Economics

The truth is nobody needs a diamond. You don't need a diamond to heat your home, run your car or power your cell-phone. As a business, it's clear to us that there is only one source of value for diamonds- and that is the consumer's desire for the product.

The cost of inaction far exceeds the cost of action. Every day we delay comprehensive HIV programs, we're not just counting dollars - we're counting lives.

By far the most common is underestimating expenses. When industries do barely double-digits if their lucky, business plans ought not to be showing EBIT or EBITDA of 50-70% – that doesn't mean people are smart, it means they haven't understood the industry.

Founder of Palo Alto Software and business planning expert

One of the unique aspects of a prize is that when you put a dollar up in a prize purse, you're incentivising teams around the world to spend many times that dollar in pursuit of the competition. You are leveraging dollars in a completely different way- in a philanthropic pursuit.

The end of an X-Prize is the beginning of a new market, or a new market opportunity. We are nothing more than a distinct channel to that market.

Markets have an incredible capacity to forget, so who knows if it will stay like that… Markets forget, they get over-leveraged, they extend themselves, we will see other bubbles.

Prominent Economist & Former Vice Chair of Federal Reserve Board

What I mean by that is compensation systems- especially for traders- that created go for broke incentives. If you won big, you became fabulously wealthy- and if you lost big- you got a comparative slap across the wrist.

Prominent Economist & Former Vice Chair of Federal Reserve Board

The government turned a profit on the financial market aspects of TARP- a profit! People still think these measures cost American taxpayers a huge amount of money and did no good. The facts are exactly the reverse.

Prominent Economist & Former Vice Chair of Federal Reserve Board

One of the themes which is perhaps more important in the intellectual rather than practical world was the excessive love affair that people in the financial world had with the efficient markets hypothesis. If you take that literally, there can't be bubbles. Who can believe that now?

Prominent Economist & Former Vice Chair of Federal Reserve Board

There's a disease shared between individuals who consider themselves the smartest people in the room that makes them think they'll be the ones that get out just in time, while others are left holding the bag. That was true for a few people, but in general… someone will always be left holding the bag.

Prominent Economist & Former Vice Chair of Federal Reserve Board

People also lose sight of the fact that technology driven globalisation has been extremely beneficial for a lot of people outside the US. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted above the poverty line in India, China, Africa and elsewhere.

University of Chicago finance professor specializing in private equity and leveraged buyouts

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!

University of Chicago finance professor specializing in private equity and leveraged buyouts

Technology, scale and globalisation has helped people involved in business- and led to increased incomes for many groups. The conundrum we have in society is that many of the 'less-skilled' members of the population have not done so well from these trends and that's part of the reason for backlash.

University of Chicago finance professor specializing in private equity and leveraged buyouts

The average pay, inflation adjusted, has dropped more than 40% – yet the Gretchen Morgenson's of the world want to write that it's going up and up… that's just wrong.

University of Chicago finance professor specializing in private equity and leveraged buyouts

Our mission is to expand the economic sphere of influence of humanity off the surface of the planet and into the solar system. Currently we have a vibrant economy in space that goes out to the geostationary belt- where the communication satellites are- and it stops.

There is a naïve form which doesn't recognise the bubble, and thinks that real-estate will go up forever. There is then a second order overconfidence where someone recognises a bubble but feels they will escape it when other people don't.

Nobel Prize Winner in Economics for Behavioral Economics Research