From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
income inequality, as a measure of relative depravation, was consistently associated with violent crimes.
Once you have transparency on impact, why would you tax all companies for the damage caused by some? You would tax the ones who create the damage. I hope we therefore shift to a fairer taxation system that improves the position of governments.
The essence of the evolving global economic system is that all countries are dependent on one another in some way, and this includes finance. Emerging and developing countries are dependent on capital inflows from developed regions. But developed regions are also dependent on funds from the developing world!
We need to get out of the peacetime footing that we are on and we need to get onto a wartime footing against this climate crisis. During World War II, the US allocated 50% of GDP roughly to fighting, and I believe we need to get to 50% of GDP sustained over 5 to 10 years.
Risk of a double dip recession in advanced economies (US, Japan, Eurozone) has now risen to 40%.
It's definitely affected the psychology of the marketplace. It could not have come at a worse time. We have to deal with this expeditiously and make the system more robust to these kind of issues.
We have to acknowledge that the global economic recovery that we started to see in 2009 was the first economic cycle since World War II that was not led by the US, but by China.
Taken together, mass migration, mass starvation and mass extinctions are what we will see if we sleep walk into a future of unmitigated climate change. These stresses will ruin economies and drive competition over dwindling resources.
The general theory that integration is good for better allocation of resources is not the big thing, the big thing is that it makes it harder for governments to play with financial markets.
Taxes are the price of civilisation.
Since 1998, the effective return to hedge-fund clients has only been 2.1% a year... never in the history of Finance was so much paid by so many for so little.
We waste 75% of the energy we produce, half the food we produce and half of our natural resources. So much of our waste is waste because people don't understand that it's a resource that can be used!