Podcasts about Renaissance Capital

Chi Odogwu is the founder of The Bulletproof Entrepreneur™, where he helps companies drive growth through AI integration and practical business strategies. A former consultant at PwC and Renaissance Capital, Chi brings over 15 years of finance and management experience to his work with business leaders. He's a regular contributor to WSJ, Success Magazine, CNET and Forbes, specializing in AI operations, business growth, and wealth building. When he's not helping clients leverage AI to boost revenue, Chi creates animated stories that make business lessons more engaging.Learn more: https://bulletproofentrepreneur.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-chi-odogwu-founder-of-the-bulletproof-entrepreneur

Chi Odogwu is the founder of The Bulletproof Entrepreneur™, where he helps companies drive growth through AI integration and practical business strategies. A former consultant at PwC and Renaissance Capital, Chi brings over 15 years of finance and management experience to his work with business leaders. He's a regular contributor to WSJ, Success Magazine, CNET and Forbes, specializing in AI operations, business growth, and wealth building. When he's not helping clients leverage AI to boost revenue, Chi creates animated stories that make business lessons more engaging.Learn more: https://bulletproofentrepreneur.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-chi-odogwu-founder-of-the-bulletproof-entrepreneur

Anthony Milewski has two passions: the outdoors and investing. At any moment you might find him skiing in France, fly fishing in Alaska, white water rafting in Oregon, or wide awake in the middle of the night analyzing news releases and financial statements.Anthony realized early on that a truly rewarding career needed to include following his passions. But how to do this? As a Fulbright scholar, he spent time in the former Soviet Union and saw firsthand the changes brought about by the privatization of vast swaths of the regional economies. He also noted the great potential in building companies on the back of these changes and, for a time, was employed by Renaissance Capital in Moscow, Russia, working with entrepreneurs and natural resource companies. Upon graduating from the University of Washington, with a MA in international studies and a JD in law, he took a job at New York-based Skadden, Arps where he became immersed in commodity transactions. Anthony would later transition from Skadden to Firebird Management in New York where he worked in the Global Macro funds.Anthony's time at Firebird had a profound impact on his investment style. He realized that you can “get a call right” but the “timing wrong”. Investing, as much as anything, is about understanding the themes and ideas that shape our world, environment, and capital markets. It was this realization that helped to shape his views on identifying themes, thinking about liquidity, and ultimately making successful investment decisions. No one ever lost money selling for a gain! After leaving Firebird he went on to work with other major funds as a C-level executive specializing in global origination and investment processes. This time cemented his views on risk mitigation and liquidity.After years in the asset management business, Anthony realized it was time to strike out on his own. Along with his business partner, Justin Cochrane, he founded and took public several companies. To date, he has helped raise over a billion dollars for listed companies on various exchanges around the globe. In a sense, this was Act Two of his career.All told, Anthony has served as a founder, advisor, director, executive, and investor. He now pursues investment ideas that make money and make the world a better place. That might mean investing in nickel as the key ingredient in batteries, carbon as a way of saving forests, copper for the electrification of things, artificial intelligence to help reduce the impact of farming on our environment — the list goes on.Learn more: https://www.anthonymilewski.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-anthony-milewski-founder-of-the-oregon-group

Anthony Milewski has two passions: the outdoors and investing. At any moment you might find him skiing in France, fly fishing in Alaska, white water rafting in Oregon, or wide awake in the middle of the night analyzing news releases and financial statements.Anthony realized early on that a truly rewarding career needed to include following his passions. But how to do this? As a Fulbright scholar, he spent time in the former Soviet Union and saw firsthand the changes brought about by the privatization of vast swaths of the regional economies. He also noted the great potential in building companies on the back of these changes and, for a time, was employed by Renaissance Capital in Moscow, Russia, working with entrepreneurs and natural resource companies. Upon graduating from the University of Washington, with a MA in international studies and a JD in law, he took a job at New York-based Skadden, Arps where he became immersed in commodity transactions. Anthony would later transition from Skadden to Firebird Management in New York where he worked in the Global Macro funds.Anthony's time at Firebird had a profound impact on his investment style. He realized that you can “get a call right” but the “timing wrong”. Investing, as much as anything, is about understanding the themes and ideas that shape our world, environment, and capital markets. It was this realization that helped to shape his views on identifying themes, thinking about liquidity, and ultimately making successful investment decisions. No one ever lost money selling for a gain! After leaving Firebird he went on to work with other major funds as a C-level executive specializing in global origination and investment processes. This time cemented his views on risk mitigation and liquidity.After years in the asset management business, Anthony realized it was time to strike out on his own. Along with his business partner, Justin Cochrane, he founded and took public several companies. To date, he has helped raise over a billion dollars for listed companies on various exchanges around the globe. In a sense, this was Act Two of his career.All told, Anthony has served as a founder, advisor, director, executive, and investor. He now pursues investment ideas that make money and make the world a better place. That might mean investing in nickel as the key ingredient in batteries, carbon as a way of saving forests, copper for the electrification of things, artificial intelligence to help reduce the impact of farming on our environment — the list goes on.Learn more: https://www.anthonymilewski.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-anthony-milewski-founder-of-the-oregon-group

In this episode, Brian from quantlabs.net delves into a fascinating article from eFinancialCareers.com about Better Hand Financial Technologies (BHFT), a high-frequency trading firm based in Dubai. BHFT has been making waves with its remote work model and strategic hires from top competitors.   New website at Home | Quantlabs (quantlabsnet.com) Key hires include Ilya Malinovsky, former head of HFT at Tower Research Capital and Credit Suisse, and Ruslan Reskipov, previously head of derivatives and algo trading at Renaissance Capital. The firm has also attracted talent like Rook Teeter, former managing director at KCG Holding and Tower Research. BHFT stands out by using Rust instead of the traditional C++ for its trading systems, attracting a diverse team that includes chess champions, martial arts winners, and world-class math and science talents. Despite the remote work setup, the company boasts a friendly, multicultural team with a modern tech stack. The episode also covers BHFT's current job listings, including roles for senior quant traders and researchers, with a notable focus on the Chinese and Indian trading markets. Brian wraps up by sharing updates about his new website, quantlabsnet.com, and invites listeners to join the new community group.

Jake Madoff is a full-stack growth marketing leader, specializing in growth marketing strategy, paid social, paid search, SEO, and CRO. He's led growth at three multi-million dollar startups—Bespoke Post, Sealed, and Everytable and founded three startups of his own.Through his 8-year freelance career, he has worked with over 100 brands like HUM Nutrition, Home Chef, Renaissance Capital, Kindo AI, Strategic Coach, Threadbeast, Jean Dousset, Partake Foods, TradeMark Engine, and many more, ranging from small ($5K-$10K monthly spend) to large-sized media budgets ($2M+ monthly spend). He helped these brands to optimize and scale their existing paid media campaigns, improve funnel conversion rates, evolve their creative strategy, and diversify their paid media marketing mix across different paid channels.In This Conversation We Discuss: [00:47] Intro[01:46] From affiliate revenue to lead growth[03:24] Embracing an omnichannel approach[04:38] Perfection delays progress in marketing[06:52]  crafting high-value lookalikes[08:29] Optimizing pixel insights &  conversion API[09:09] Creating compelling cinemagraphs[09:48] Understanding channel personalities[11:07] Maximizing Shopify's ad targeting capabilities[12:38] Taking enterprise-Level expertise to freelancing[14:10] Converting results across different sectors[14:48] Sharing expertise: offering tips and strategies[15:22] Exploring the roles of a growth marketer[17:00] The holistic approach of growth marketing[18:38] Maximizing ROI with limited ad budgets[20:53] Tailoring testing approach to ad spend[21:39] Balancing growth and acquisition costs[23:34] Determining the right time to add channels[25:21] Using organic & paid efforts on different channels[27:03] Reach out to Jake MadoffResources:Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on YoutubeIncrease your revenue with growth marketing jakemadoff.io/Follow Jake Madoff linkedin.com/in/jake-madoff-8a191070/If you're enjoying the show, we'd love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!

The Kansas City Chiefs are the Super Bowl champions once again. Moffett Nathanson's Robert Fishman lays out the impact on streaming. Plus, the IPO sector is rocketing higher. Renaissance Capital's Avery Marquez explains. And, investors are awaiting a number of market catalysts this week, including January CPI tomorrow. Principal Asset Management's Seema Shah and Infracap's Jay Hatfield discuss.

Congress returns from summer break this week as it looks to ensure the government is funded past the September 30 deadline. American Enterprise Institute's James Pethokoukis explains. Plus, Arm Holdings is expected to kick off its roadshow today ahead of its highly anticipated IPO. Renaissance Capital's Avery Spear explains. And, bearish sentiment is growing at the start of what's historically a rough month for stocks. The Glenview Trust Company's Bill Stone and RBC Capital Markets' Amy Wu Silverman weigh in on the outlook.

CNBC's Bob Pisani spoke with Matt Kennedy, Senior IPO Market Strategist for Renaissance Capital and Todd Sohn, Head of ETF and Technical Strategy at Strategas Securities – along with Kyla Scanlon, founder of financial education company Bread. They discussed the IPO market – with Cava going public later this week, are we finally starting to see green shoots sprouting after a very long drought? They also talked broader markets this summer, honing in on the potential for a major FOMO equity market move, even despite relatively thin inflows, and the broader economy ahead of Wednesday's Federal Reserve meeting. In the “Markets 102” portion, Bob continued the conversation with Kyla Scanlon, founder of Bread. 

Charlie Robertson, chief global economist at frontier- and EM-focused Renaissance Capital, joins us to dig into the new Saudi story, whether emerging markets investors got a bit too excited early this year, how long we can expect the dollar to retain its primacy and when African nations will reach escape velocity.    Charlie also spills the beans on questions he's asking about his own portfolio. Should he go ex-China? Listen on to find out.

