Business

I hate that moniker because it assumes or implies a reduction in yield. I typically think impact investing, on the whole, can generate better risk-adjusted yields than the alternatives.

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.

Chief Economist of Moody's Analytics & Economic Forecaster

Global investors were awash in cash due to current account surpluses in emerging economies and easy monetary policies. Investors from emerging economies first invested their rapidly rising wealth in risk-free Treasuries, but once they had their fill of Treasuries they looked for higher yield in what they thought was the next safest thing, U.S. residential mortgages. Due to shrinking returns on less risky investments, other global investors began to search for yield by taking more risk investing in more complicated securities and derivatives.

Chief Economist of Moody's Analytics & Economic Forecaster

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.

Chief Economist of Moody's Analytics & Economic Forecaster

A lot of negatives have already happened in Greece, and now there is an opportunity. Most Greek assets have been going down in price at some time, and if you happen to hold the right assets? You'll make a killing!

Professor of Economics specializing in network economics and digital markets

Big firms can get credit and are not using it while small firms cannot get credit at all.

Former Federal Reserve Member & Leading Labor Economics Scholar

If you want to rebalance, you have to understand that you must rebalance from construction and finance into something else. But what? It's very hard to see where any sustainable growth can come from.

Former Federal Reserve Member & Leading Labor Economics Scholar

To talk of 'a march of the makers'... I was just looking at a collapse in the numbers of process, plant and machine operatives... The march of the makers has actually been a march of the unemployed-makers!

Former Federal Reserve Member & Leading Labor Economics Scholar

We should not assume that there is one single benchmark for all types of financial transactions. There are certain transactions that should be based on market rates, and others which call for the kind of benchmark that LIBOR provides.

MIT Finance Professor & Pioneer of Quantitative Finance & Behavioral Economics

It has certainly affected the appetite to investors to engage in LIBOR denominated contracts. Financial markets depend on trust, and we had precious little trust as it was. The LIBOR scandal has done nothing to restore that trust.

MIT Finance Professor & Pioneer of Quantitative Finance & Behavioral Economics

It certainly plays a much bigger role than was ever intended to. A number of financial institutions and contracts rely on LIBOR as the benchmark by which other rates are set. I don't think it was ever intended that LIBOR would play such a central role between so many institutions and contracts.

MIT Finance Professor & Pioneer of Quantitative Finance & Behavioral Economics

The original motivation was to develop a sense of what lending rates were among the large money-centre banks. It was really meant as a reference rate of where supply and demand of funds sat at a given point in time. It was meant to be a fairly robust measure of borrowing and lending activity.

MIT Finance Professor & Pioneer of Quantitative Finance & Behavioral Economics

Dubai offers a lot. We're currently at the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC). There's a separate jurisdictional regime in this area meaning that companies are treated under English common-law principles. It's a very safe environment for transactions to occur, and this gives us a big advantage of areas which simply do not have that framework.

In our part of the world, there will always be some kind of uncertainty. The market accepts and endorses that our physical oil is delivered outside The Strait of Hormuz, we're also not subject to any destination restrictions as Oman is not part of OPEC.

The market definitely recognised and endorsed the need for a new benchmark. WTI was certainly disconnected from the pricing and economic activity of the rest of the world. Further to this, Brent is great for the North Sea and European trade flows, but it does not impact or reflect the actual activity in the far east.

In a bit of a unique proposition, this exchange was created before the ecosystem existed. When you look at the growth and development of WTI, you have Houston which has production, New York which provides financing, the refineries on the Gulf Coast, the traders, marketers, banks and many other pieces of the puzzle which are already there. The DME was a bit of a unique experiment, we created an exchange before all parts of the ecosystem were in place.