From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Bill Gates spoke at Davos in 2008, about the need for creative capitalism. Michael Porter started talking about shared value capitalism, John Mackey of Whole Foods started talking about conscious capitalism and Marc Benioff started talking about compassionate capitalism. It was the beginning of a time when everybody felt the need to put a modifier in front of the word 'capitalism,' it was clear the incumbent version wasn't working as well as it could.
The developed world actually has worse demographics when looking at competitiveness and systemic issues, and has a lot of work to do in order to shore up financial systems.
We can now, more accurately than ever before, view the transactions occurring within our system, identifying the originator(s), beneficiary(ies) and intermediaries along the chain.
Short-term vision does not allow one to build better businesses and create value. If we keep a long-term perspective in mind, we will go through the good cycles and the bad cycles and reach the other side.
poverty seems to be an aggravating factor in all types of violence
Since 1998, the effective return to hedge-fund clients has only been 2.1% a year... never in the history of Finance was so much paid by so many for so little.
Central banks all around the world have essentially abused the power of printing money, and they have abused it by using quantitative easing, meaning creating new federal money to kit over fundamental problems, structural problems in the economy. So much of that acceleration in the wealth inequality has come from this quantitative easing.
The last quarter century of globalisation has utterly transformed how our markets and nations do business. With that in mind, we have to appreciate that our economies not only provide profound benefits and wealth-creation opportunities, but also hold very real (and untended) existential threats to the livelihoods of billions of citizens.
It's naïve to think that financial markets are not part of the battlefield.
He told me that his returns got so much better in the Bahamas, why? Because he got the Wall Street Journal a few days late! It's so difficult to mentally distance yourself from the herd and so perhaps physically distancing yourself from the herd is a good idea.
When we talk of economic confidence, business confidence, or even confidence in global markets, we are talking of the mindset of the majority of participants in that market. In a 'booming' market, participants feel happy, with little sense of risk- so they are happy to invest in their businesses, create jobs, buy property, and drive strong economic figures.
For large corporations, globalization opened up opportunities without the correlate responsibilities which usually travel with that- so things that banks must do at home they didn't have to do abroad. This took globalization out of balance, into a vicious cycle – and we're now dealing with the consequences of that.