Alt-right, The Right Stuff blog, TSR, Michael Peinovich, Mike Enoch, Joseph Jordan, Erick Striker, Tony Hovater, Unite the Right rally, TSR's role in Unite the Right, National Justice Party, NJP, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Charles Bausman, Russia Insider, Bausman's links to TSR/NJP, Konstantin Malofeev, Eastern Orthodoxy, Monarchism, Traditionalism, Malofeev as Russia's George Soros, Basil the Great Charitable Foundation, FSB, Igor Strelkov/Girkin, Ukraine, Crimea, Donbass, Malofeev's sponsorship of insurgency/Russian forces in Ukraine, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, Wagner Group, Renaissance Capital, Mikhail Prokhorov, Marshall Capital, telecommunications, White Russians, Serge de Pahlen, Agnelli family, Italian fascism, Propaganda Due, Vladimir Yakunin, Alexander Trubetskoy, Jean Goutchkov, Intermaritime Bank of New York, Bank of new York, Bruce Rappaport, BCCI, Aleksabdr Goutchkov, KGB, Sidney Reilly, Operation Trust, Sovereign Order of Saint John, SOSJ, Captive Nations, OUN-B, Ukrainian question, military/intel officers in SOSJ, SOSJ links to terrorism/PATCON/SOSJ in Continuity of Government, COG, American Gladio, American stay-behind, special operations forces, Operation Bloodstone, modern SOSJ linked to Joint Special Operations Command, Dialogue of Civilization, Nicholas Papanicolaou, Rick Joyner, General William Boykin, Sean Moon, Rod of Iron Ministries, Abe assassination, Sean Moon links to Bausman, Alexander Dugin, EurasianismAfter first musical break (4:30): TSR, NJP and Charles BausmanAfter second musical break (1:01:40): Malofeev's spycraft and paramilitary adventures in Ukraine, White Russians, the Sovereign Order of Saint John, and the American GladioAfter third musical break (1:55:20): Sean Moon, Alexander Dugin and the new nationalismNote: this show was recorded prior to the attempted assassination of Konstantin Malofeev by Ukrainian-backed forces. Malofeev is the second traditionalist-oriented figure, behind Dugin's daughter, that has been targeted by this milieu. This should illustrate how seriously the Anglo-American/OUN-B axis regards this network.Declassified FBI docs: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G48f8GFS_88BpCmXtClEV8chWcdvu9CA/view?usp=sharingFor more on Moon's links to Abe's assassination, check here.Links to the first Far West show can be found here. The listener is strongly advised to view both of these series as part of a bigger picture.More information on the FBI's PATCON investigation and the Sovereign Order of Saint John can be found here and here.Music by: Keith Allen Dennishttps://keithallendennis.bandcamp.com/Additional music by: Corwin Trailshttps://corwintrails.bandcamp.com/ Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to another episode of Ideas Untrapped. My guest today is Charlie Robertson, who is the chief economist of Renaissance Capital - a global investment bank - and in this episode we talked about the subject of Charlie's new book, "The Time-Travelling Economist''. The book explores the connection between education, electricity, and fertility to economic development. The thrust of the book's argument is that no poor country can escape poverty without education, and that electricity is an important factor for investors looking to build businesses. It also explains that a low fertility rate helps to increase household savings. Charlie argues, with a lot of data and historical parallels, that countries need at least a 70-80% adult literacy rate (defined as being able to read and write four sentences in any language) and cheap electricity (an average of 300 - 500 kWh per capita) in order to industrialize and grow their economies rapidly. Small(er) families (3 children per woman) mean households are able to save more money, which can improve domestic investments by lowering interest rates - otherwise countries may repeatedly stumble into debt crises. We also discussed how increasing education can lead to higher domestic wages, but that this is usually offset by a large increase in the working-age population - and other interesting implications of Charlie's argument.TRANSCRIPTTobi;The usual place I would start with is what inspired you to write it. You mentioned in the book that it was an IMF paper that sort of started your curiosity about the relationship between education, electricity, fertility, and economic development. Generally. So, what was the Eureka moment?Charlie;Yeah, the eureka moment actually came in Kenya, um, because I'd already done a lot of work showing how important education was. It's the most important, no country escapes poverty without education. So I'd already made that clear and there wasn't much debate about that. Perhaps there was a debate about why some countries have gone faster than others, but there wasn't much debate about that. The second thing I was very clear on was electricity, which kept on coming up in meetings across Sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, [at] a number of countries, people kept on talking about the importance of electricity. But the eureka moment came when somebody pointed out to me that Kenya, where I was at the time, couldn't afford to build huge excess capacity of electricity, which I was arguing you need to have. You need to have too much electricity, so that it's cheap and it's reliable.And then investors come in and say, "great! I've got cheap educated labour, and I've got cheap reliable electricity. I've got the human capital and the power I need, that then enables me to invest and build a business here." And the question then was, well, why was it so expensive in Kenya but so cheap in China? Why was the cost of borrowing so high in Nigeria but so cheap in Morocco or Mauritius? And when I was trying to work out where did the savings come from in China, uh, well I was looking globally, but China's the best example of economic success and development success we've seen in the last 50 years. Over half the answer came from this IMF paper saying, actually it came from their low fertility rate. That's over half of the rise in household savings, which are massive in China, came about because the fertility rate had fallen so dramatically.And I then thought, could this possibly be true for other countries as well? Could this help explain why interest rates are so high in Nigeria or Kenya and so low elsewhere? And the answer is yes. So this book, The Time Travelling Economist is bringing all of these three things together - the fertility rate, the education rate, and electricity - to say not just how countries develop, cause I think I've answered that, but when they develop. Because once we know those three factors are key, we can then work out the when. Not just in the past [of] countries, but also in the future. Um, so that's where this came from.Tobi;I mean, we're going to be talking about each of those factors over the course of this conversation, but another question...some would say boring question, but I know how development economists and economists generally always try to defend their turf, you know, around issues like these. So, has anybody like taking you to task on the causal link between these three factors and development? And how would you defend yourself against that were it to be asked?Charlie;I haven't found anyone yet who's argued successfully against these points. Um, the closest criticism I get, and just to say, you know, this book came about off the back of three key reports I did in 2017 on education, 2018 on electricity, and 2019 on fertility and savings. So I've now been talking about these ideas for three to five years. The book only came out in July, 2022, bringing them all together. But in five years I haven't had pushback other than people ask, "is it not correlated?" You know, "is it not perhaps economic growth leads fertility declines or boosts savings?" And I think I show really clearly in the data that "no." Um, the fertility declines give us the growth. You don't get growth without adult literacy of at least 40%, you certainly don't get industrialization until literacy is at 70 to 80.So, you know, I'm looking at the data and I think it's pretty crystal clear that you've gotta get these other things right first before your economy can take off. And I can't find any counter-examples. Except, I mean there's the inevitable few, those countries like Qatar or Kuwait with huge amounts of energy exports per capita or diamonds in Botswana's case. And there you don't have to get everything right before you get wealthier because you just happen to be lucky to have huge amounts of energy exports per person and a very small population. But they are a bit of an exception. I think you could probably argue that they do grow first before they get everything else right. But for the vast majority of the planet and all countries in history, it's the other way around. You gotta get education, power, fertility rates in the right place to take off.Tobi;So I mean, getting into the weeds, let's look at education first. Before your book, personally for me, and I should say what I really like about your book is, it's well written, it's an interesting read. It comes across as a bit less analytical, which is what you get from the standard development literature, you know, and I think that's partly because you are writing about a lot of the countries that you have also worked in and interacted with a lot of these factors. So it really gives it a first-hand experience kind of narrative. So I like that very much. So prior to your book, if someone were to ask me about the relationship between education and economic development or catch-up growth, generally, the reference usually goes to Studwell's big claim, Joe Studwell, that: Yeah. You don't really need a super high level of education metrics for a country to industrialize because the standard explanation is that how a relatively poor country starts industrializing is from the low-skill, uh, labour-intensive, low-skill manufacturing jobs, that you don't need a high level of education and skill for you to be able to do that.So what I wanna work out here is what is the transmission mechanism between adult literacy and industrialization the way you've, like, clearly analyzed in your book?Charlie;Well, thank you very much for saying it was nicely written, I appreciate that. I wanted to try and make it as accessible as possible. Yeah, I think Joe Studwell's books are really good and I think he's right that you don't need a high level of education to do that first step out of rural poverty, subsistence farming into a textile mill. I think what's interesting is how many people writing about development forget how important just adult literacy actually is, because we've taken [it] so much for granted. So Adam Smith, who wrote The Wealth of Nations, the father of economics back in the 18th century in Scotland, he didn't make a big deal about adult literacy driving growth. And more recently, you know, people like Dani Rodrik have echoed exactly that saying you don't need any great education to work in a textile mill. You just need to be dextrous with your fingers. Which is almost exactly actually what Adam Smith said 250 years ago. And I was sympathetic to that, but I then kept on seeing in the data, well, first of all, I found this theory written in the sixties that said that no country has industrialized even to that first basic level of textiles without adult literacy being about 70 to 80% of the population. Which means basically all adults, all men, plus well over half the female population as well. And this was the theory written in the sixties and when I looked at the data, it was proven right and I couldn't quite understand why - if you just need dextrous fingers to work in a textile mill, why would there be that link? And I ended up talking to a guy who ran Levi's factories in Asia in the 1980s and he said, “Charlie, just think about it.”You've got this box of Levi's jeans coming down the conveyor belt. Do you put that box onto the truck labelled United States or that truck labelled Europe for export? And if you can't read and write, you won't even get that right. So the adult literacy thing I think is overlooked. People are focusing on secondary school, high school education, how much [many] university graduates a country needs and they do need graduates too. But until you get to that 70 to 80% adult literacy, textile mills don't go to a country. And we can see that they did go to China in the nineties when they got to adult literacy of 70%. They are in Southeast Asia. They're in Bangladesh since education hit about 70 to 80% in the last 10 to 15 years. But they're not big in sub-Saharan Africa, or at least in parts of Nigeria or the Sahel or West Africa because the education levels still aren't there yet. So, you know, I looked as far back as I could go to the 19th century and even the first non-European country to take off, Japan, had an adult literacy rate of about 70% by 1900 and 20 years later, they had a thriving textile industry. The education always comes first. And Korea copied that Japan model in the 1950s and sixties, Taiwan, Hong Kong, all the rest [of] Southeast Asia's followed. Now, South Asia's doing it and luckily it's spreading across Africa too. But the adult literacy is the first essential step.Tobi;One possible objection. And I haven't seen this anywhere, but I couldn't really get it out of my mind while I was reading that part of the book is that some will argue that increasing education also increases domestic wages and that is really a problem for industrializing. And, if I recall, one particular point that the anonymous economic historian on Twitter, Pseudoerasmus, made particularly about Asia, is they were able to combine a very high adult literacy rate - a measure which you use is completion of secondary education…Charlie;Yeah.Tobi;With very unusually low domestic wages. What role do wages play in your analysis?Charlie;I think that's the norm actually. It connects to the fertility thing. And I'm not sure if you want to jump there just yet, but what tends to happen when you've educated your population is that the fertility rate drops a lot. And when that happens, the number of people who have to stay at home looking after 5, 6, 7 children goes down a lot too. Women can go into the workforce and of course cause you've got the education, right? Those women are educated so they can join the industrial workforce as well. So very roughly, if we say there's a hundred people in Nigeria, 50 kids and 50 adults, let's say 25 of the adults have to be staying at home to look after 50 kids, you're talking 25% of the population can go out and work of the overall population. You go to Asia today and it's more like 70% adults, say 30% of kids.So you need maybe 15% of adults to stay at home. And you end up with something like 85% of the whole population can go out to work instead of 25%. Now, the consequence of that is a massive rise in the working-age population. And I think that that keeps industrial wages low for a few generations, in fact. Or at least three decades. Probably 40 years, where the education's come through, the fertility rates come down, you've got this huge excess supply of labour, which is then joining the industrial workforce and getting jobs. But because there keeps on being more people joining that workforce, it keeps wages relatively low. Now, what eventually happens then after a few decades is that that big increase in the workforce stops increasing as fast. We've seen this in China in the last 20 years. So, 20 years ago China's per capita GDP was about fifteen hundred dollars, $1,500.Whereas now, now the population has stopped growing. Working age population's shrinking. It's gone up to over $11,500. It's gone up tenfold. So the big reward for industrialization comes later. And we had this in Europe of course in the 19th century, you know, wages were pretty awful and industrial working was pretty awful experience in the 19th century. I mean it paid slightly better than rural subsistence farming, which is why people came to the cities. But London was a horrible place for the vast majority of people. And the industrial workhouses were terrible places as well. And that lasted for generations. It's only when that big population, kind of, boom stories started to shift that labour eventually got any bargaining power. Cause when there was too much labour coming into the market, they had no bargaining power with the factory owners. It wasn't until the 1870s that the trade unions became legal in, say, the United States. Because up till then, you know, "you join a union, I fire you," you know, could be what the factory owner would say in the United States, cause there's always gonna be another person I can employ. But once the workforce starts to gain a bit of bargaining power, cause it's not expanding quite so fast, then finally wages start to pick up. So I think what's happened in Asia is pretty normal and will probably be the experience that we've seen across Africa as well.Tobi;Inevitably this will take us into what it means to be educated, really. Because a lot of countries, I mean it's pretty much standard - they say, Oh yeah, we want invest in education. Um, we know it is important for human capital. We know how important it is to have an educated population and all that. You talked about some data challenges also for some countries in your book. So what I wanna ask here is what exactly does it mean to be educated in the sense that you are talking about in the book?Charlie;Yeah, this is a really fair question. Why am I talking about adult literacy? The definition is can you read and write four sentences in any language? Sentences like "farming is hard work." So it's not a very high threshold and I wouldn't argue, I don't think you would, that it's highly educated. It's just educated enough to put that box of jeans onto the right truck when it's going to America or Europe. But all that's doing then is taking your country's per capita GDP from your per person kind of wealth from say $500 a year, a thousand dollars a year to the kind of two, $3,000 a year level. It doesn't mean you've got the education levels you need to get to the $10,000 per capita GDP level growth or 20 or 50 or even a hundred. Um, to get to the 10,000 level, I think you probably need very good secondary school education as well.And to get to the $20,000 per capital GDP level, you're talking a lot of graduates coming out of university and you need to have that education then spreading throughout the population, both broadening and deeper education as well. And that is a process that takes decades. I mean I focused quite a bit on Korea because it was one of the most successful models and then China came along and did it even faster. But what Korea prioritized in the 1950s was getting that adult literacy rate from 35% or so, too low even to grow sustainably, to about 90% they said by 1960. So in about 10 or 15 years they got it from 35 to 90 and that was enough then to have textile mills do really well in the 1960s and they became a manufacturing country, an industrialized country by the early 1970s.But already then the government said, right, we need more engineers, we need graduates coming out of university to do heavy industry, to do cars, shipbuilding. But Korea had no cars or shipbuilding at the time, nothing significant. So they were changing the university focus from, kind of, the arts or law towards engineering and the sciences before they had the economic sectors that they were trying to promote. And then about 10 to 20 years later, all these graduates were then in the economy and ready to start up companies like Deawoo, Hyundai, Kia, Samsung. And they started small obviously in the 1980s and early nineties. But this kind of sequential thinking about it meant that Korea kept on having the right human capital at every stage of development. So my book's trying to focus on, you know, why hasn't Pakistan got all the textile factories?Why does Bangladesh have them? Why doesn't Nigeria have them? Why does Vietnam have them? And this is saying first you've gotta get that sequencing right of everybody ideally being literate, everybody having had school up to 11 years old and come out with a good standard of education. On the quality issue you just raised, the problem here is a couple of things. So I mean firstly people sometimes just make up the data and say, yes, my population is literate when it's not. But secondly, when you try and kind of shoehorn a hundred kids into one class to say, you know, they're all going to school now, but you've only got one teacher, you are not coming out with a good education at all. You might not even be coming out literate at all. So that, you know, I'm also trying to warn that governments can't do this on the cheap. Or not completely. They have to take it seriously and say, look, we actually need to make sure everyone really is coming out able to read and write. It's not just trying to tick a box to say everyone's at school.Tobi;Hopefully, we'll circle back to policy questions around this later. Let's talk briefly about electricity, which as you say, once you start investigating these factors, then you start teasing out what's what for each country. And the way you introduce that is [that] there are some countries with very high adult literacy rates but still weren't getting the benefits - like [the] Philippines, which was your example in the book. And it turns out what was missing in that particular case was electricity generation. But first I want you to make one distinction for me quite quickly. Cause it's funny, I was reading David Pilling's brief coverage of your book in the FT and he talked about the fertility part being controversial and I wonder that people miss the obvious controversy in electricity, but we'll get to that. So, now, is it really about investment in electricity that is often missing in countries that can't quite manage to get it right or the way their electricity market is structured? I know you are quite familiar with Nigeria and it's really a big, big, big debate that we've been having for, I don't know, like 20 years. So, some people will say you need very large upfront investment, possibly by the government, in generating capacity transmission, machinery and co. We argue, oh no, you really need to restructure the electricity market first. People have to pay for what they use. You need to restructure the tariff system, blah blah blah, blah, blah. What are your thoughts?Charlie;Um, big issues. And there is a debate. There're so many debates about this actually. There's the debate about whether you need a big national grid, big national generation and distribution companies or whether you can have localized electricity. Um, you are getting a couple of points though that I think it's easier to say some answers to. And one of them was to do with getting people to actually pay their bills. Certainly a problem in Nigeria, apparently, you know, discos will say that because there hasn't been good metering and despite privatization that those meters have not been rolled out. I know the government's promising to roll it out to all 10 million account holders now, but because there hasn't been metering, you can't charge necessarily the fair price for the amount of electricity people have used. So then people don't wanna pay. So then the discos are losing money, then they can't pay the generators and this then becomes a problem.And I think there is a case to say that if the generators can sell some power directly to some big companies, that could be one way around part of the problem. So in a place like Lagos, very similar to the Philippines in the 20th century, good educated population just held back by a lack of cheap reliable power. You know, I think if Lagos could have its own electricity story, it would be a phenomenally successful economy. It should be over the next three or four decades. So there is a case about how you structure this. But I found two or three things interesting when I was looking into this issue in 2018. And the first was just clarifying that it really is electricity that people need more than say transport infrastructure. You know, this is a survey the world bank had done and the only countries where they've said transport infrastructure was the bigger problem was countries where there wasn't an electricity problem because there's so much of it.So countries, where there's a load of electricity, say yes we need more transport infrastructure, but everybody else says we have to have the electricity first. So then it's a question of how do you roll that out in a way that makes money and supports development? And there is a... I think, a problem at the moment with well-meaning policies from people like the United Nations or the African Development Bank saying everybody should have access to electricity. But my point in the book is, and Adam Smith said the same thing in the 18th century, you want your infrastructure to be making money not losing money. You need to make sure that if you're going to supply people with a road or a bridge or electricity, that they can pay for it. And if you start building stuff that loses you money because people can't pay their bills, then you'll end up with an uneconomic electricity system which can't function properly and can't give industry what it needs.And what I try to emphasize in this is that every country from America and France in the 1920s to Turkey in the 1960s or seventies to Korea in the 1970s, every country has said, okay, let's make sure we've got electricity for industry first. Profitable, makes money, and then households over time? Yeah, okay, we'll connect them over time, but only when they can start affording to pay for electricity. It's not another subsidy that governments can't afford, we just can't do that. [This] is what every other country's done. But at the moment I do see this pressure for electricity systems to try and roll out universal access and so, in places like Kenya that's putting the whole electricity system under financial pressure because it's hurting their profits. And if you're trying to roll out cheap electricity to households, well how do you pay for that?Well, government subsidies partly, but the other way to pay for it is to make industry pay a high price. But if you're making industry pay a high price industry won't come. They'll go to Asia; where they get a low price for electricity. They're not going to go to somewhere that's got a high price. Cause no company's gonna say, I just wanna subsidize households getting electricity. Companies are coming to build stuff in countries because they'll make a good profit from doing so. So I think you've raised a number of issues there, you know, is localized electricity good, and so on? You know, what should you be prioritizing first - industry or households? And there's a whole host of issues. But I hope I've answered that.Tobi;Actually, that's the controversy I was referring to at the beginning of that question because the background that is, it'll be a very, very tough sell in the current political climate, for example in Nigeria, for any person aspiring to public office to make this argument that you have to power industry first. What it's going to sound like is: you are just trying to prioritize the rich and trying to exclude some people from what, like you said, has come to be framed as a universal basic right. You talk to a lot of small businesses, even individuals, like you mentioned with the World Bank Survey, the importance of electricity is so paramount on everybody's mind that if there's stable electricity, I can start X and Y businesses. I could make money and, I mean, no one needs the government for anything else. Just give us electricity.Charlie;Yeah.Tobi;So my point is practically… thinking about this practically, how do you think a sensible government that is not trying to bankrupt itself prematurely can manage this situation?Charlie;Well, I think it's hard work. Um, how did the Koreans do it in the sixties or the seventies or the eighties? They gave you no right to protest - military government. How did the communists do so well at getting this industry first, households later? How did they get it right in China or Russia? Same thing. You've got no rights to protest. "Your interests don't matter, we're thinking 10 to 20 years ahead how to make our country better off and how to make everyone better off. So you suffer now because we are gonna prioritize business." So that is one model. I'm not recommending it, I'm just saying it is a model that can be done. The other way is to allow it to be done by the private sector. And if you let the private sector roll out electricity, they will not supply electricity to people who won't pay their bills.And that is the story that you saw in western Europe, it's the story you saw in the States, and to some extent you're seeing actually in Kenya. There's quite an interesting company there called M-KOPA. And M-KOPA will sell you, well, they'll lend you, they'll lease you, a solar panel, a little one that you can put on your - actually, a friend of mine was showing it to me the other day in Uganda...they put it on the straw roof of the mud hut and that solar panel, you pay a monthly fee and after about 18 months you've paid for the panel, you've also got energy during that time enough to supply a mobile phone and so on, lights a little bit, and then it's yours and that's effectively privatizing that rural distribution story. But I think the difficulty is that politicians find it really hard to do this.And part of what I'm writing about in the book is how really hard it is for governments in a country with no savings, big population growth, to constantly meet all of the different demands. With huge population growth you're having to build new schools all the time, you have to hire even more teachers all the time. You've got population pressure, maybe, causing clashes over agricultural land like the Fulani herdsman in Central Nigeria, Northern Nigeria as well. And all of these pressures are on you all of the time. And there's constant demand to spend more on bridges, on hospitals, on education, on security. And what you can't afford to be doing is making a loss. And so I think what politicians need to do is say, we've gotta sequence this right. The same thing as with education. It's no good having a million university graduates if a country isn't literate enough to have an industrial base, you've gotta have the literacy first.And equally, it's no good having electricity rolled out to every household when there are no factories for people to go and get the jobs they need to be able to pay the electricity bill. And it's not easy. I, I totally understand it's not an easy situation for anyone to be in. The difficulty is [that] because it's not easy, too many political leaders will take what appears to be the easy option of saying, "I tell you what, let's just go and borrow a load of dollars offshore. Nigeria's going to go and issue a lot of dollar debt and we'll use that to try and sort these problems out." Kenya's done the same, Ghana's done the same, Pakistan's done the same. And the risk then is that you end up in default situations. So that feeds into one of the other chapters in the book as well.But I think it's very difficult. I think realistically governments need to say, what can we do here? And this is how long it's going to take. And it's going to be not a five-year story, it's going be a 20-year story, a 30-year story to get it right. And people, sadly, need to be patient, which is hard; when for generations people have been waiting for things to get much, much better and little progress has been made, relatively little progress has been made compared to Asia and that causes a lot of political frustration. I think.Tobi;I mean, speaking about Asia and I mean your point about taking away the right to protest, I think Africa and Nigeria sort of missed that window when we had military governments everywhere. So, uh, let me give you one experience I've had in trying to discuss your book with friends. So I get two reactions to the fertility section.It's almost automatic, you know, when you discuss fertility being at a certain level and I try to, you know, successfully argue your point, you get two strands of reactions in my experience, one goes immediately to the China issue - the one-child policy; that, "oh, so are you trying to say we should do what China did?" The other slightly more technical objection I get goes to the relationship between population growth and economic growth that is quite pervasive in the growth literature. Did you also experience that while writing the book and debating with colleagues?Charlie;Now I'll take each point in turn. Um, the China one-child policy story helps explain this massive rise in Chinese savings and then their very strong growth. What I'm trying to show in the book, of course, is that every rich country has seen a fertility decline. And what I'm arguing is probably the right sort of level for countries to aim for is about two to three kids on average. I don't care if people have five kids or one kid, it's just as a country the average of two to three kids is consistent with a very high, well, a big jump in the level of sayings. And with those savings, you can then industrialize and grow, and grow fast. Um, China I think actually made a mistake. I think China got it wrong by going for the one-child policy because they kind of turbocharged that story, that story that every rich country has got, of lower fertility, it took a really long time in Europe. I mean it took a really, really long time in Europe and that's why Europe had the slowest growth of any industrial revolution. It was done faster by the communism [they had] in Russia and they did faster growth and we've done even faster in China. But the consequence of this one-child policy and what the Chinese have discovered is it's bloody hard to get the fertility rate back up again once you've had one kid. I was talking to a Chinese professor on a plane back from Asia once and she was saying all of her friends, they can't get married, they can't stay married. They get married and they can't stay married because they're all used to being a one-child kind of princess or prince in the family who gets everything they want and then they try married life and they discover as you might well know, that you never get everything you want in a marriage, and you have to compromise.And it's certainly created a problem now that China can't get the kids, they can't raise the fertility level and it's not just China that's discovered that once you've got a low fertility rate, too low, I think of one, you have a problem raising it. Again, Italy's had the same problem, Iran, uh, Russia. So I think China did it too fast. And you certainly don't need to do it and loads of other countries show you that just aiming for that two to three kids figure really helps your economy and gets you onto the path to being middle-income and then a rich country. So I don't think you need to do the China one child. No. Um, the second issue, the population growth versus economic growth. What I show, what we did in this was we looked back at every country's growth rate since 1960 and I compared the per capita GDP growth, the per personal growth of an economy, it's the best way to measure how well an economy itself is really doing. And I compared that growth rate against the share of adults to kids that I was talking to you about a little earlier.Tobi;Yeah.Charlie;And where it's 50-50 roughly, between adults and kids, per capita GDP grows at 1% and that was the story of Asia in the sixties and seventies. It's still the story for a good number of countries including Nigeria today. So per capita GDP growth is about 1% when half your population can't work because they're kids. But once you get two-thirds of the population being adults, your average per capita growth in lower-income countries by half of America's wealth level, so not even lower-income, lower or middle-income countries, your per capita growth, and it averages three to 5% a year. So the structure of your population tells you what your per capita GDP growth is. So it's just... I can't see that there's any other way to explain this than you've gotta get that fertility rate down first before you can start to get the high per capita GDP growth. Um, and it's connected to the savings, of course; cause once you've got two kids instead of six, you're saving money in the bank, the bank starts to have more cash to lend out. There's more money for lending for investment. The government can borrow more cheaply so it can build infrastructure, roads and rail, electricity and cheap electricity cause interest rates are low cause the savings are high because most families are able to put some money aside at the end of the week. But that doesn't happen when 50% of the population are kids. They're not earning any money, they're not saving anything and the poor parents are trying to manage to feed five, six kids on average. You know, they've got nothing left at the end of the week to put into a bank.So the bank's got no cash. So interest rates are really high cause there's no money in the bank. Um, so money's really expensive. So the government can't afford to invest in infrastructure and if it does build electricity it has to charge a lot of money cause it's having to pay a lot of interest on the debt it's taken on. So to me, I've yet to find someone demolish the argument and uh, you know, it could happen.Tobi;Yeah.Charlie;But so far it seems you've got to get the fertility rate down first if you want to get fast growth. Now if you don't want to grow at three, four, 5% a year, you could do it really slowly like Europe did and you grow at say, one and a half, two, eventually, you get from European farming in 1800 to factories that are producing not great stuff by 1900, a hundred years later. But when I'm looking at Nigeria today, I don't want Nigeria to be waiting a hundred years to be doing what Europe took a hundred years to do. I also don't think the Chinese model of it taking 30 years, 20, 30 years but then having a population problem of being too old, I don't think that's the right solution either. But there's somewhere in between. At the moment though, Nigeria's on that long growth story, it's not yet ready for the faster growth storyTobi;On the China question, um, thinking about your answer there, is extremely low fertility or what they say "fertility below the replacement rate" a feature of the kind of explosive growth 30, 35, 40-year trajectory that we've seen in Asia. Because if you look at Korea, Korea even have worse demographic numbers than China and there was no draconian population policy, but it's kind of gone through this explosive growth phase that is even faster and bigger than China's.Charlie;Well, it's been going on for longer. So what the Koreans got right was they raised their adult literacy rate to, you know, they said about 90% by 1960. China, despite being communist and communists tend to say they really appreciate education, didn't get to over 70% literacy until 1990, sometime in the early 1990s, which is 25, 35 years later than Korea. Uh, so Korea was already booming in 1970 at a time when China was having the catastrophic mistakes of the cultural revolution and really bad growth and people feared mass famine. Well many, many did die in China in the sixties. So what I would argue is that Korea had a slower fertility decline and the growth rates were not as fast as China's but they've been growing for 50, 60 years already. So Korea's two to three times richer than China is today. But as you say, they're so ageing that they're gonna be the oldest country in the world by 2030.And what's gonna get interesting then, and I can't really answer this in the book cause we haven't seen it yet, but what's interesting about Korea and we're going to have to watch it carefully, is that you are going to end up with, not 70% adults and 30% kids, it'll be less and less working-age adults, maybe 60%, I dunno maybe eventually 50% and it'll be 50% kids and old age pensioners who can't work. And my guess is that Korean growth is going to slow back to about the 1% per capita growth that Nigeria's got at the moment because Korea's going to be too old. You know, and that's not something that I think people should be thinking about or worrying about. [People should be thinking about] Pakistan, East Africa, Southern Africa, West Africa at the moment. It's [Korea is] just not a...you know, that's a problem to worry about in 50, 60 years. But it is going to be interesting to watch what does happen to growth in really old countries. Um, can pensioners actually still do work? You know, maybe they end up retiring at 70 or 75 or 80, I dunno. It's gonna be quite interesting to see.Tobi;So I mean the question then is, uh, for countries that have fertility rates that are higher than what you described in the book.Charlie;Yeah.Tobi;It then becomes how do we get it to the point where domestic savings start going up, interest rate for the domestic investment environment then benefits from that virtuous cycle. You talked about access to uh, reproductive interventions like contraception, also education, which takes us to where we started this conversation from, especially the education of women and girls, generally. I was taking a look at David Le Bris recently where he was talking about equality between siblings and inequality between siblings and how it affects the overall capital formation, whether it's physical capital or human capital in the society. So my question then is, do you see individual sort of personalized household decision-making affecting this more or it is sort of a national policy thing?Charlie;When it's something as important as family, you know, the individual decisions matter a huge amount. And as I said earlier, I've got no issues with anyone doing what they choose to do. But that big family story, I was just talking to a former minister, actually, of a... former finance minister of a country and he's got five kids, he's saying that he's been able to help fund them go to university, but he can't afford to help them buy a house cause he just hasn't got the cash. And I thought that was a really interesting example of even in a wealthier country, you know, it still matters how big that family is. You know, when I looked into this on how do you get the fertility rate down and there's been quite a lot written about it. I don't have a magic or a single answer, but the theories are first: girls if they're staying at school until they're 18, versus girls who leave school at 13. If you leave school at 13, perhaps you have your first kid at 14, maybe a second kid at 17, third kid at 20. But if you stay at school until you're 18, perhaps the first kid's at 20. So already you've reduced the fertility rate by two just by keeping girls at school. And the key figure, but just kind of remind, well tell people is the key figure is at about three to four kids per woman on average, the banking system has got deposits cash in it of about 35% of GDP, at four to five kids, it's around 30, 25 to 30. At five to six kids, which is where Nigeria is, it's about 20% of GDP. Um, so 20, 30, you know, these sort of levels. If you get to two to three kids though, if you get it below three kids, it more than doubles to about 60% of GDP.That's when banks suddenly have loads of cash. When banks have got loads of cash, there's loads of lending, suddenly access to finance isn't a problem anymore. So how do you get it below three kids? So you educate girls, there's an incentive when women are educated for them to work cause they can start to make decent money in a textile factory that you can't do unless you've got that literacy. Um, the government just telling people that low fertility is a good thing is shown to have some success. From Indonesia to India, these kinds of government campaigns suggesting lower fertility rates have made a difference. The third thing, which really surprised me cause it's such a strong correlation, is [to] stop kids [from] dying. And I was pretty upset, actually, to see the numbers where, for Nigeria, you've got a 10% chance, just over a 10% chance of dying before the age of five because you're born in Nigeria. And when I was comparing that to Covid - which the world spent, what, trillions trying to fight - with a fatality rate of about one or 2%, you think of those with more than a 10% chance of dying just before the age of five in Nigeria. Anyway, it's kind of shockingly high, but when you have such a high chance of losing a child, you tend to have more children and the correlation is really quite strong. So, if you can try and address infant, [and] young child mortality rates, which doesn't cost that much, you can see countries with Nigeria's wealth level that have a mortality rate of not over 10%, but five or even 3%. And usually, countries with such a low mortality rate then have a much lower fertility rate as well. So, people tend to have less kids when they are more confident that all their kids are going to survive childhood. So, some investment in basic healthcare for children, education of girls, contraception availability, yes it does help, and government information campaigns. You put those things together and then you get a country like Bangladesh. Bangladesh which had the same population as Nigeria about 15 years ago. But today Nigeria's got tens of millions more. But Bangladesh is growing as fast as India. Bangladesh's per capita GDP is over $2,000. And it keeps on growing at six, seven, 8% every year. Because they have on average two kids per woman, they've got savings, they don't have much foreign debt because they don't need to borrow dollars from abroad to fund their growth, because they've got their own savings, because the fertility rate is low. Muslim Bangladesh: tremendous success story over the last two or three decades.Tobi;You sort of made allowances for countries that can't quite get their savings right up to the levels where they can get the desired domestic savings and really positively affect their investment environment in a big way. And you talked about debt in the book, which would be familiar to anybody that's been in the new cycle about Nigeria currently, which is that government revenue has collapsed. Debt servicing is rapidly approaching a hundred percent of what the government can collect. And it's only a matter of time before we are talking about a debt crisis. But, like you said, a debt crisis is, like, unavoidable if you're trying to grow and you don't have to requisite domestic savings to sort of mitigate that. But this inevitably brings in the question of debt restructuring which, again, some would also argue does not help you grow. So, in terms of just the sheer macroeconomics management of this, how do you go about it?Charlie;It's tough. The book's arguing, obviously, that a whole chunk of this stuff is really long term. You got to get the education right. So, you've got to have enough teachers and that takes, well, at best Korea did it in 15, 20 years. But even if you've got the education, then you've got to get the fertility rate down. And that takes at best 10 years to get it down by about two kids per woman. Nigeria's at 5.3 kids or so at the moment. It needs to be below three to have the local savings. So, we're talking at least 15 years, even if every priority was made today to try and improve education, do all this reproductive education and so on. So, the governments then have the choice of what do you do? I mean, if you're going to wait 15 years, you can grow at 1% a year per person. But you'll find the population is getting pretty cross because you've got all these other countries in the world growing at three, four, 5% per person every year. You know, why is my country growing at one [percent]? So, the politicians then...[it] becomes so attractive to go out and borrow and, you know, every country, not every single one, but the vast majority of debt defaults in the second half of the 20th century were in high fertility countries. The fertility rate I think was around, on average, five - five kids per woman was the average fertility rate in countries that defaulted in the second half of the 20th century. Wherever they were in the world. A lot of them were in Latin America in the debt crisis of 1980s. So firstly, debt crises are really common in high fertility countries because governments say I want to speed up my growth and they borrow when the markets let them.And we've certainly seen that in Africa in the last 10 years too. And then they borrow too much and then they go into default and then they can lose maybe a decade. And that is what happened in Latin America in the 1980s. But the alternative is to only grow at 1% a year. And yeah, you can avoid debt default. I'm not saying every high fertility country defaults. I'm saying almost all the countries that have defaulted are high fertility. So, you can settle for the low growth but if you don't want to settle for the low growth, the debt becomes a very attractive way to try and get faster growth. But it causes a problem. I end up finding roughly two other ways that you can try.Tobi;Okay.Charlie;And grow faster. Is it okay to jump on to those?Tobi;Yeah, go ahead please.Charlie;Yeah. First is to try and bring in as much foreign investment as you can. Cause you haven't got enough local savings, you don't want to take on too much debt cause eventually you'll default. So, you can try and make yourself very attractive for foreign investors. Foreign direct investors. The only problem with that model is that those foreign direct investors do also want their cheap electricity and the good infrastructure that unfortunately high fertility countries haven't got the money to pay for. So, it's difficult to get in a lot of foreign direct investment. Foreign direct investment in China, I was just reading a really good book by David Lubin, who's the chief economist of Citi for Emerging Markets and he did a book called Dance of the Trillions. Highly recommend, it's brilliant on emerging markets. And he says FDI suddenly started in China in the 1990s. Now, I know why. My book is explaining why I think, which is you finally had a literate population, 70% literacy and you also had the low fertility rate. So, you had the high savings, you had the good infrastructure. But the FDI didn't come 10 years before into China. It only really picked up in the 1990s. So, the point of then is, I mean yeah, try and get some [FDI] if you can, but the last option that I can see other than to just, perhaps, try to go full Stalinist, kind of communist, take control of every part of the economy. But even that still education and low fertility really helps... Um, the last option which any country can do is to run a current account surplus, I think. Have a currency level that's so cheap that you are running a trade surplus. A current account surplus, which is obviously trade plus services and remittances and so on.If you've got a surplus on that current account, you are bringing dollars into the economy and those dollars help reduce interest rates. And Nigeria saw that actually in 2005, six, seven and eight when the oil price was booming. Nigeria had that flood of dollars coming into the economy. Interest rates were really low below inflation and investment was relatively cheap and easy to finance. Now it's a problem to manage when it's a commodity-driven boom because commodities then bust. So, all that flood of money that came in suddenly disappeared again, you know, once the oil price collapsed there wasn't that current account surplus anymore. But if you run a cheap currency policy to make sure you always run a current account surplus, then that helps give you that supply of savings that you can then use to start investing. So that seems to me one of the few ways that a low-income country that's got not enough local savings, doesn't want to wait forever until its fertility rate's down [and] low enough to build the domestic savings, this is one way that looks sustainable that can bring in some foreign cash to help support growth.Tobi;But one minor aside on FDI and you can really correct me here if I'm wrong, wouldn't that really be a bit unstable? Because if you have loads of FDI, if other indicators are really working in your favour and at the slightest hint of a crisis, all that money then flows out.Charlie;Yeah. Well, I'll just differentiate between foreign direct investment and foreign portfolio investment. And, again, David Lubin's book is very good on this because the Washington consensus, which is this set of policies that were drawn up by policy makers around 1989, 1990, it said countries should welcome foreign direct investment. Building factories that it's pretty hard to move out of the country, that that should be welcomed. But when the original guys who drew up the Washington Consensus wrote down the kind of 10 principles, they weren't that keen on foreign portfolio investment. This is the hot money that will include a lot of my investors who will come in and buy shares in companies in the Nigerian Stock Exchange and might come in and buy bonds. And I think it's fair to say that that money can leave in times of trouble and doesn't really support...isn't necessarily as supportive [of growth] and that money we count on the capital account because it is foreign capital.What I was talking about on the current account surplus was obviously the trade surplus, the remittances, the services and so on. So, I think it's more debatable. I think a number of countries have restricted foreign portfolio flows into equity market or the bond market. And if they've got other things going for them, like a low fertility rate, they can kind of get away with that. Um, what I'm highlighting is that for some countries they just don't have that choice. And when America was short of capital in the 19th century, it was British capital that went over and built their railways, that bought all the shares in their infrastructure companies. The Brits owned America for much of the 19th century and then the French actually owned most of Russia. Uh, the railways and the ports and some of the industry, the coal mines [were] very significantly owned by French investors, portfolio funds, and portfolio guys are there to make money as well. You know, they're there to make profit and if you're making good profit, five, 10% a year or whatever sitting in Nigerian equity market, people will stay, and it won't leave. They'll be happy to stay there for many, many years as people are and have been doing in India, actually, since India's education fertility and electricity numbers have all come together in the last 10 years in a really good way. Foreign portfolio guys are saying, "Hey, we wanna put our money into the Indian stock market too." And Indian shares are pretty expensive right now because of that. But the money doesn't want to leave. It'll leave when policy mistakes are made but fundamentally doesn't want to leave. However, I don't deny that there is a reasonable argument you can make to say we're going to choose foreign direct investment, we're going to be more restrictive on foreign portfolio investment. Because that can be more volatile. It can leave quicker. And I wouldn't argue with that. Well, I mean we could debate it, but I think it's harder to prove that you must have foreign portfolio investments to thrive. I think the current account surplus is a better policy choice because it's in your control. Foreign portfolio investors and what they do, that's not in your control.Tobi;One question that stayed with me throughout your book, which is a bit silent in the book itself, maybe it's implied, you can tell me, is that it's really difficult to find a country at any particular point where all these three factors align at the same time. Where you have the requisite adult literacy rate, electricity and fertility, they rarely align at the same point in time in the history of any one country. Because your book did not really distinguish between any particular political preference or institutional arrangements, which I like that, but what institutional arrangement favours the consistency for all these factors to sort of come together, uh, in the economic history basically of a country. Because we know that political leaders tend to favour what benefits their ambition at any particular point in time, you know? And a lot of these things are investments that do pay off in the long run, you know? Like we talked about on savings, a lot of political leaders would want to borrow a lot of money and then leave the debt crisis to the next administration.Charlie;Yeah. Yeah. Happens a lot.Tobi;Yeah. You know, and so many other things, whether you are investing in electricity or education or whatever, they don't really want to do the hard work. They want to do the easy stuff and just leave it to the next guy.So, what institutional arrangements have you found in your observation and study of this that favours the patient consistent build-up to the alignment of these three factors?Charlie;I think it's really, um, it's kind of interesting actually because in each chapter I try and say which countries are at the right place for industrialization, education, which countries are at the right place for electricity, and which countries are at the right place for fertility. Perhaps I didn't properly bring that together in one chapter at the end to say, "so, who's the fast growth story?" But right now, the countries that have brought them together are Vietnam, India, Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and I think those five countries, Morocco actually six, um, those six countries should be the countries that will show the really good growth for the next 30 to 40 years. Um it's going to be great. And I'm then trying to highlight who's closest to joining them on a 10 year view. Um, Pakistan and Egypt both got big debt problems right now, but five to 10 years they could be joining that group as well and Ghana and actually Kenya and I would argue southern Nigeria could be, could be there in the 2030s.Um, so I am trying to say when they come together. The question you are asking, though, about institutions or perhaps leadership and so on, I think is a really important one because I guess this book in lots of ways is an argument against Why Nations Fail, which was a really interesting book; and [it] said it is all about institutions and the right institutions and that's why if you walk a kilometre across the US border into Mexico, things are run so very differently. It's got to be the institutions, that book argues, that makes the difference between a country succeeding or not. And what I'm arguing is that I don't think that's true. I think you appear to have the good institutions when everything else is running well and you appear to have the terrible institutions when you don't have the education or you don't have the electricity or you don't have the low fertility or worst of all, you haven't got any of them.So, a country that hasn't got any of them, like Niger, Chad, Somalia, you know, these are countries in a terrible place. But I'm saying that they can't have good institutions cause there's no money in the economy, there are not enough educated people in the economy. There's just no way that you're going to get a good setup in those countries. And actually, even at the beginning when, at the first 10 years or so, when you've got these things all coming together, you still don't think the institutions are good. You know, you go to India today, people don't think, "wow, this is a brilliantly run civil service. It's so uncorrupt[ed]." Such wonderful institutions everywhere. They don't say that. They don't say that about Philippines' Duterte, the president who's been just recently retired, by people who were worried the institutions found it difficult to control his populism. And yet Philippines boomed under Duterte, and India's boomed under Modi and countries like Korea boomed even with a level of corruption that means in the last 10 years we've seen four presidents go to jail for corruption.Um, so I argue that the better institutions come afterwards and that's why four presidents have gone to jail in Korea because they're now getting the institutions better. And I read a really good book about why democracies die by some American academics about three or four years ago now. I recommend it. And they pointed out that Latin America, across Latin America, they just copied the American institutions. They said, look, what's working in the Americas is North America. It's United States, they've got it right. Let's copy their institutions, we'll put them into my country, be it Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, whoever. And then they discovered that actually if the human capital is not as advanced, people will undermine the institutions. And you arguably saw Trump try it in the United States itself, but the human capital and the rest of the place was good enough to stop him from going too far.This is all debatable stuff, but you know, this is... So, I think the institutions do work when everything else has been working for some time and before then it's very hard to argue that the institutions work or can make a huge difference. I think the fundamental economic reality of are you growing at 1% a year or three to 5% a year per capita? That isn't about the institutions. Having said all of that? I think there's no doubt that you can have, if you're lucky, very lucky, really good leadership. A leader like Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, who has got vision, understands or is lucky, but he prioritized education and all the rest, who gets it right and takes the country onto a new path. When I think of some of the most obvious successes, a lot of them are small Singapore, Hong Kong, even Taiwan really.And maybe it's just tougher to do it in a country the size of Nigeria with over 200 million people or, or uh, India with over a billion, which is why it took India so long or Brazil. But I remember even the French president, Charles de Gaulle, I think in the sixties or seventies said, "how is it possible to govern a country with 350 types of cheese?".Um, and in India you'd say, "how can you govern a country of over a billion people with that many different dialects, different customs, different local cultures?" Um, and it is hard, but once you get these fundamentals of education, electricity and fertility right, suddenly, it looks like you can govern well. So, I want to think there is a role for good leadership, um, and it can make a difference and it does help. I just think history's telling us over the last 300 years that we can't count on luck and that lucky guy who happens to be the right leader to come in, sometimes woman who can come in, and push reform in the right way. What we can count on is that if you get the education, electricity and fertility numbers right, you will get out of poverty, you will get better off and your kids will have a much, much better future and your grandchildren even more so.So, I think that's probably one area [where] my book differs from many in the last 10, 15 years is saying, "I don't think it is so much about the things that we all like to pay attention to [like] who's going to win the next election and what are their different policies going to be?" And you know, most of the time I'm arguing it doesn't really make as much difference as we'd like to think.Tobi;Now, another point that came in the later chapters in the book, which I found interesting, and which is quite also a bit of a political issue right now, surrounds migration. Uh, a lot of Nigerians are leaving, I mean it's become even a social media trend and meme - "who is...Charlie;The Japa trend.Tobi;Who is leaving next, uh, yeah, yeah, Japa. So, like, who is leaving next, you know? Right. But you argued in the book that as countries grow richer, there will be more migration not less because what you often hear is that the reason why people are living is because the country is so bad and they're looking for a way to make better lives for themselves, which is true anyway. So, and that the way to really stop this migration wave is if you can improve the domestic economy and then suddenly you see a drop, but you are saying no, um, we are actually going to see more migration as countries grow richer. Now, how do you suppose that this can be resolved with the current, should I say, political environment in Europe and to some extent in America that is increasingly seeing migration from poorer countries as a problem, right? Is it a case of as countries grow richer, then the migration demographic just, sort of, changes to more educated people leaving and less tension and political rancour about migration?Charlie;Um, I doubt, I mean, I doubt that these political problems about immigration in Europe and The States are going to disappear. Cause we've seen election results just in the last two, three weeks in Italy with the far right becoming dominant, in Sweden as well. Where they took in a huge amount of, I think, it was Syrian refugees and before that Somalian refugees. Um, and you're trying to integrate people coming from a country with very low adult literacy into, particularly in Somalia's case, into a country like Sweden, which had a hundred percent, nearly a hundred percent adult literacy already by 1900. That's an integration process that takes generations. As America's still struggling 150 years after civil war, still struggling to manage integration. So, I think that political problem is going to carry on, but it is going to get more acute for Europe, um, and eventually United States because Europe is this aging old continent that hasn't got enough people.I was in Germany two weeks ago and there, there was a surprising number of industrialists saying "we must have a much more open border situation." I said, well, you know, that'll be really interesting to see if you do that because the backlash that we're seeing elsewhere says there is a limit to what countries politics seem ready to accept. And, I think, I even think the Brexit vote was about that. It was about the East European migration into the UK, which had the most open approach to east European countries from Poland and Hungary and Czech coming to the UK. Every other country in Europe kept in a border, well, restrictions, but the UK didn't. And I think that backfired on the UK when it had a Brexit vote that said, "oh, we have too many Polish people eating sausage in our supermarkets. And I, I, yeah, I mean really people cared.I don't understand it. I love the variety obviously, but while I don't understand, while I don't feel the same, [some] people do. So, I think that's the political problem. And even educated people who are needed by the economy might find it hard to integrate, say, beyond the bigger urban centres. I was really shocked when I was writing the book and I was looking at what happens when you've got an educated population but a high fertility rate. What happens across history is people leave. Cause there aren't enough jobs at home. Cause the fertility rate's so high, there's thousands, millions of people coming into the workforce. The savings aren't there to help create the jobs. So, they leave and it's the Philippines, you know, in the 20th century, it's Pakistanis now, where a number of people are well educated, not everyone sadly. But 150 years ago, it was Ireland, and it was Norway, and they were sending their excess population to America, and it caused huge controversy.There was, you know, rioting between, kind of, the Italian immigrants and the Irish immigrants in New York. T

