Wisdom in fragments

Our strategy is to try and find elements which can create a common ground, a common agenda, which can then build confidence for sides to work together. Often, a common-agenda comes from issues outside the source of the conflict, such as economic and social well-being.

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Concepts like democracy and human rights will always remain fairly abstract if you cannot feed your family. It is therefore important to ensure that job creation, and protecting livelihoods occurs early on in the process.

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The fundamental starting point is to acknowledge that outside actors can rarely create peace, local ownership in resolving the conflicts is vital. You cannot import peace, it is created within society.

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From about 2000, Africa has come into an economic renaissance: Between 2000 and 2008, we saw a marked improvement in macro-economic stability, with inflation falling and interest rates hitting single digits even in areas like Nigeria. We have seen robust GDP growth, 17% in Angola and 5.5% in Ghana and Nigeria in 2008 for example, combined with increases in FDI, which was up 25% year on year between 2000 and 2005.

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Historically, Africa has been viewed by many countries as a 'burden,' whereas the BRIC's see it as an enormous opportunity. To put this in context, Europe has twice as much trade with Africa as does even China, so Europe must wake up to the fact that Africa is an important and relevant opportunity, not a burden.

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Climate change is a J-curve, not linear. Rates of change globally are occurring at a faster pace than the global population expects, and will impact food production.

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When you look at the numbers, over half the sub-Saharan African population is under 18 years old, versus Latin America, where over half the population is under 25 years old and Asia, where it is under 35 years old. In short, these EM populations are young, expansive and dynamic, not like the stable, more risk-averse populations of the world's developed economies.

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Africa is an enormous continent, larger than the US, China and Europe combined. It represents 20% of the global land mass, and only 10% of the world's population. It offers an un-crowded space of opportunities including minerals, natural resources, water and agriculture.

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Globally, we have neglected this topic [agriculture] for decades. We have, worldwide, over a billion undernourished people. Food prices have risen over the past few years, with our own research showing these should accelerate up from 2010. The world's demographics are also alarming: The world's population has quadrupled in the twentieth century, doubling between 1960 and 2007. For the first time in history, we have seen the global urban population exceed the rural one, and, over the past forty years, agricultural-land has increased by only 10%. Two words, food security, are central to our model.

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It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

Physicist who developed the theory of relativity and E=mc².

Seventeen of the top twenty universities in the world are in the USA, one third of all students who leave their countries to study in another come to the USA. There are only a handful of countries who spend relatively more on R&D than the USA.

Chief Strategist & Senior Currency Strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex

It turns out that for every ipod sold by Apple, it makes the US trade deficit go up by USD 150. Is the US poorer because the world loves ipods? No, we accrue the high-value elements like intellectual property, profit, and so forth, and outsource the lower-value parts of the chain.

Chief Strategist & Senior Currency Strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex

To use an analogy, when you squeeze toothpaste out of a tube, it's quite hard to get it back in. By the same token, by the time you see inflation, it's too late. The key is inflation expectations.

Chief Strategist & Senior Currency Strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex

The daily turnover of the foreign exchange market is around USD 3.2 Trillion, meaning that in a few weeks of trade, enough capital is circulated to pay for all of global trade in a year. Capital is the driver, NOT trade.

Chief Strategist & Senior Currency Strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex

Abraham Maslow (a famous psychologist) once commented, 'if all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail'. Investors currently have a hammer, and that hammer is economics.

Chief Strategist & Senior Currency Strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex

I can illustrate the current situation in the form of a story. Two boys were being chased by a Tiger. One boy stops to put on running shoes, and the other boy says, 'What are you doing?' The first boy responds, 'I don't have to outrun the Tiger, I just have to outrun you'.

Chief Strategist & Senior Currency Strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex