From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Globalisation is here to stay. You cannot, however, look at it as a natural phenomenon on which you have no influence- it's not like a typhoon or a cyclone. It's a process- and a process on which you can have influence.
Think about your water kettle. When you heat the water and you see the transition from water to gas, not all water molecules are converted at once. The same happened in the world economy. Since this transition was associated with such a fantastic increase in income per capita, those societies that took off first increased their gap from the rest of the world tremendously.
We've entered a geopolitical recession, where the old US led world-order is unwinding. This isn't just a Trump issue- it's about Europe, BREXIT, about Russia undermining the US and the West, the rise of China and its alternative political and economic models.
The monetary union was flawed from inception. It included, under the framework of a single currency and a single monetary policy, countries that were likely to have very divergent outcomes and therefore would prefer to see different exchange rates, interest rates, and monetary policy responses.
Politically and practically, the Euro Zone nations cannot be seen to bail-out Greece. Not only would this set a potentially dangerous precedent, but it could also affect the overall financial stability of the system itself.
We were able to trash the currency, inject hyperinflation and cause interest rates to skyrocket… all at the same time… through the use of a currency weapon. This is a real world, real time example of a currency weapon being used…. Not to gain trade advantage, but to destabilise a regime.
As far as I'm concerned any business that's up and running within an hour of having mortar [attacks shows remarkable resilience].
The diversity of strategies people use is truly remarkable, I saw people using completely different strategies to the degree that if I had set out to invent 15 different strategies for a fictional work…. I couldn't have made the strategies more different to the ones I saw in real life! This illustrates a point I have made in all my works insofar as there really is no 'holy grail' or single style that is most effective.
World income per capita has increased 14-fold in the past 200 years, whereas over 300,000 years of human existence, it hardly changed. I describe it as the mystery of growth, namely what generated this dramatic transformation in the standard of living over the past 200 years after literally 300,000 years of stagnation?
World poverty has been reduced significantly- and whilst everyone seems to think the world is getting more impoverished, this simply is not the case. Scientific cooperation has improved too, and this has allowed significant advances in global health.
One of the things which is a really distinguishing factor about our markets in contrast to the OTC derivative market is that we're completely open, competitive and transparent with a very high degree of participation, a very high turnover, and a high degree of pre and post trade price transparency.
Investors who previously thought that sovereigns were a quasi-risk-free asset have been challenged in that respect. Domestic local-currency sovereign debt is certainly not risk-free. It very much depends on the willingness and ability of the sovereign to pay-back its debt!