What do high education and low fertility rates have in common? According to today's guest, Charlie Robertson, they are both positively correlated with economic growth. In today's episode, Charlie shares the reasons why he believes that countries that don't get their fertility rates down to below 3 children per woman and those that don't have adult literacy rates above 70% are doomed to remain trapped in poverty. Join us for a round-the-world trip where Charlie delves into the history of South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the West, and offers his explanation for why some countries have flourished while others have floundered. Charlie is the Global Chief Economist at Renaissance Capital and the author of The Fastest Billion and The Time-Travelling Economist.   Key Points From This Episode:   •   Understanding economic trends in Africa over the past few years. •   Factors that lead to the creation of urban slums. •   Charlie's hypothesis on the link between fertility and economic growth. •   What Charlie sees as the optimal fertility rate. •   Basic adult literacy rates in Sub-Saharan African countries when they were decolonized. •   A statistic that highlights the progress that has been made on the education front globally. •   Why education is imperative for growth. •   The correlation between education and fertility. •   The importance of correctly sequencing educational priorities. •   An explanation of the economic success being experienced in the Philippines. •   Comparing the rate of economic growth in India and China. •   Reasons why Pakistan hasn't kept up with India's levels of economic growth. •   Explaining Sri Lanka's downfall. •   Charlie's thoughts on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. •   The energy financing issues facing African countries. •   Challenges of using green energy as a baseload power source. •   Why Charlie believes governments should be focusing on providing electricity to factories rather than homes. •   Benefits of decentralized energy systems. •   The potential of municipal-level financing approaches.   Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:   https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlie-robertson-6814751/?originalSubdomain=uk (Charlie Robertson on LinkedIn) https://www.rencap.com/ (Renaissance Capital) https://www.amazon.com/Fastest-Billion-Africas-Economic-Revolution/dp/0957420307 (The Fastest Billion) https://www.indiebound.org/search/book?keys=the+time+travelling+economist (The Time-Travelling Economist) https://www.chartercitiesinstitute.org/ (Charter Cities Institute) https://www.facebook.com/Charter-Cities-Institute-424204888015721/ (Charter Cities Institute on Facebook) https://twitter.com/CCIdotCity (Charter Cities Institute on Twitter)

