From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I fully believe the future of financial infrastructure will be built on blockchain. We handle around US$5 billion per day for all transactions, around 3x more than PayPal. This is only the beginning.
The rights of children are not yet acknowledged as the key driver for human progress and development and hence they are not getting priority in economic, social or political discourse.
China's main comparative advantage for the past couple of decades has been cheap labour. What if we move to a world where, because robots are so cheap… cheap labour doesn't really matter anymore? What will be China's main comparative advantage after that?
Dubai offers a lot. We're currently at the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). There's a separate jurisdictional regime in this area meaning that companies are treated under English common-law principles. It's a very safe environment for transactions to occur, and this gives us a big advantage of areas which simply do not have that framework.
Our system has never defined what it means to be 'good' – what is the ideal human being in capitalism? Is it Jeff Bezos? Is it Steve Jobs? They thrived, they profited, are they 'moral'? Even though they exploit the labour of millions of people?
I'm constantly bemused when I hear about some amazing energy or agricultural company that is for profit, but works with low-income people and a non-profit leader says, 'you know Jacqueline, charging people who are poor is immoral…' – you know what else is immoral? 700 million people who have no electricity.
Why would anybody at all invest in an economy where the three leaders said the country was bankrupt?! That's what's killed off confidence and investment in the economy.
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.
The scale and scope of this threat is extraordinary. It amounts to US$320 billion per annum or, to put it another way, half a percent of global GDP. That is just the economic cost of drug trafficking. As far as the social and health risks are concerned, we believe that around 250,000 people each and every year die because of drugs.
150 years ago, Aluminium was the rarest metal we knew of on the surface of planet Earth. Through technology we learned how to extract it from the bauxite in the Earth's crust, and discovered it was the most abundant metal. We went from Napoleon serving Kings and Queens on the finest Aluminium plate-ware to much more money made on Aluminium within 20 years.
most of the half-trillion dollars received by Africa since the 1960s has funded military coups and civil wars, not economic development. Between 1982 and 1985, Zimbabwe spent $1.3 out of $1.5 billion of foreign assistance on arms and ammunition.
When it comes to the growth of knowledge, you need to double down on the capacities you already have; you want to build on cities that possess a foundation. When you build in a remote location, costs skyrocket, attractiveness is hard to engineer, and the complementarities that help knowledge stick to a place simply aren't there.