From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Today's business book says: business exists to maximize profit for the shareholders. I think that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard in my life.
I typically think impact investing, on the whole, can generate better risk-adjusted yields than the alternatives.
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.
The government turned a profit on the financial market aspects of TARP- a profit! People still think these measures cost American taxpayers a huge amount of money and did no good. The facts are exactly the reverse.
We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we'll have to take an economic hit of some kind… Or, we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives.
Short-term vision does not allow one to build better businesses and create value. If we keep a long-term perspective in mind, we will go through the good cycles and the bad cycles and reach the other side.
We have to understand that the world has been inefficient for decades, producing too much, using too much and throwing away too much. We waste 75% of the energy we produce, half the food we produce and half of our natural resources.
Much jitteriness in this recent crisis has come down to 'flying blind' – where investors and risk managers have been caught somewhat unaware, and do not have the visibility to make decisions with support.
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.
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.
Economics is like artificial intelligence, it's not really there… there's no physical invisible hand…. It's about people interacting with people against a social order, a set of ethics, principles and practices.
Our mission is to expand the economic sphere of influence of humanity off the surface of the planet and into the solar system. Currently we have a vibrant economy in space that goes out to the geostationary belt- where the communication satellites are- and it stops.