From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Well credit, as you say, makes the world go around, but we want the right amount of credit. Too little credit and the economy can't grow, too much credit and the economy becomes unstable and we have the great financial crisis. So we need to find that proper Goldilocks point in the middle.
A speculative bubble exists when the price of something does not equal its market fundamentals for some period of time for reasons other than random shocks. [Fundamental] is usually argued to be a long-run equilibrium consistent with a general equilibrium
...in the long-term, random investment strategies provide gains comparable to those seen where technical strategies are applied.
We estimate that between 2010 and 2015, there will be 150million new Chinese entering the middle-class. That's a middle-class which increasingly buys diamonds as a gift of love and as a memento of stature.
We have to leave behind the myth that our economies are actually fit for the present that we understand, and the vision of the future we want to create. We need to redesign economics for our times.
When your business becomes a unicorn and heads for the stratosphere, there's a temptation to slide into the primary activity of the business being turning capital, and so customer focus can get lost. Once you stop putting customer first, the competition will destroy you.
When examining the persistence of antisemitism, it's not just about understanding how these ideas endure and are transmitted within the culture. It is also crucial to ask why these ideas are being drawn upon and why we sometimes fail to provide more convincing explanations for the economic, social, and political challenges we face.
Academics, research analysts, and even regulatory agencies have recognized that today's markets are more liquid and less expensive than before the advent of HFT. This is no doubt due in part to the improvement in liquidity provisioning that has arisen from the better risk management that computers provide over human traders.
What crises actually do is expose the underlying fragility and structural flaws within an economy and society. Some of this is endemic – financial markets are fragile because they are giant pools of sentiment and leverage at their heart.
...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 institutions walk, talk and act like commercial-organisations and must be treated as such.
We will not employ capital unless we can find an opportunity that has a minimum of 50% upside to our intrinsic value over the term of our investment.