Mr. Milewski has spent his career in various aspects of the mining industry, including as a company director, advisor, founder and investor.  In particular, he has been active in the battery metals industry including investing in cobalt and actively trading physical cobalt. In 2016, one of the industry's leading publications, “The Mining Journal,” named him as a Future Mining Leader. In 2017, Anthony accepted an invitation from the London Metals Exchange to join the LME Cobalt Committee which includes representatives from the largest mining and commodities companies globally to represent the interests of the industry to the board of directors the LME. Mr. Milewski has managed numerous mining investments at various stages of development, including exploration, development, production and turnaround situations, and across a broad range of commodities. With the June 2018 close of Nickel 28's A$10 million equity investment in Highlands Pacific for resulting ownership of 13%, Mr. Milewski was appointed to the Board of Directors of Highlands Pacific.  He has also served as a director of both public and private companies and has been seconded as interim CEO on multiple occasions.  Mr. Milewski was a member of the investment team at Pala Investments Limited.  Prior to joining Pala Investments, he worked at Firebird Management LLC. Mr. Milewski previously worked at Renaissance Capital and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP in Moscow, where he focused on advisory and transactional work in metals & mining and oil & gas sectors.  He has lived and worked in Africa and Russia, including a year as a Fulbright scholar, and has spent considerable time in Central Asia. Mr. Milewski holds a B.A. in Russian history from Brigham Young University, an M.A. in Russian and Central Asian Studies from the University of Washington, and a J.D. from the University of Washington.  He holds an LLM from the Russian Academy of Sciences. 2:20 - Anthony's focus on energy transition and decarbonization 3:20 - Human's carbon footprints 5:48 - Global warming and pollution 6:35 - Carbon credits - what are they and how do you get them? 11:30 - Carbon credits and Wall Street 14:25 - Carbon credit money markets  23:10 - Doing more with less while making the world a better place 25:10 - Carbon credits and farming 27:00 - Vertical farming 28:00 - Connecting with Anthony  

