Business

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.

There's a huge gap between the inspiration side of travel and the execution into the purchase path. That latter part of the process is so universally horrid that everyone hates it- and nobody is doing anything about it.

The opacity is the difference between profit and loss. If every airline seat that could be sold- were sold at the lowest possible price, the industry would lose billions. If every airline seat that could be sold- were sold at the highest possible price… It would make billions.

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.

inspires because it has a huge emotional component, everybody feels very attached to it. At the same time, it's incredibly complex- and full of mind-bogglingly stupid things that make it more complex than it needs to be

I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody…

Political Strategist & Democratic Campaign Consultant, "The Ragin' Cajun