From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
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.
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.
People are now talking of a new 'Cold War' with China. This is a very misleading use of history. If you look at the relationship between China and the US today, there is half a trillion dollars of trade, and some 350,000 Chinese students and 3 million Chinese tourists are in the US. It's more complex than the type of relationship we had during the Cold War.
The only source of value in our business is the consumer's desire for the product. That desire is built on emotions ascribed to diamonds.
Right now, is the absolute best time in human history to be a disruptor. The world is awash with cash chasing disruptive ideas and most companies have one (if not both) hands tied behind their back.
The Chinese state then backs a local champion company, subsidizes it, and blocks the international company from the Chinese market. Subsequently, goods produced at artificially deflated prices are offloaded onto the international market with the intent of driving competitors into bankruptcy.
The economy is a subset of society, it's a social construct. It's entirely created by humanity- by the way we interact with one another to meet our wants and needs and human society itself is embedded in the living world, we are part of nature whether we like it or not- and we have to respect the rest of nature.
This is the most inefficient system you could possibly imagine. It takes 6-10Lbs of grain or fodder to go into an animal and, in turn, yield 1Lb of protein.
If you use a complex system approach which doesn't have a fixed period of time in the model, it enables you to start exploring what types of animals you will see! It's classifying the elephants in the room - it may not tell you which one will come, but it will give you a better idea of what is out there in terms of risk.
We're creating a different type of work. The average Dasher dashes for about four hours a week, and very often they're trying to save-up for something and use it as a supplement to their income. We believe that flexibility should exist, and that benefits earned should be portable and proportional to the amount of work you're doing on each platform.
...adoption of random strategies diminishes the probability of extreme events (in this case large capital increases or great losses) but also ensures almost the same average wealth over a long time period, at variance with other technical strategies...
Sovereign debt is reasonably unique in that there are no underlying assets one can claim unlike corporate bonds.