Mr. Milewski has spent his career in various aspects of the mining industry, including as a company director, advisor, founder and investor.  In particular, he has been active in the battery metals industry including investing in cobalt and actively trading physical cobalt. In 2016, one of the industry's leading publications, “The Mining Journal,” named him as a Future Mining Leader. In 2017, Anthony accepted an invitation from the London Metals Exchange to join the LME Cobalt Committee which includes representatives from the largest mining and commodities companies globally to represent the interests of the industry to the board of directors the LME. Mr. Milewski has managed numerous mining investments at various stages of development, including exploration, development, production and turnaround situations, and across a broad range of commodities. With the June 2018 close of Nickel 28's A$10 million equity investment in Highlands Pacific for resulting ownership of 13%, Mr. Milewski was appointed to the Board of Directors of Highlands Pacific.  He has also served as a director of both public and private companies and has been seconded as interim CEO on multiple occasions.  Mr. Milewski was a member of the investment team at Pala Investments Limited.  Prior to joining Pala Investments, he worked at Firebird Management LLC. Mr. Milewski previously worked at Renaissance Capital and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP in Moscow, where he focused on advisory and transactional work in metals & mining and oil & gas sectors.  He has lived and worked in Africa and Russia, including a year as a Fulbright scholar, and has spent considerable time in Central Asia. Mr. Milewski holds a B.A. in Russian history from Brigham Young University, an M.A. in Russian and Central Asian Studies from the University of Washington, and a J.D. from the University of Washington.  He holds an LLM from the Russian Academy of Sciences. 2:20 - Anthony's focus on energy transition and decarbonization 3:20 - Human's carbon footprints 5:48 - Global warming and pollution 6:35 - Carbon credits - what are they and how do you get them? 11:30 - Carbon credits and Wall Street 14:25 - Carbon credit money markets  23:10 - Doing more with less while making the world a better place 25:10 - Carbon credits and farming 27:00 - Vertical farming 28:00 - Connecting with Anthony  

We are living in times of uncertainty and great challenges. The economic systems as we know them are shaken to the core and the ecology of the entire planet is threatened due to our doing. There is the saying that a tiger can not change its stripes, meaning we can not change our essential nature. I do believe in the power and the possibility of profound change that lies within each one of us. Currently we are witnessing a dramatic shift within human consciousness in the midst of these tumultuous times. And evolve we must, if we are to remain as a viable species on a healthy planet.  The story of today's guest is one of profound change. On the outside Adam Hall had achieved the American Dream. He was a financial power broker on the pinnacle of material achievement. He had founded three successful real estate development companies, before personal devastation forced him to reassess his life. Adam met his misery by undertaking a life-changing metamorphosis that altered his mindset from Earth Conqueror to Earth Keeper, becoming an author, speaker, futurist, impact investor and conservationist. As the CEO of Renaissance Capital, Adam raised $1.5 billion in capital investment helping conserve natural landscapes in-perpetuity.  He spent two decades as an impact investor dedicated to the quadruple bottom line: People, Planet, Profits with Purpose -- and founded the The EarthKeeper Alliance.Adam has dedicated himself to fostering conscious evolution. Through his books — Divine Genius: The Unlearning Curve, The Little Book of Genius: Abundance and the first book in his autobiographical trilogy The Earthkeeper: Undeveloping the Future Adam continues share ways to elevate consciousness and create optimal inner wellness. He is the founder and CEO of the Genius Studio, creator of the Genius Process and works with accomplished leaders who are seeking more contentment, alignment and personal meaning in their lives. Committed to helping others get in touch with their innate power for personal, professional, and planetary transformation, Adam's mission in life is to help change a billion minds about how we do business and our relationship with ourselves, each other and the planet. In this episode with Adam Hall, you'll discover: -Changing ideals regarding the archetypal warrior...04:15 -From Earth Conqueror to Earth Keeper...07:45 -Realizing the conventional definition of "success" isn't everything success entails...14:08 -How we're perceived by ourself and others when we truly seek Wisdom to guide our lives...18:50 -Why the "unlearning" curve is just as important as the "learning" curve...25:52 -Forgiveness is a process, not an event...32:35 -Terminal seriousness v. terminal joy...36:08 -Reframing thought processes regarding ethical business dealings during tumultuous times...41:05 -Connecting with community to find inner peace in times of crisis and chaos...52:05 -Predictions for humanity in the next 10-20 years...1:00:25 -The difference between "destiny" and "fate"...1:07:38 -How to get out of this lifetime alive...1:10:54 -Adam's most profound personal practice...1:14:45 And much more... Resources mentioned: https://www.adamhall.solutions (Adam's website) BOOKS https://www.amazon.com/Divine-Genius-Unlearning-Adam-Hall-ebook/dp/B097NKX9V1/ (Divine Genius, The Unlearning Curve) https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00NP73N9A/ (The Earth Keeper: Undeveloping the Future) https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09LJXD9DM/ (The Little Book of Genius: Abundance) Guest's social handles: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamhallsolutions/ (LINKEDIN) https://www.facebook.com/EarthKeeperAdam/ (Facebook)

Charlie Robertson – Global Chief Economist, Renaissance Capital

Melanie Johnson & Jenn Foster owners of Elite Online Publishing, interview Adam C. Hall about how to empower and manifest your intentions into the future and about his book: Divine Genius: The Unlearning Curve.  Adam C. Hall is committed to helping individuals, companies and organizations unlearn the beliefs, behaviors, and habits that shield them from discovering their purpose, mission and cause. He is an author, speaker, futurist, social architect, impact investor, advisor and conservationist—with 3 decades as a CEO & serial entrepreneur-- He was the founder of three successful real estate development companies, As the CEO of Renaissance Capital, Adam raised $1.5 billion in capital investment. He conserved premiere natural landscapes in-perpetuity. Today he is the founder/CEO of the Genius Studio, creator of the Genius Process and works particularly with accomplished men and women who are seeking more contentment, alignment and personal meaning in their lives. Learn More Here

Get ready to Unlearn! On Power Your Life Radio find out how Unlearning can help you access your most Divine Self! Adam C. Hall is an author, speaker, futurist, social architect, impact investor, advisor and conservationist.  He's committed to helping individuals unlearn beliefs, behaviors, and habits that shield them from discovering their Divine Genius, the key to acknowledging and activating their true Divine selves. In his new book Divine Genius: The Unlearning Curve, Adam shares the 13 Universal Wisdom Teachings and the Genius Process that lead to his transformation. He was the founder of three successful real estate development companies, before personal and professional devastation forced him to reevaluate everything in his life. He began to integrate a deeply spiritual, more authentic and natural approach, becoming a trained shaman, and teacher of The Course of Miracles. It was then Adam focused on creating a company that protected the planet, particularly open space at risk of development. As the CEO of Renaissance Capital, Adam raised $1.5+ billion in capital investment to rescue and conserve premiere natural landscapes. He spent two decades as an impact investor dedicated to the quadruple bottom line: People, Planet, Profits with Purpose -- and founded the EarthKeeper Alliance. He also contributes to replanting the earth through the organization 8 Billion Trees. As a believer of lifelong learning and unlearning, Adam is committed to helping others get in touch with their innate power for personal, professional, and planetary transformation.

Adam is committed to helping individuals unlearn the beliefs and habits that shield them from discovering their Divine Genius, the key to acknowledging and activating their true Divine selves. In his new book Divine Genius: The Unlearning Curve, he shares the 13 Universal Wisdom Teachings and the Genius Process that lead to his transformation. He is passionate about sharing this information with the world. An author, speaker, futurist, social architect, impact investor, advisor, and conservationist, Adam began his professional career as a self-described Earth Conqueror, ultimately turning to the role of EarthKeeper. He was the founder of three successful real estate development companies before personal and professional devastation forced him to reevaluate everything in his life. Ultimately, he began to integrate a deeply spiritual and more authentic and natural approach, becoming a trained shaman, and teacher of The Course of Miracles. It was then he chose to focus on creating a company that protected the planet, particularly open space at risk of development. As the CEO of Renaissance Capital, Adam raised $1.5+ billion in capital investment to rescue and conserve premiere natural landscapes. He spent two decades as an impact investor dedicated to the quadruple bottom line: People, Planet, Profits with Purpose -- and founded the EarthKeeper Alliance. Adam has dedicated himself to fostering Conscious Evolution and culture over the past two decades. Through his books, his 40 keynotes, and the more than 60 radio and television show interviews he has done, Adam continues to seek ways to elevate consciousness. To purchase Divine Genius: The Unlearning Curve: https://amzn.to/3Gl6l28 Visit Adams website: https://www.adamhall.solutions/  

Eckhart Tolle wrote, “The awakening of consciousness is the next evolutionary step for mankind.” If you are seeking to upgrade your human operating system, as our guest puts it, and develop a better way of life in the chaos of our modern world, then you want to know today's guest, Adam C. Hall. Adam will show you where the next frontier in Science, Medicine and Spirituality meets your optimal state of health and wellness so you can unlearn the beliefs, behaviors, and habits that shield you from discovering your Divine Genius. In his new book Divine Genius: The Unlearning Curve, Adam shares the 13 Universal Wisdom Teachings and the Genius Process that led to his transformation, a quest that began at shores of Santa Barbara, CA and took him to the jungles of Brazil and Peru. Author, speaker, futurist, social architect, impact investor, and more, Adam began his professional career as a self-described EarthKeeper. He was founder of three successful real estate development companies, before personal and professional devastation forced him to reevaluate his life. His transformation led him to a deeply spiritual approach to life, beyond the success, money, and prestige that his ego craved. He became a trained shaman, teacher of The Course of Miracles, and the CEO of Renaissance Capital, raising over $1.5 billion to rescue and conserve premiere natural landscapes. He spent two decades as an impact investor dedicated to the quadruple bottom line: People, Planet, Profits with Purpose -- and founded of the EarthKeeper Alliance. Over the past 2 decades, Adam has dedicated himself to fostering Conscious Evolution, Business and Culture. Through his books — Divine Genius: The Unlearning Curve and the first book in his autobiographical trilogy The EarthKeeper, Undeveloping the Future—plus numerous keynotes and radio and television interviews, Adam continues to seek ways to elevate consciousness. Today he is the founder/CEO of the Genius Studio, creator of the Genius Process. Book: Divine Genius: The Unlearning Curve Is available on Amazon.com for $16.95 for softcover or on Kindle for $9.95 Additional Book: The EarthKeeper, Undeveloping the Future. The first edition of Adam's trilogy. It chronicles his journey from Earth Conqueror to EarthKeeper. Website: www.adamhall.solutions Blog: https://www.adamhall.solutions/blog Gifts to Inspire a Genius Driven Life The Little Book of Genius-Wisdom to Create Abundance-EBook with insights, inspirational quotes and affirmations to create abundance. https://www.adamhall.solutions/ebook Life Assessment Test. Take a short test to understand more about your strengths and weaknesses. Find out what might be blocking your Genius https://www.adamhall.solutions/life-assessment Guided Meditation. This popular meditation will help you shed feelings of lack. It will help eliminate limiting belief about scarcity and help you manifest a life of your dreams. https://www.adamhall.solutions/manifestation-meditation Social Media Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EarthKeeperAdam/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/?trk=hb_tab_home YouTube: https://www.facebook.com/EarthKeeperAdam/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quantumwealthadvisor/ Insight Timer: https://insighttimer.com/adamchall

