From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
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?
One of the things which is a really distinguishing factor about our markets in contrast to the OTC derivative market is that we're completely open, competitive and transparent with a very high degree of participation, a very high turnover, and a high degree of pre and post trade price transparency. That refers back to that old phrase of 'liquidity begets liquidity'.
Our system has never defined what it means to be 'good' – what is the ideal human being in capitalism? Is it Jeff Bezos? Is it Steve Jobs? They thrived, they profited, are they 'moral'? Even though they exploit the labour of millions of people?
The miracle of capitalism is that if you have a central government trying to solve something, it will come up with one averagely optimal solution for everybody. And capitalism will come up with 10 different solutions to the same problem.
Many governments, faced with a popular revolt, have chosen to martyr wealth without realising that it is the source of entrepreneurship, innovation and philanthropy in their economies.
We tend to see two scenarios that come up time and time again. The first and most common scenario is that security prices become inefficient or show large departures from intrinsic value when there are few investors paying attention to the company. The second is a crisis situation. Uncle John always had a desk-plate in his office that said 'trouble is opportunity' and that's very much how we see the markets.
I can illustrate the current situation in the form of a story. Two boys were being chased by a Tiger. One boy stops to put on running shoes, and the other boy says, 'What are you doing?' The first boy responds, 'I don't have to outrun the Tiger, I just have to outrun you'.
We have to acknowledge that the global economic recovery that we started to see in 2009 was the first economic cycle since World War II that was not led by the US, but by China.
Toyota's reputation for long-term quality is finished. People aren't going to buy Toyotas, period. It doesn't matter which model. What's happened is sufficient to keep people out of the stores.
The economy is a subset of society, it's a social construct. It's entirely created by humanity- by the way we interact with one another to meet our wants and needs and human society itself is embedded in the living world, we are part of nature whether we like it or not- and we have to respect the rest of nature.
There is nothing, however, in standard theories of money that requires transactions to be anonymous from tax- or law-enforcement authorities. And yet there is a significant body of evidence that a large percentage of currency in most countries, generally well over 50%, is used precisely to hide transactions.
150 years ago, Aluminium was the rarest metal we knew of on the surface of planet Earth. Through technology we learned how to extract it from the bauxite in the Earth's crust, and discovered it was the most abundant metal. We went from Napoleon serving Kings and Queens on the finest Aluminium plate-ware to much more money made on Aluminium within 20 years.