From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We've had a collective gap of imagination around economic bridges. We know how to build bridges; we just don't build them.
Think about your water kettle. When you heat the water and you see the transition from water to gas, not all water molecules are converted at once. The same happened in the world economy. Since this transition was associated with such a fantastic increase in income per capita, those societies that took off first increased their gap from the rest of the world tremendously.
Crypto-currency is a means by which people can exchange property in a secure way without the use of a central institution like a bank or the Federal Reserve. The currency is digital and particular crypto-currencies like BitCoin go to extreme lengths so that you can only spend your digital currency once.
Essentially, corruption entails a misallocation of entrepreneurial talent into activities that carries individual benefit, but has destructive or unproductive consequences for society at large. Because of its essentially predatory nature, it reduces productive investment, leads to an outflow of talent, lowering growth rates and increasing income inequalities.
You have to understand, for instance, that in my lifetime until I was fifty or so- I had not witnessed any period without inflation of twenty or thirty percent, and sometimes one hundred percent.
The net result would certainly be worth the effort as now, more than ever, stakeholders in a fragile global economy from central banks to individual consumers need to know that what they are seeing is, in fact, the truth... the whole truth... and nothing but the truth.
This isn't about shareholders becoming like Greenpeace but realising that return on investment requires you to understand your risks and that requires you to understand, and act on, your relationship with society.
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.
I think we were fortunate to get capitalism rather than it being inevitable. Society had been organized long before capitalism began, in the cities of the North of England; where- for the first time on Earth- ordinary people were able to gain from economies of scale, economies of specialisation, and from working in firms and factories.
...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...
These models depend entirely on government statistics. They automatically leave out many forms of illicit money such as drug trading, human trafficking, some forms of trade mispricing and so forth. That is why we feel our estimates are very conservative.
Sports are the most valuable content and intellectual property in the world. MMA is the fastest growing sport and has the best business model in sports.