Most of the poverty and misery in the world is due to bad government, lack of democracy, weak states, internal strife, and so on.

Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.

In certain circumstances, financial markets can affect the so-called fundamentals which they are supposed to reflect. When that happens, markets enter into a state of dynamic disequilibrium and behave quite differently from what would be considered normal by the theory of efficient markets. Such boom/bust sequences do not arise very often, but when they do, they can be very disruptive, exactly because they affect the fundamentals of the economy.

I admire Chancellor Merkel for her leadership qualities, but she is leading Europe in the wrong direction.

Once a trend is established it tends to persist and to run it’s full course.

The securitisation of mortgages added a new dimension of systemic risk. Financial engineers claimed they were reducing risks through geographic diversification: in fact they were increasing them by creating an agency problem. The agents were more interested in maximising fee income than in protecting the interests of bondholders. That is the verity that was ignored by regulators and market participants alike.

I'm not doing my philanthropic work out of any kind of guilt, or any need to create good public relations. I'm doing it because I can afford to do it, and I believe in it.