From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I think the biggest risk is the situation with the EMU as I have explained. I can see that this has the potential to derail the world economy in the same way the 2008 credit crisis did.
For the societies themselves, this activity drains hard currency reserves, heightens inflation, reduces tax collection, curtails government service and undermines investment. There is no good accomplished by this massive outflow of resources.
For the creator economy, NFTs represent a way for creators and producers of content to directly engage with the people who support them. It's a completely different model… a way for artists and creators to monetise much more effectively than incumbent platforms.
We are now at the same crossroads, with impact. There is an interesting parallel here with 1933, when we introduced the GAAP. Until then, there had been no real transparency on profit! After the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929, investors sat-up and said 'hey, this is crazy!' and they got transparency through the adoption of GAAP.
When a customer sees that a company from India is performing in the financial markets better than their local partner, their attention is caught. We leveraged the financial markets for building brand, for competing in the marketplace.
If I may return to the biology analogy too; human beings get a lot of benefit from walking erect, but our backs and our feet are sometimes sore because we are made of parts that were put together before we could walk erect.
I'm very old-fashioned in the sense that I still feel you need a strong manufacturing sector in your economy. I was saying that in the late 1970's and early 80's and people just laughed at me. I think my day is about to turn.
We can only solve our ecological problems by linking ecology and economy. If we can create the right economic environment, change will happen. If it's more profitable to be efficient than wasteful, we will be efficient.
More money has been lost on the mismeasurement of risk than not having risk management at all. The battle is not won through being attuned to risk control. If your measurement of risk is completely wrong, it could be worse than having nothing in place.
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!
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.
Hedge funds give less transparency than almost anything that people invest money in... Since investors have accepted much less transparency and much less attractive terms in liquidity and information rights, they have not been able to pick apart the sources of return.