From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Why would anybody at all invest in an economy where the three leaders said the country was bankrupt?! That's what's killed off confidence and investment in the economy.
The great thing about film is that the capital structures allow you to pick where you want to be on the risk-return spectrum. If you're looking for lower risk, you can sit where the banks used to- advancing money against known collateral.
The important thing which central government can do is to promise, without reservation, that there will be no new taxation and 'emergency' taxation- and that they will focus on collecting existing taxes by expanding the tax-base to those who are evading taxes.
Sovereign debt is reasonably unique in that there are no underlying assets one can claim unlike corporate bonds.
When you have high levels of indebtedness and big deficits… if you simply impose fiscal austerity, you may not be able to achieve your targets because GDP will begin to contract and that will place much greater pressures on the fiscal side.
Until the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the economy had been measured in tonnes of grain and steel, and because of the crash- economists and politicians decided they wanted some grip over the scale of output of the economy- so they turned to a brilliant young scientist called Simon Kuznets and asked him how they should be measuring economic output. His answer was published in 1930s- he figured out a way to add-up all the tonnes of grains and steel and create a national income figure. He gave the caveat that it would scarcely be taken as the measure of welfare of a nation because it didn't include all the value created in a community, all the unpaid caring work at home, and only measured what was sold- not what was used-up!
Digital currency shows that anything can be money. We have become accustomed to see money as paper or pieces of gold, but in truth it could also be stones, grain, wood, cigarettes or complex computer codes.
One thing that really helped us was NOT following the IMF prescription, and hence I think the fact that we insisted on having growth (alongside stability) was something that made for a big change in Brazil.
Taxes are the price of civilisation.
a doubling in crime increases the Gini coefficient by 3% to 4%
When you consider that wealth transfer internally in western countries is around 15-25% of GDP… and that is not enough to solve the problem of poverty in the west… then you compare that to a transfer of less than 0.5% between North and South… that is just nothing compared to the needs.
There are a handful of families that own a very substantial degree of the economy including several companies on the stock exchange... The positive effect is through stabilising- it's very difficult for speculators to short stock here or to play tricks on the exchanges... there are simply not enough shares in free-float to do that.