Business

The way to think about informational asymmetry is market by market. If you're in a supermarket buying lettuce, there are potential informational asymmetries. Someone may have used a bad fertiliser… even a toxic one… and you wouldn't know it staring at a piece of lettuce.

Nobel Prize-winning economist; Stanford provost and NYU president

Global investors were awash in cash due to current account surpluses in emerging economies and easy monetary policies. Investors from emerging economies first invested their rapidly rising wealth in risk-free Treasuries, but once they had their fill of Treasuries they looked for higher yield in what they thought was the next safest thing, U.S. residential mortgages.

Chief Economist of Moody's Analytics & Economic Forecaster

They should be stress-testing their balance sheets and portfolios under a range of negative scenarios, and have sufficient capital and liquidity to withstand scenarios that are far out on the tail of the distribution of possible outcomes. The stress tests should account for potential bubbles in global asset markets.

Chief Economist of Moody's Analytics & Economic Forecaster

Most fundamentally, the subprime bubble was created by- a surfeit of global liquidity due to large current account surpluses in China and other emerging economies and easy global monetary policies; a flawed private mortgage securitization process that funnelled the liquidity into poorly underwritten mortgage and other loans; and weak regulatory oversight that failed to catch and rectify the problems in the securitization process.

Chief Economist of Moody's Analytics & Economic Forecaster

As soon as such actions are taken, I think a lot of entrepreneurs will see Greece as being the right place to invest.

Professor of Economics specializing in network economics and digital markets

Germany for example, has decided to close-down its nuclear industry. That creates a huge electricity deficit, and there is the potential to produce a large amount of renewable energy in Greece and export it to countries like that.

Professor of Economics specializing in network economics and digital markets

When it came to Avatar… James Cameron's track record was just second to none- phenomenal. The creative vision he had to that film, tied to Fox's commitment in the movie and the advances in technology made it seem- at the time- quite an easy decision.

The great thing about film is that the capital structures allow you to pick where you want to be on the risk-return spectrum. If you're looking for lower risk, you can sit where the banks used to- advancing money against known collateral.

We're platform agnostic. People tend to see the market in terms of discrete sectors such as film, TV, music, video games, live and so on. We like to invest in content you can view many different ways- and that gives us depth and diversity within our portfolio.

The first thing I'd say is to quote an old saying by William Goldman which is, 'in this business, nobody knows anything' – otherwise it would be sure fire and completely fail-safe!

Our model is very much investing in media cash-flows. We don't take positions in quoted media stocks, as that introduces too much exposure to volatile equity markets- and media tends to get hammered more than other sectors when the markets have any degree of turbulence in them.

The ability for hedge funds and other private investment product to advertise is certainly a big deal that will have lasting impact on the manner which these products are distributed and marketed.

Institutional investors are decidedly more process-oriented in their due diligence, with a quantitative focus, while their non-institutional counterparts generally have a more qualitative approach and require fewer data points in the course of their due diligence.

The old adage 'hedge funds are bought, not sold', will likely need to be revisited. Likewise, firms will be forced to adapt and evolve their infrastructures to process and pursue inbound inquiries from prospective investors.

The visibility of hedge fund managers, particularly 'star' managers of large and/or successfully performing funds, will increase to a larger and broader audience in the same manner that mutual fund managers became celebrities in the 1990s.

Each time we get a bit of momentum in the economy, each time our exporters make up for the fact that domestic demand is flat.... we get knocked back by the Euro Zone.

Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI)