“The process can kill their musicianship. The process can drown-out the music so much that you can't hear it anymore… you end-up so cut off from your intuitive self that it's a series of obstacles playing a piece of music rather than something which is an expression.”

— Nicola Benedetti

Scottish violinist & classical music ambassador

The quote archive

Economics

A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.

what turns a developing into a developed nation is not the amount of foreign aid it attracts, but how the money is spent.

— Loretta Napoleoni

Economist and author specializing in terrorism financing and shadow economy

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.

— Raymond Baker

We estimate that in talking about the cross-border flows of illicit money the component that is due to corruption- i.e. bribery and theft by government officials, is around 3-5% of the global total. It is very much the smaller part of the equation.

— Raymond Baker

We measure these flows entirely based on data filed by governments at the World Bank and the IMF. We apply two very established economic models. One is the World Bank's residual method, and the other is the IMF Direction of Trade statistical approach. These models have been used by economists for decades but we were the first group to apply these models to all developing countries.

— Raymond Baker

We're talking about massive amounts of money that have been shifted from poorer countries to richer ones. Almost all of this constitutes a permanent outward transfer. In our estimate, only about 10-20% of global illicit money ever finds its way back into the country of origin.

— Raymond Baker

If one wants to treat societal problems, then philanthropy and government spending are fine. If one wants to cure societal problems, one has got to come up with sustainable solutions- and that means attracting for-profit capital.

— K. Robert Turner

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.

— K. Robert Turner

They should be stress-testing their balance sheets and portfolios under a range of negative scenarios, and have sufficient capital and liquidity to withstand scenarios that are far out on the tail of the distribution of possible outcomes. The stress tests should account for potential bubbles in global asset markets.

— Mark Zandi

Chief Economist of Moody's Analytics & Economic Forecaster

Global investors were awash in cash due to current account surpluses in emerging economies and easy monetary policies. Investors from emerging economies first invested their rapidly rising wealth in risk-free Treasuries, but once they had their fill of Treasuries they looked for higher yield in what they thought was the next safest thing, U.S. residential mortgages. Due to shrinking returns on less risky investments, other global investors began to search for yield by taking more risk investing in more complicated securities and derivatives.

— Mark Zandi

Chief Economist of Moody's Analytics & Economic Forecaster

Most fundamentally, the subprime bubble was created by- a surfeit of global liquidity due to large current account surpluses in China and other emerging economies and easy global monetary policies; a flawed private mortgage securitization process that funnelled the liquidity into poorly underwritten mortgage and other loans; and weak regulatory oversight that failed to catch and rectify the problems in the securitization process.

— Mark Zandi

Chief Economist of Moody's Analytics & Economic Forecaster

Germany for example, has decided to close-down its nuclear industry. That creates a huge electricity deficit, and there is the potential to produce a large amount of renewable energy in Greece and export it to countries like that.

— Nicholas Economides