, that's great, but we're swimming against billions in subsidies. These are changes which will require government action at the highest level, consumer action alone will not get us there.
Once one understands the disadvantage of being at the bottom of the stack, it becomes much easier to understand the importance of speed in HFT. As new price levels form, HFTs compete with other HFTs to join the new price as quickly as possible in order to secure advantageous stack position for passive orders.
One of the things I'm interested in encouraging people to think about is the whole area of risk. What really is risky?! In many ways I think it's actually much safer to take things into your own hands rather than trusting your destiny to an uncertain jobs market.
I've worked with many entrepreneurs and billionaires and I see the same trend over and over again. What they want is someone to manage the liquid side of their portfolio, and they want to take a huge chunk out and use it as their risk capital on things they know and can control. The money didn't just drop-in… it arrived through creation and building! These individuals are always going to be about growth….
While many investors were caught in this crisis, the leading economists in the world saw it coming.
The real scarcity today is attention to the importance of the question, to what end are we deploying this capital. The knowledge age economy is aspirational and that is where I believe we should aim for as we are clearly not there yet. We are in a limbo now, an interregnum phase and this is when everything is particularly unsettling.
We estimate that between 2010 and 2015, there will be 150million new Chinese entering the middle-class. That's a middle-class which increasingly buys diamonds as a gift of love and as a memento of stature.
Countries that criminalise LGBT+ people are losing tourist revenue because LGBT+ tourists and their straight friends and families won't go to such countries. There is also a very significant brain-drain from countries that victimise LGBT+ people.
There are a handful of families that own a very substantial degree of the economy including several companies on the stock exchange... The positive effect is through stabilising- it's very difficult for speculators to short stock here or to play tricks on the exchanges... there are simply not enough shares in free-float to do that.