Eckhart Tolle wrote, “The awakening of consciousness is the next evolutionary step for mankind.” If you are seeking to upgrade your human operating system, as our guest puts it, and develop a better way of life in the chaos of our modern world, then you want to know today's guest, Adam C. Hall. Adam will show you where the next frontier in Science, Medicine and Spirituality meets your optimal state of health and wellness so you can unlearn the beliefs, behaviors, and habits that shield you from discovering your Divine Genius. In his new book Divine Genius: The Unlearning Curve, Adam shares the 13 Universal Wisdom Teachings and the Genius Process that led to his transformation, a quest that began at shores of Santa Barbara, CA and took him to the jungles of Brazil and Peru. Author, speaker, futurist, social architect, impact investor, and more, Adam began his professional career as a self-described EarthKeeper. He was founder of three successful real estate development companies, before personal and professional devastation forced him to reevaluate his life. His transformation led him to a deeply spiritual approach to life, beyond the success, money, and prestige that his ego craved. He became a trained shaman, teacher of The Course of Miracles, and the CEO of Renaissance Capital, raising over $1.5 billion to rescue and conserve premiere natural landscapes. He spent two decades as an impact investor dedicated to the quadruple bottom line: People, Planet, Profits with Purpose -- and founded of the EarthKeeper Alliance. Over the past 2 decades, Adam has dedicated himself to fostering Conscious Evolution, Business and Culture. Through his books — Divine Genius: The Unlearning Curve and the first book in his autobiographical trilogy The EarthKeeper, Undeveloping the Future—plus numerous keynotes and radio and television interviews, Adam continues to seek ways to elevate consciousness. Today he is the founder/CEO of the Genius Studio, creator of the Genius Process. Book: Divine Genius: The Unlearning Curve Is available on Amazon.com for $16.95 for softcover or on Kindle for $9.95 Additional Book: The EarthKeeper, Undeveloping the Future. The first edition of Adam's trilogy. It chronicles his journey from Earth Conqueror to EarthKeeper. Website: www.adamhall.solutions Blog: https://www.adamhall.solutions/blog Gifts to Inspire a Genius Driven Life The Little Book of Genius-Wisdom to Create Abundance-EBook with insights, inspirational quotes and affirmations to create abundance. https://www.adamhall.solutions/ebook Life Assessment Test. Take a short test to understand more about your strengths and weaknesses. Find out what might be blocking your Genius https://www.adamhall.solutions/life-assessment Guided Meditation. This popular meditation will help you shed feelings of lack. It will help eliminate limiting belief about scarcity and help you manifest a life of your dreams. https://www.adamhall.solutions/manifestation-meditation Social Media Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EarthKeeperAdam/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/?trk=hb_tab_home YouTube: https://www.facebook.com/EarthKeeperAdam/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quantumwealthadvisor/ Insight Timer: https://insighttimer.com/adamchall

Host - Sveta and Ben Banerjee Topic: Money with a Purpose Guest: Ville Korpela, Founding Partner of Impact Innovation Institute and a Senior Faculty Member at Dubai Future Academy.  Petri Kuusisto CIO experience from 2 largest pension funds in Finland (Eur 40+ bn) and a Sovereign Wealth Fund in Middle East   The weekly show on how Impactful investments and businesses are helping to implement the 17 UN SDG's worldwide to preserve the world for future generation. Banerjis have enlightening and in-depth conversations with newsmakers, celebrities, thought leaders, entrepreneurs, project owners, investors, politicians and business leaders and encourage them to act now. Ville Korpela is a professional futurist and impact strategist. He is a Founding Partner of Impact Innovation Institute and a Senior Faculty Member at Dubai Future Academy. Ville has worked extensively with emerging markets, previously he has been Head of European Operations at Vunani Capital (South Africa) and Business Development Director at Christofi Group (Cyprus). Ville started his professional career at a Finnish public affairs consultancy Eurofacts and later with Ernst & Young and the leading Russian investment bank Renaissance Capital in Moscow, as part of their corporate finance and M&A teams. Currenty, Ville resides in Dubai. Ville is a member of several World Economic Forum projects, such as the Nature Action Agenda, Inclusivity Quotient, African Growth Platform and Global Plastic Action Partnership. Ville is passionate about impact investing, systems thinking and social entrepreneurship. In his spare time Ville likes to travel, write poetry and listen to the Blues. Petri Kuusisto has 30+ years of direct CIO experience from 2 largest pension funds in Finland (Eur 40+ bn) and a Sovereign Wealth Fund in Middle East.  During last 10+ years he has been a serial entrepreneur/investor having among other things launched and sold 2 asset management companies, one being the first global timberland management company. He has also acted as a consultant for several institutional investors on investment strategy and financing issues. Recently he co-founded Impact Innovation Institute, a for benefit research and advisory think tank. He is currently writing series of academic articles on Impact Investing and has coined the term Sustainable Portfolio Theory, a needed extension to Modern Portfolio Theory and current Strategic Asset Allocation thinking. His ongoing action research is focusing on Blended Finance.

On this episode I speak to Mamokete Lijane about her life story, we unpack her unconventional upbringing in Lesotho. We take a candid look into her professional growth and her interests and views on motherhood and advice on how women can navigate male dominated industries. Mamokete Lijane, is a Fixed Income Sales Trader and Macro Strategist at ABSA Capital with 19 years' experience as an analyst in financial markets. Prior to Absa she worked at Aluwani Capital Partners as an investment strategist, and Sasfin Securities and Renaissance Capital as a fixed income analyst. Her career spans all areas of non-equity investment research, including macroeconomics, credit and rates on both the buys and the sell sides of the investment business. Mamokete has a deep interest in the intersection between public policy, economics and financial markets.On this show we cover:02:12  - Background and life growing up in Lesotho in an unconventional African home,  04:41  - Moving between families at an early age and how our childhood memories affect our adult experience,07:57  - Finding comfort and excelling in academia and drifting into a job in finance,  13:12 - books that influenced your life, The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck & Why Nations Fail,19:20 -  Career advice for young people, nothing is easy but it's not life threatening, 24:38 - Profound lessons learned from failure,28:45 - Tips for women in male dominated industries on how to build you brand and show up as your authentic self,33:02 - Insight from mothering twins,39:45 - Best time, energy and money  investments,49:15 - My life's philosophy,Did you enjoy the podcast? If so, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps us get into the ears of new listeners and help others find topics they are interested in.Get in touch:Twitter: @Mamokete30Visit us:www.thenetworkingcompany.co.zaFollow us:Facebook –The Networking CompanyInstagram - thenetworkingcompanysa

Dmitry Ageev is Executive Director of SKOLKOVO Wealth Transformation Center established by the initiative of Ruben Vardanyan for the HN-UHNWI community in Russia support and customer development. He is maintaining partnerships with major private banking, luxury products, and services providers, multi/single family offices. His primary focus is research, consultancy, educational efforts, and conferences for HN-UHNWI families on the issues of Wealth Management: Personal Finance, Succession Planning, Family Business, Philanthropy (including social impact projects). Producer of the largest online/offline annual conference platform in Russia for HNWI and infrastructure – Wealth Knowledge Day. Previously in his carrier, Dmitry was holding executive and expert positions at large Russian and multinational companies (ConocoPhillips, RUSAL, Rostelecom, Johnson & Johnson) at strategic human resources and corporate social responsibility. FIND DMITRY ON SOCIAL MEDIA LinkedIn Alexey Stankevich is a Managing Director of Phoenix Advisors, a wealth management company established in 2015 in partnership with Ruben Vardanyan. Advisor to the largest Russian capitals in the matters of asset structuring and protection. Until 2015, he was a co-founder and CEO of the investment group Third Rome, which was created in 2009 by top managers of the Renaissance Capital group. From 2004 to 2009, he led the structured solutions group and the multi-family office practice at Renaissance Capital that he created. From 2001 to 2004 Alexey was the head of the Investment Projects Department of the International Industrial Bank, where he managed projects for the acquisition and consolidation of non-banking assets. He created and headed family offices of major Russian entrepreneurs. He worked in the central office of Sberbank of the Russian Federation, Razgulay UkrRos Group. He started his career in 1997 in the Big Four companies in the tax and legal consulting department. FIND ALEXEY ON SOCIAL MEDIA LinkedIn ================================ SUPPORT & CONNECT: Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/denofrich Twitter: https://twitter.com/denofrich Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/denofrich YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/denofrich Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/den_of_rich/ Hashtag: #denofrich © Copyright 2022 Den of Rich. All rights reserved.

Dmitry Ageev is Executive Director of SKOLKOVO Wealth Transformation Center established by the initiative of Ruben Vardanyan for the HN-UHNWI community in Russia support and customer development. He is maintaining partnerships with major private banking, luxury products, and services providers, multi/single family offices. His primary focus is research, consultancy, educational efforts, and conferences for HN-UHNWI families on the issues of Wealth Management: Personal Finance, Succession Planning, Family Business, Philanthropy (including social impact projects). Producer of the largest online/offline annual conference platform in Russia for HNWI and infrastructure – Wealth Knowledge Day. Previously in his carrier, Dmitry was holding executive and expert positions at large Russian and multinational companies (ConocoPhillips, RUSAL, Rostelecom, Johnson & Johnson) at strategic human resources and corporate social responsibility.FIND DMITRY ON SOCIAL MEDIALinkedIn========================================Alexey Stankevich is a Managing Director of Phoenix Advisors, a wealth management company established in 2015 in partnership with Ruben Vardanyan. Advisor to the largest Russian capitals in the matters of asset structuring and protection. Until 2015, he was a co-founder and CEO of the investment group Third Rome, which was created in 2009 by top managers of the Renaissance Capital group. From 2004 to 2009, he led the structured solutions group and the multi-family office practice at Renaissance Capital that he created. From 2001 to 2004 Alexey was the head of the Investment Projects Department of the International Industrial Bank, where he managed projects for the acquisition and consolidation of non-banking assets. He created and headed family offices of major Russian entrepreneurs. He worked in the central office of Sberbank of the Russian Federation, Razgulay UkrRos Group. He started his career in 1997 in the Big Four companies in the tax and legal consulting department.FIND ALEXEY ON SOCIAL MEDIALinkedIn================================PODCAST INFO:Podcast website: https://www.uhnwidata.com/podcastApple podcast: https://apple.co/3kqOA7QSpotify: https://spoti.fi/2UOtE1AGoogle podcast: https://bit.ly/3jmA7ulSUPPORT & CONNECT:Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/denofrichTwitter: https://www.instagram.com/denofrich/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/denofrich/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/denofrich

CNBC's Bob Pisani spoke with Kathleen Smith, Principal and Co-founder of Renaissance Capital – and Brian Schaeffer, Managing Director at Invest-X Capital. They discussed the year that was and what's to come for the fall season of IPOs, opportunities in the private market and how to get involved in promising pre-IPO investments in the future. In the ‘Markets 102' portion of the podcast, Bob continues the conversation with Kathleen Smith from Renaissance Capital and discusses direct listings and SPAC's.

In this episode of the new series Lagos to Mombasa, Abebe Aemro Selassie of the IMF and Charlie Robertson of Renaissance Capital join Gyude Moore to discuss how to increase investment in transportation, power, water, health, and education infrastructure to spur economic growth in African countries.

Miguel Armaza sits down with the fascinating David Nangle is CEO of Vostok Emerging Finance, an investment company listed on Nasdaq First North Growth Market in Sweden that invests in growth stage private fintech companies across the emerging world. Born and raised in Ireland, Dave has spent his career focused on emerging markets having worked in places like Moscow and London, and has backed some of the top fintech names across Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, India, Kenya, and beyond. Some of VEF's current and past portfolio companies include Creditas, Konfio, JUMO, and Tinkoff. In this fun episode, we discuss: - David's story and why he quit his London job and moved to Moscow in the early 2000s without speaking a word of Russian - Advantages of being a publicly listed firm with a permanent capital structure - The incredible investment opportunities within fintech in emerging markets - Why VEF actually invests harder and doubles down during volatile periods and how he even closed a deal in Turkey in the middle of an attempted coup with tanks on the streets - Investment lessons and why you should always invest along with local VCs - The exciting future of fintech in frontier markets like Pakistan, Egypt, and Nigeria… and a lot more! David Nangle David Nangle has spent his career focusing on emerging markets and within that the financial services sector. He was part of ING Baring's Emerging Markets Research team between 2000 and 2006, after which he spent nearly 10 years with Renaissance Capital in both Moscow and London, as head of financials and research overall. He helped the firm develop and grow their financials and broader research footprint from a strong Russia base to a leading EM and frontiers franchise. Having had a front row seat in the evolution of the financial sector across emerging markets since the late 90's, in 2015, he left the world of investment banking and co-founded VEF to back founders building the next generation of financial services firms across the emerging world. About VEF VEF is an investment company listed on Nasdaq First North Growth Market in Sweden under the ticker VEFAB. We invest in growth stage private fintech companies across the emerging world. We take minority stakes and are active investors with board representation in each of our portfolio holdings. We respect the macro, but are firm believers that the secular growth trend of EM fintech, outweighs all the macro uncertainty and volatility that we and our portfolio companies will invariably live through. A digital financial world is the end game and the best companies always come out of pockets of macro and market turbulence in a stronger relative position. For more FinTech insights, follow us below: Medium: medium.com/wharton-fintech WFT Twitter: twitter.com/whartonfintech Miguel's Twitter: twitter.com/MiguelArmaza Miguel's Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3jWIpqp

Ilya Kuzyuk is the Co-founder and CEO of VIVIX, an animation studio, specializing in the development and production of computer-animated television series for young adults. Ilya has 7+ years of experience in investment banking (J.P. Morgan, Xenon Capital Partners, Renaissance Capital; closed-deals value exceeds $2.5B) and 4+ years in entertainment & media (ex-CEO of PlatformaVR, a location-based VR startup). FIND ILYA ON SOCIAL MEDIA LinkedIn | Facebook ================================ SUPPORT & CONNECT: Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/denofrich Twitter: https://twitter.com/denofrich Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/denofrich YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/denofrich Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/den_of_rich/ Hashtag: #denofrich © Copyright 2022 Den of Rich. All rights reserved.

