From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The government turned a profit on the financial market aspects of TARP- a profit! One of the many sad legacies about this episode is the bad name given to fiscal stimulus and TARP. You can't even use those terms in the United States any more without thinking of a euphemism. People still think these measures cost American taxpayers a huge amount of money and did no good. The facts are exactly the reverse.
Over 70% of the labour force in sub-Saharan Africa is involved in agriculture. This means the sector forms a lynch-pin of society.
We define the credit risk of a bond portfolio as the volatility of the CDS basket which would perfectly hedge the sovereign risk of the portfolio.
Without understanding the rules of the game, you might assume that your outcomes are determined mostly by luck. People who end up unhappy about what they get conclude that they were unlucky or that the system was rigged against them. After enough of these experiences, they believe that's just how the world works.
Travel is a market that will always do well, in the absence of one of two factors. Firstly… if the global economy goes soft- since travel is a discretionary spend- it will go soft faster than the rest of the economy. Secondly… if there is ever an event that cause travel to be inhibited it has a ripple-out effect.
causality runs from the latter to the former: in more unequal societies, the return to committing a crime increases, since there is more wealth to be taken away at each crime
Search started as a free product meaning it cannot get any less expensive for the user. You pay nothing, but the benefits of reaching larger and larger portions of humanity accrue to the provider, not to you.
Germany for example, has decided to close-down its nuclear industry. That creates a huge electricity deficit, and there is the potential to produce a large amount of renewable energy in Greece and export it to countries like that.
Your corporate's social responsibility is to win. You cannot be generous from an empty wagon! This nonsense about giving when you're broke is ridiculous. Corporate responsibility, first and foremost, is to win. You can then take those resources from winning and allocate them as you see fit. That's not a popular statement, but it's the truth!
Telecommunications has not only connected India, but it has also given India global recognition and a new respect for Indian talent. It has created our own multinationals, and created a huge amount of foreign exchange reserves.
Transport, natural disasters, the distribution of resources, globalisation – engineers and inventors have the traits and skillset to solve the problems the world faces today. And therefore have the potential to impact the world and economy.
There's 6,000 times more energy hitting the surface of the Earth than we consume as a species. The poorest countries in the world are also the sunniest, which is a powerful asset.