Business

Financial markets depend on trust, and we had precious little trust as it was. The LIBOR scandal has done nothing to restore that trust. We have to do a lot more work on our regulations, procedures and regulators to re-establish that level of trust.

MIT Finance Professor & Pioneer of Quantitative Finance & Behavioral Economics

We have open and transparent pricing through our futures exchange- that means price is determined by buyers and sellers and not an 'official' selling price set by a producer.

The DME was a bit of a unique experiment, we created an exchange before all parts of the ecosystem were in place.

Even though Brent has been successful in terms of becoming a larger and more liquid benchmark, it is the 'least worst' option.

You are only ever one click away from looking at another alternative… The ability for the consumer to shop-around has made it difficult for some operators to realise the need for transparency in pricing… particularly when your product is built around opacity.

Travel is a market that will always do well, in the absence of one of two factors. Firstly… if the global economy goes soft- since travel is a discretionary spend- it will go soft faster than the rest of the economy.

The consumer is far better educated today than he ever was. Consumers don't need to rely on intermediaries to tell them what is good or bad- people are social, they share information with friends and strangers, and go to a broader community for help and assistance.

The industry is so big that it's difficult to give a general read of its state. It's a bit like saying 'what's the state of the global banking industry?' You could do a broad-brush and say that the banking industry is full of corrupt individuals intent on defrauding the world, or you could say that in some markets banking is doing very well- and in others it's doing terribly.

There's definitely a sense that regulators don't understand how firms operate and the practicalities of what they do- and hence that regulations won't help resolve the issues, such as governance issues, that are there.

Following the crisis, nobody actually pinpointed its cause and hence where the deficiencies were. There were knee-jerk reactions to say hedge-funds caused it with leverage, they're bad and must be regulated…. but nobody looked at the fact that the market created a load of products that nobody understood, and then failed to manage them properly.

The key danger is that regulators try to remove all the risk from the marketplace- this cannot be the case. There has to be risk in all these products, and if they try to remove them too much, they'll create vanilla products that simply cannot deliver.

A corporate bond is ultimate a long-term loan structured in the form of a bond. Corporate entities are not default-remote and are not guaranteed to pay-back their debts.

Climate scientist and energy systems researcher at University of Manchester

Transparency is paramount. We have to make sure that we have sufficient transparency in the investments we are making, to be able to manage risk for our clients.

Climate scientist and energy systems researcher at University of Manchester

Sovereign debt is reasonably unique in that there are no underlying assets one can claim unlike corporate bonds.

Climate scientist and energy systems researcher at University of Manchester

Before you think about the alpha, you have to think about the client's beta.

Climate scientist and energy systems researcher at University of Manchester

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.