Ilya Kuzyuk is the Co-founder and CEO of VIVIX, an animation studio, specializing in development and production of computer-animated television series for young adults. Ilya has 7+ years of experience in investment banking (J.P. Morgan, Xenon Capital Partners, Renaissance Capital; closed-deals value exceeds $2.5B) and 4+ years in entertainment & media (ex-CEO of PlatformaVR, a location-based VR startup).FIND ILYA ON SOCIAL MEDIALinkedIn | FacebookVisit the podcast page for additional content https://www.uhnwidata.com/podcast

CNBC's Frank Holland spoke with Dave Nadig, Director of Research at ETF Trends, Jay Rhame, CEO of Reaves Asset Management, and Kathleen Smith, Chairman and Co-founder of Renaissance Capital. They discussed the big questions ETF investors are facing in the second half - including the value vs. growth debate, how China's regulatory crackdown could affect major IPOs like Didi Chuxing, and the ripple effects of President Joe Biden's historic infrastructure bill.

The British Prime Minister on Monday will announce details of a covid status certification scheme that is being developed in England to enable concerts and sporting events to resume. Meanwhile, in India, Maharastra state goes back into lockdown after a spike in coronavirus cases and the Pope, in his Easter message, urges a faster vaccine rollout for the developing world. We hear from Charlie Roberston at Renaissance Capital about the global inequality resulting from the pandemic and mining analyst John Meyer tells us about how President Biden's infrastructure spending plans will impact global commodities. Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, a member of of the Indian Prime Ministers Council on Climate Change, says that India will not be pushed into meeting targets and a British musician, Verity White. (Image: AZ vaccine in vial and syringe Image credit:)

In the 21st episode of the A Perspective Podcast, Andrew turns to Charlie Robertson. Charlie is Global Chief Economist and Head of Macro Strategy at Renaissance Capital. Focused on emerging, Frontier, and Africa markets, Charlie is often rated number 1 for Emerging Europe or Frontier/Africa commentary.  Join them as they discuss a wide range of captivating topics including; why the 21st century is going to be better for Africa, what the continent needs to address to achieve industrialization, and the notion of supply chains and added value in Africa post COVID-19 and AfCFTA. Charlie also shares his views on which country has it right on the continent, vaccine diplomacy, why Education underpins all progress on the continent, and rounds off this illuminating conversation by giving us a reason to be cheerful.

Morgan Stanley uses copper to argue that MSCI EM has achieved all its gains for the year. It points out the strong correlation between EM and the copper price. In recent weeks, some commentators have been suggesting the copper, wheat, iron, corn price surge of 2020 was related to Yuan appreciation and Chinese stock-building – and as Yuan appreciation has largely stopped – so should the price surge in these commodities. Its too early to be categoric about it – but copper, wheat, corn all seem to have topped out. But that doesn’t mean MS is right to say the year is done for EM. The MS target of 1,330 for the year might have already been met, but Dan Salter’s target is 1,513 which leaves a lot of upside. Charles Robertson, Global Chief Economist, Renaissance Capital, wrote a note yesterday saying that some of the gains might be had in the smaller markets – from SA – which has won a record $1bn investment into its car industry yesterday (he targets a R14/$ for end-2021), or Turkey where the currency is remarkably cheap (he can see it getting to 7/$ in the short-term), or Brazil where the currency could get some much needed support via a few Selic rate hikes over the coming year or so. And Russia, which is bouncing off the excessive fall of recent days. There’s a Bloomberg story on Emerging markets about cheap EM currencies using the Big Mac survey – which supports this point. For now The animal spirits continue to soar into February Chris Holdsworth, chief investment strategist at Investec Wealth and Investment, speaks to Michael Avery about the latest Covid numbers, commodities pulling back and the reason to pick your hedge funds carefully.

Today's Daily Download episode features an interview with HousingWire Mortgage Editor James Kleimann. In this episode, Kleimann discusses the recent uptick of mortgage companies like Rocket Companies and United Wholesale Mortgage entering the public arena and filing for IPO. Kleimann also delves into the significance of special purpose acquisition companies and discusses the role they play in public debuts. For some background on the interview, here's a brief summary of Kleimann's recent article on the latest mortgage lender to file for a public offering. AmeriHome on Thursday became the latest mortgage lender to file for a public offering, the latest to do so amid a coronavirus pandemic that has helped spur record origination volume this year.The lender told the SEC in a filing that it plans to raise at least $100 million as a placeholder for an upcoming public offering, though it did not disclose the ultimate size of the offering. Renaissance Capital speculated that it could ultimately raise up to $300 million in an IPO.Like other mortgage firms, California-based AmeriHome has captured a glut of business over the last year due to low interest rates and paltry inventory. Year-to-date, AmeriHome has booked $642 million in revenue for the 12 months that ended June 30, according to the S-1 filing.The Daily Download examines the most compelling articles reported from the HousingWire newsroom. Each afternoon, we provide our listeners with a deeper look into the stories coming across our newsroom that are helping Move Markets Forward. Hosted by the HW team and produced by Alcynna Lloyd and Victoria Wickham.Here are the latest IPO articles from HousingWire that are covered in this episode:AmeriHome plans to go public – Let's look at the numbersCaliber Home Loans plans $2B-plus IPOAs UWM attempts to build an empire, brokers and rivals weigh in on Mat Ishbia's $16B planUnited Wholesale Mortgage plans $16B public debut via acquisitionLoanDepot could make public debut this year at up to $15B

We're on pace to break the all-time record for IPOs set back in the year 2000. We could potentially see over $100 billion raised in initial public offerings and more than 200 newly listed companies by the end of 2020. If so, it would be one of the strangest, most unpredictable outcomes of the year - and that's really saying something this year!Today's new episode of my podcast, The Compound Show, takes a look at the IPO Fever we're experiencing now. I have two of the most knowledgeable people in the country as my special guests. First, we talk to Kathleen Smith, the founding director of Renaissance Capital, the premiere research firm in IPOs and the sponsor of the IPO ETF. Then, we speak with Jay Heller, the head of US capital markets at Nasdaq, who has overseen the launch of approximately one hundred new issues so far this year - most of which he conducted from his kitchen table in suburban New Jersey! Kathleen and Jay have so much knowledge to share about initial public offerings and the watershed year that 2020 has become. You're really in for a treat this week :)Thanks for listening and please leave a rating and review! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode of the Kenyan Wallstreet Podcast, our Resident Economist Prince Muraguri holds an insightful discussion with two economists from Renaissance Capital: Charles Robertson(Global Chief Economist) and Yvonne Mhango  (Head of Research - Sub-Saharan Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa Economist). In this episode, you'll discover:  03:50: Africa has been less vulnerable to COVID-19 due to age dynamics. 08:28: East African countries perform well in the Renaissance Capital's composite resilience score ranking. 12:41: Higher bond yields in emerging economies in the new decade will likely attract investors to emerging markets. 17:10: Kenya's GDP projected to grow at 1.5%. 20:15: The link between fertility rates and domestic borrowing rates. 26:14: Kenya's trade balance dynamics. 29:37:The U.S. Presidential election and the KSH/USD exchange rate. 33:25: More on the Kenyan Shilling - is it misaligned from fair value? 35:43: Key take-aways from the macro panel discussion at the 6th Annual Virtual East Africa Investor Conference. Notes Learn more about Renaissance Capital on their website Connect with Charles Robertson on Twitter Connect with Yvonne Mhango on Twitter

In this episode of the Kenyan Wallstreet Podcast, our Resident Economist Prince Muraguri holds an insightful discussion with two economists from Renaissance Capital: Charles Robertson(Global Chief Economist) and Yvonne Mhango (Head of Research - Sub-Saharan Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa Economist). In this episode, you'll discover: 03:50: Africa has been less vulnerable to COVID-19 due to age dynamics. 08:28: East African countries perform well in the Renaissance Capital's composite resilience score ranking. 12:41: Higher bond yields in emerging economies in the new decade will likely attract investors to emerging markets. 17:10: Kenya's GDP projected to grow at 1.5%. 20:15: The link between fertility rates and domestic borrowing rates. 26:14: Kenya's trade balance dynamics. 29:37:The U.S. Presidential election and the KSH/USD exchange rate. 33:25: More on the Kenyan Shilling - is it misaligned from fair value? 35:43: Key take-aways from the macro panel discussion at the 6th Annual Virtual East Africa Investor Conference. Notes Learn more about Renaissance Capital on their website Connect with Charles Robertson on Twitter Connect with Yvonne Mhango on Twitter

Kathleen Smith, chairman of Renaissance Capital, discusses the outlook for the IPO market.

CNBC’s Bob Pisani spoke with Kathleen Smith, chairman and co-founder of Renaissance Capital; John Davi, chief investment officer and founder of Astoria Portfolio Advisors; and Christian Magoon, CEO and founder of Amplify ETFs. They discussed what 2020 has in store for recent and upcoming initial public offerings, the risks and rewards of bond alternatives as investors hunt for yield, and the rise of the momentum trade. In the markets 102 section, Bob discusses investing in IPO's through ETFs.

Africa is the fastest urbanizing region on the planet. The continent's rapid population and economic growth demand large-scale solutions. As Africa's new private city builder – backed by American, Norwegian, British and New Zealand investors – Rendeavour builds cities in the growth path of some of Sub-Saharan Africa's fastest growing regions. Today's guest is Yomi Ademola, the country head for Nigeria for Rendeavor, which is the largest urban real estate development company in Africa. In this episode, we discuss what it means to create livable, sustainable cities, the process of building them, and how they fit into the broader regional development of their locations. Yomi also shares with us what the impact of COVID has been on his business, the importance of blending local capacity with international expertise, as well as how to balance the need for order with the organic emergence of a city in its own right. For more on building the livable, sustainable, and aesthetically pleasing cities of the future, tune in today! Key Points From This Episode: •   Yomi introduces himself and gives a bit of background to founding Rendeavour. •   What Rendeavour is, what it means to build cities, and where their current developments are. •   The process of building a city, from site selection and feasibility to livability and sustainability. •   There is such a demand for new, clean, aesthetically pleasing cities in Africa given the rapid rate of urbanization and the resulting congestion. •   How these cities fit into the broader regional development of their locations. •   Other city projects that Yomi draws inspiration from and how PPPs like his can be catalysts for rapid economic development. •   How COVID has affected what's happening on the ground and the demand for Yomi's services. •   Raising capital and withstanding downturns depends on financial capacity of shareholders. •   The importance of blending local capacity with international expertise, for successful projects. •   Getting a critical mass of movers to jumpstart activity in these areas: Commerce is what capitalizes growth. •   Balancing the need for order and the organic emergence of a city in terms of urban planning. •   Yomi's currency risk mitigation strategies for working in countries without stable currencies. •   What autonomy Yomi's company has over governance, and how it benefits the new city. •   How government regimes differ and what the varying effects on market demand have been. •   What it means to create a city culture and steps Yomi has taken to develop it.   Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yomi-ademola-132a24/?locale=de_DE (Yomi Ademola on LinkedIn) https://www.rendeavour.com/ (Rendeavour) https://www.alarocity.com/ (Alaro City) https://www.rencap.com/ (Renaissance Capital) https://www.tatucity.com/ (Tatu City) https://romapark.co.zm/ (Roma Park) https://www.rendeavour.com/projects/kiswishi/ (Kiswishi) https://cityscapeplanning.com/ (Cityscape Planning) https://www.som.com/ (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) Support this podcast

Covid-19’s fracturing of supply chains has left businesses and governments questioning the prudence of networks that crisscross the planet. Pandemic recovery plans talk of developing “strategic autonomy” in key sectors, and suggest that executives should bring production closer to home. But on the ground, companies say it’s not so easy.  Host Stephanie Flanders hears from Frankfurt-based Bloomberg reporter Piotr Skolimowski and a German pharmaceutical executive about why it’s so hard for Europe to extract itself from Chinese supply chains. She also speaks with World Trade Organization Chief Economist Robert Koopman and Renaissance Capital’s Global Chief Economist Charles Robertson on the future of global trade and investment. They discuss what trade might look like in a post-coronavirus world, whether so-called reshoring is actually a good idea, and why emerging market economies might ultimately benefit from Covid-19.

In this episode, Hall welcomes Olusegun Okubanjo, Managing Partner of Obsidian Capital. Based in London, Obsidian Capital is a boutique investment banking firm that arranges infrastructure-oriented, transaction-based funding for mid-sized clients in West Central and East Africa. They are excited about Emerging Africa's economic potential and are committed to supporting private-sector led growth on the continent by providing onshore institutional clients access to the best global investment banking services.​ They create, incubate and invest directly in high-growth businesses in the region, and are less focused on specific sectors and more focused on investing in the right people - who have ambitious ideas, foresight and passion to change the world. Olusegun has over 20 years of experience in wealth management and investment banking and is skilled in crafting and implementing sophisticated financial solutions to the uniquely complex personal and corporate investment structures that are typical of the entrepreneurial clients in emerging Africa. Prior to joining OBSIDIAN, Olusegun was Executive Director, Africa at UBS, London. He began his career with ARM Investment Managers, Lagos and went on to head the West Africa offshore private client divisions at Standard Bank and Renaissance Capital and led a team covering West Africa at Barclays Wealth in London. Olusegun has a BSc in Business Administration and an MBA in International Business from the Gardner School of Business & Technology, Wayne State College. He studied Law (Juris Doctor) at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and is a member of the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment, London. Olusegun speaks with Hall about the state of investing in Africa, what excites him as an investor and what Obsidian Capital’s investment thesis is.  You can visit Obsidian Capital at .  Olusegun can be contacted via LinkedIn at , via Twitter at and via email at ooo@obsidian.capital.

