From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If you're going to be a city of love and compassion, you're going to have to develop economics infrastructure, capital planning and job creation policies, complementing them with education. For those who feel left out, we have to bring them in, and have that conversation with every company, every worker, and fight for them to be part of the more complicated world.
Over Thousands of Years, globalisation has progressed through travel, trade, migration, spread of cultural influences and dissemination of knowledge and understanding
In the advanced countries, it is a very challenging time for people in the middle-income and middle-education range. They are being subjected to greater competition from labour saving technology.
We can see, therefore, that sovereign debt has a systemically important role in the stability of the global economy, the economies of individual states and even the very peace of a country. To be able to then treat this as a market instrument- while appropriate at a time when capital flows were gentile and considered- is clearly not when we can write $2 trillion or more from an entire economy in a matter of seconds.
When your business becomes a unicorn and heads for the stratosphere, there's a temptation to slide into the primary activity of the business being turning capital, and so customer focus can get lost. Once you stop putting customer first, the competition will destroy you.
The biggest opportunities relates to the branded companies who are excellent at exploring opportunities in the BRIC and N-11 world, especially those with a consumer brand that is difficult to replicate and compete with, for example German cars, Louis Vuitton.
If you can rank oboists and there's one who's clearly the best in the world, anyone, anywhere, can access that person. So why would you listen to the third-best oboist who happens to live next door?
Morality represents the way we would like the world to work, and economics represents how it actually does work.
Not all financial contracts are created equal. 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.
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.
Until now, we had an insolvency problem – but we didn't have a liquidity problem that could trigger that insolvency because interest rates were so low. Now they're rising, and the mother of all debt crises is going to occur.
Transport, natural disasters, the distribution of resources, globalisation – engineers and inventors have the traits and skillset to solve the problems the world faces today. And therefore have the potential to impact the world and economy. The economy can be boosted by exporting tangible technology that is in global demand. This is the hands of engineers.