From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
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.
...the most serious financial crisis we've seen at least since the 1930s, if not ever.
The reality is, not every business model is designed for scalability. Some businesses don't necessarily need to scale to be successful. The key lies in intellectual property. Once you've developed a piece of IP, the cost of distributing it to one person versus a million is remarkably similar.
Without the capability to take calculated risks, offering access to capital becomes nearly impossible. Charity, with its limitations and lack of accountability, rarely leads to significant change. However, the landscape is shifting with the advent of digital transactions. The digitisation of money movement, transitioning from cash to digital, allows for traceability. This traceability generates data, which can be analysed to inform decisions.
The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.
It's clear to me that small businesses, particularly micro-enterprises, have been responsible for the majority of the gross job creation in the last five years… particularly through the recession.
Remember that back in 1950, they invented something called the computer that allows you to do more complex calculations than you could with a paper and pencil. Computers allow us to use much more sophisticated statistical techniques to calculate seasonal adjustments, which mean that we do not need to use year-over-year calculations.
Governments need to use their money to develop the future, not recover the past. We have to take this chance, if we don't, we're really going to be in trouble.
When global markets open up, if you're selling t-shirts in the US or Denmark, you're disadvantaged because countries like Bangladesh produce them more efficiently and cheaply. This has fuelled arguments advocating caution when it comes to free trade. We've conducted what is, to my knowledge, the first study attempting to quantify both the benefits and costs of trade, rather than focusing solely on the benefits.
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.
We can see, therefore, that sovereign debt has a systemically important role in the stability of the global economy, the economies of individual states and even the very peace of a country. To be able to then treat this as a market instrument- while appropriate at a time when capital flows were gentile and considered- is clearly not when we can write $2 trillion or more from an entire economy in a matter of seconds.
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.