Finance is a language: one we all need to speak to understand the changing world of today.
Finance is time travel: projecting the future costs and benefits of a strategy as the cash flows to come, discounted back to a valuation today; and also looking back through the history of markets to understand how past decisions have influenced present outcomes.
Finance is intermediation: the plumbing through which capital flows and credit is created, aggregating the financing choices of households, corporates and sovereigns into the interlocking sectoral balance sheets of an economy, with risks quantified, priced, managed and compensated along the way.
Two decades in senior leadership roles taught me the power of speaking finance: in public markets on trading floors in New York, London and Singapore, working with global sovereigns, hedge funds, and asset managers; and in private markets with private equity firms and in corporate boardrooms.
I continue to use this language as a teacher and a student in classrooms at elite schools globally, sharing my passion for understanding the world in which we live. Wrestling with some of the most persistent unresolved questions at the heart of finance, I have built a unique dataset that now grounds an ambitious empirical macrofinancial research programme, to begin to answer those same questions but focused on the origins of modern capital markets and thereby gain perspective on the dramatic policy choices we face today.
All are able to learn to speak finance. I invite you to join me on the journey of using this tool to better influence the changes in the world around us.