Renaissance Capital's Global Chief Economist Charlie Robertson joins Eric & Cobus to discuss the prospects for debt relief in Africa amid the worsening economic crisis brought on by the COVID-19 epidemic.JOIN THE DISCUSSION:Facebook: www.facebook.com/ChinaAfricaProject Twitter: @eolander | @stadenesque | @RencapManSUPPORT THIS PODCAST. BECOME A SUBSCRIBER TO THE CHINA AFRICA PROJECT.Your subscription supports independent journalism. Subscribers get the following:1. A daily email newsletter of the top China-Africa news.2. Access to the China-Africa Experts Network3. Unlimited access to the CAP's exclusive analysis content on chinaafricaproject.comSubscribe today and get two-weeks free: www.chinaafricaproject.com/subscribe

Yvonne Mhango, sub-Saharan Africa economist at Renaissance Capital, an emerging and frontier markets-focused investment bank, talks to The Banker's Joy Macknight about how the double blow of Covid-19 and oil price shock is affecting sub-Saharan African economies, which countries could afford stimulus programmes and which ones are most vulnerable. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The World Bank has warned global remittances, which is the money migrant workers send home, will fall by around 20% in 2020 because of coronavirus. The bank predicts this will affect the income of at least tens of millions of families. One such family is that of Smitha in Kerala, whose husband is stuck in Dubai unable to work due to lockdown. But it’s not just about subsistence. Michael Clemens at the Centre for Global Development says remittance flows are a crucial resource for helping families and communities pull themselves out of poverty, and the effects of this sharp fall in remittances will be felt for many years to come. Meanwhile, Yvonne Mhango, Sub-Saharan Africa at Renaissance Capital, explains how the impact felt in Africa will differ across regions. And Michael Kent, CEO of digital payments service Azimo, explains how services like his could fill the gap left by the shuttering of brick and mortar transfer shops. Producer: Frey Lindsay. (Picture: Smitha and her family. Picture credit: Smitha Girish.)

Following stepped up measures in South Africa, Rwanda, Senegal and Madagascar, the cross-continental call for debt relief and falling oil prices over the last month, all eyes are on African governments for firm responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Invest Africa invites you to listen to our webinar for an update on coronavirus and the new challenges for Africa. Touching on the economic outlook for the continent in light of a slowing global growth and a slump in commodity prices, our panel of experts will discuss how organisations can firm up their investments and what steps must be taken in order to safeguard for the future. Thank you to our panellists: Francois Conradie, Senior Political Economist, NKC African Economist,Peter Gray, Co-Managing Partner, Al Dahbashi Gray, Charles Robertson, Global Chief Economist and Head of Macro-Strategy Unit, Renaissance Capital.

Doug offers insight into the benefits of direct listings and debunks a recent article written in opposition to them. Top 3 Takeaways: This article from Renaissance Capital on why direct listings are bad for public investors contains a lot of false or...

Get a peek into Howard’s time as President at one of the most famous hedge funds in the world, Renaissance Capital.    Also, learn how he became the very first investor for Uber and what Howard thinks are the next big opportunities in the bioinformatics space, which has become the primary focus of his later stage investment group, B Capital.

***IBM sues Zillow over multiple charges of patent infringement IBM alleges in the lawsuit that Zillow built its business on software developed by IBM   The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, alleges that Zillow essentially built its business on the back of IBM's inventions.   “Rather than build their business on their own technologies, Zillow has appropriated the inventions of the [patents named in the lawsuit],” the complaint reads. “The website, www.zillow.com, and the associated mobile applications under Zillow's control use the technology claimed by the [patents named in the lawsuit], to provide customers access to real estate listings and provide advertisements and other services for real estate agents.”   The lawsuit specifically points to patents covering the use of algorithms for computing the desirability of a geographic area using dynamic imaging; methods for providing geospatial, list-based and filter-based search; the use of layers to display multiple object categories; automatically targeting advertisements to individual search results rather than search queries; and a host of other, more technical patents.   *ADD: Zillow Offers launched Monday in San Antonio and Austin, the platform's 18th and 19th markets     ***Fed lowers interest rates again. Will mortgage rates follow? Economists and agents offered different opinions on how the 2nd rate cut of the year will impact housing market   The Fed is cutting interest rates 25 basis points from between 2 percent and 2.25 percent to between 1.75 percent and 2 percent. It had previously signaled it would not hike rates at all in 2019 – after four rate hikes in 2018 – but now it actually cut rates for the second time.     ***Foreclosure starts plummet to 18-year low Loans in active foreclosure sinks to lowest level since 2005   Foreclosure starts in August sank to their lowest level in more than 18 years, according to the latest First Look report from Black Knight.   Foreclosure starts fell to 36,200 for the month, down more than 23% from the same time last year, the report showed. This is actually the lowest number for any single month since December 2000.   In fact, the number of loans in active foreclosure continued to improve, dropping to 253,000. This represents the smallest level since 2005.       ***Compass launches new consumer search tools, says IPO 'likely'  & Compass opens West Coast tech hub 2 blocks from Amazon's headquarters Robert Reffkin announced Monday that Compass has new, artificial intelligence-driven tools that will give consumers home recommendations and let them collaborate with their agents   Compass, a real estate brokerage and tech company, opened an office in Seattle that's two blocks from Amazon's headquarters and a mile from Zillow's main offices. New York-based Compass now has three floors of a new building at 503 Westlake Avenue that will eventually house over 100 engineers and 70 operations staff. The Seattle campus will be Compass' West Coast technology hub and will be the nexus of the company's six regional offices in Washington, the company said in a statement.     ***Airbnb IPO - coming in 2020   Short-term rental platform Airbnb has announced plans to launch an initial public offering in 2020 — a disclosure linked to the firm's ambition to turn hosts into partial owners, The New York Times reported. Airbnb's IPO is expected to be better received than the recent public offerings of some tech behemoths, including Uber and Lyft. And if special equity-sharing with hosts is part of the deal, the IPO could also chart a new way to cut more stakeholders in on the success of gig economy companies. “Airbnb has something Uber and Lyft don't have: a proven, sustainable business model,” Matt Kennedy, senior IPO market strategist with Renaissance Capital, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “It will be a refreshing change of pace to actually get a $30-billion-plus company that has some profits.” Airbnb was valued at $31 billion by its investors in September 2017, Inc. reported.   *Airbnb invests $25 million in Bay Area affordable housing

Renewed trade tensions between the U.S and China arrived in markets like a “skunk at the garden party,” according to David Joy, the chief market strategist at Ameriprise Financial who has more than 40 years of experience in investment management. He tells co-hosts Sarah Ponczek and Mike Regan how he’s expecting markets to handle this pungent new arrival on the latest episode of the “What Goes Up” podcast.    Along with that skunk, Uber Technologies arrived at the garden party of public markets this week with its long-awaited initial public offering. Kathleen Smith, co-founder of Renaissance Capital and manager of the IPO exchange-traded fund, joins the podcast to assess Uber and the rest of the money-losing herd of unicorns that may make 2019 a record year for IPO issuance.     As always, the hosts and guests finish up with a discussion of the craziest things they saw in markets this week.  

My podcasts are planned every two weeks beginning March 16, 2019. This edition -- actually published February 26 -- is to test and obtain feedback from listeners on all aspects of its content and production. However, this podcast also contains great content! Included is a full transcript and links to all news covered and more! Podcast notes November 23, 2018 For links to all the news I’m covering today, go to my Investing for the Soul homepage. If any terms are unfamiliar to you, a good source for their definition is INVESTOPEDIA and scroll down to the very bottom to see their A-Z dictionary News 1) Green finance: a contrarian take, by Thomas Hale, November 15, 2018, FT Advisor, UK. "Renaissance’s argument thereafter is that, even if emerging markets have far lower ESG scores, directing capital their way allows for the highest overall rate of improvement, and so the greatest ethical utility. This is, unsurprisingly, an argument for more investment in EM." Points: 1) The argument presented here by Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank, is equivalent to the idea of investing in companies who are just beginning to engage in ESG seriously so as to take advantage of their possible rapid stock price as they're identified as a potential 'high' ESG company. As it's recognized by many investors that high ESG scoring companies also now have a premium to their stock prices. 2) Renaissance produces a wonderful graph showing how high GDP per capita is highly correlated to high ESG country scores. 3) Another quote, “As a side note, the report finds ‘virtually zero correlation’ between ESG scores and sovereign bond pricing after adjusting for per capita GDP.) Again, the argument here is that going for up and coming ESG performers in emerging countries could be a great bet for stock or bond outperformance. ------------------------------------------------------------- 2) From upstream to mainstream: ESG at a tipping point, November 15, 2018, by IN Research and Calvert, Investment News, USA. "In a year's time, the percentage of Millennials expressing a high level of interest in ESG investing jumped from 26% to 35%, advisers say, while the percentage of Gen Xers embracing ESG spiked from 16% to 25%. This is more than a generational story, however... Twenty-six percent of ultra-high-net-worth investors now show a high level of interest in ESG investing, advisers say, up from only 10% in 2017. Similarly, interest among very-high net worth investors shot from 13% to 19% in a year's time." Points: 1) These results are from a US survey of 300 advisors. The jump in numbers over just one-year is impressive. Demonstrates just how fast ESG is being accepted. 2) Somewhat interesting is that its regular advisors reporting the rapid growth. Generally, advisors have been ‘behind the curve’ regarding their positivity concerning sustainable, ESG and ethical investing. Now many are hurrying to get familiar with it! 3) Calvert, a well-known and respected ethical investing mutual fund manager was involved too. Not sure if this fact had a relevance to the conduct and results of the survey. Knowing Calvert, probably not. 4) You can download the full report here. ------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Are ESG Ratings the New Credit Rating for Stock Prices? By Ginger Szala, November 19, 2018, ThinkAdvisor, USA. "A new MSCI study of ESG ratings finds they have a similar impact on share prices as do credit ratings." Points: 1) Though to me the findings are unsurprising, it is the first study to demonstrate that ESG ratings have a similar impact to credit ratings on a company's stock price. This finding will no doubt be challenged, but comes at a time when investors everywhere are looking at the inclusion of ESG criteria in their investment research. It bodes well for the mainstreaming of ESG! 2) Many credit ratings’ agencies such as S&P, Moody’s and Fitch have long been criticized for potential significant conflicts of interest and bias. They take clients’ funds to provide new issue ratings and have historically slow to act to in changing their ratings, particularly negatively, to new circumstances! So, since ESG ratings’ companies like Sustainalytics, MSCI, RobecoSAM, etc., don’t take funds for their corporate ratings—as far as I know—they may well be even a greater indicator of corporate ‘safety’ than the credit ratings’ agencies! 3) You can download the MSCI study here. ------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Companies Leading on Disability Inclusion Outperform Peers, by Megan Amrich, November 20, 2018, TriplePundit, USA. "Accenture, in partnership with Disability:IN and the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), has released 'Getting to Equal: The Disability Inclusion Advantage.' This report looks at both the disability practices and financial performance of 140 companies over the past four years... Companies that 'embrace best practices for employing and supporting more people with disabilities in their workforces' are several times more likely to outperform their peers financially." Points: 1) This is a pioneering and worthy study. It might also be true that employees with disabilities feel they have to prove themselves and so are more productive. Hence, forward-looking companies know this and so increasingly employ individuals with disabilities? Thus, such employment is not always out of charity. 2) One has to wonder too, however, is that highly profitable companies feel they are able to hire more persons with disability because of the high profits? 3) Are such companies also aiming to create even higher reputation in the communities they serve? Subject:  What are the best ESG-Sustainable-Ethical indices? The range of indices is immense today. When I began to follow these around 2001, there were a handful globally, and mostly unknown. Today, it’s extraordinary the number of them and what they cover. The idea of these indices are that they can act as benchmarks for you to assess your own performance. Furthermore, there are numerous mutual funds and ETFs that you can be purchased that are based on them. For a good listing of them go to my page, Ethical Investing Stock and Bond Indices. Here are my favourites though. Equities Dow Jones Sustainability Index One of the oldest index families and an ethical investor’s favourite. “The family was launched in 1999 as the first global sustainability benchmark and tracks the stock performance of the world's leading companies in terms of economic, environmental and social criteria.” The DJSI data is compiled and analyzed by the Swiss organization RobecoSAM. They review some 10,000 companies!” Fossil Free Indexes(Global) "The Fossil Free Indexes are a suite of benchmarks designed for investable products that provide broad market exposure to index investors who wish to divest from fossil fuel companies. These investors are typically motivated either by a concern about unacceptable levels of climate change or by a concern about overvaluation and risk in the sector." These indices are capitalization weighted, meaning that larger companies have a bigger influence in the index; smaller companies a smaller weight. FTSE4Good Index Series and FTSE Smart Sustainability Index Series(Global) "The FTSE4Good Index Series is designed to measure the performance of companies demonstrating strong Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) practices. Transparent management and clearly-defined ESG criteria make FTSE4Good indices suitable tools to be used by a wide variety of market participants when creating or assessing responsible investment products." FTSE Russell Green Revenues Index Series(Global) "FTSE Russell’s Green Revenues (LCE) data model and Green Revenues Index Series track companies that generate green revenues – a critical component missing from current sustainability models. Now, investors can accurately identify and support their investment in companies that stand to benefit from the world’s transition to a green economy with consistent, transparent data and indexes." I really like the concept of this index with it’s scoring based on green revenues! That means industries such as tobacco, won’t score highly, whereas in other ESG-sustainable-ethical indices, they could! MSCI ESG Indices(Global) "With 40 years of expertise in index construction and maintenance, MSCI aims to set new standards for ESG indices – allowing clients to more effectively benchmark ESG investment performance, issue index-based ESG investment products, as well as to manage, measure and report on their compliance with ESG mandates." NASDAQ Green Economy Indices What I like about these are that there’re separate indices for various types of alternative energy sectors, such as solar and wind plus indices focusing on water services and products. (Global) "NASDAQ OMX offers a complete family of indexes tracking the growing environmental and clean-energy sector, also known as the 'Green Economy.' Green Economy is the shift of economic development towards sustainable practices in business and infrastructure..." S&P Dow Jones ESG Indices They truly offer something for almost any sustainable-ethically oriented investor! Canada—Equities Jantzi Social Index(JSI) I’ve known Michael Jantzi, whose firm established this index, since the 1990s. He is head of and founded, Sustainalytics, one of the world’s leading ESG ratings’ agencies. (Canada) "In January 2000, Jantzi Research launched the Jantzi Social Index®, partnered with Dow Jones Indexes. The JSI, a socially screened, market capitalization-weighted common stock index modeled on the S&P/TSX 60 consists of 60 Canadian companies that pass a set of broadly based environmental, social, and governance rating criteria. The JSI has begun to generate the first definitive data on the effects of social screening on financial performance in Canada." Bonds S&P ESG Sovereign Bond index family “The S&P ESG Sovereign Bond Index family offers investors exposure to the same sovereign bonds as standard cap-weighted sovereign bond indices but tilts the country weights towards more sustainable countries, based on RobecoSAM’s” © 2019 Ron Robins, Investing for the Soul. All rights reserved.

With Matthew Kennedy, Analyst at Renaissance Capital

- Kathleen Smith, Chairman of Renaissance Capital, The IPO Experts - Please call 1-800-388-9700 for a free review of your financial portfolio

- Kathleen Smith, Chair of Renaissance Capital, The IPO Experts - Please call 1-800-388-9700 for a free review of your financial portfolio

- Kathy Smith, Chairman & Co-Founder of Renaissance Capital reviews IPO market for the first quarter and shares her outlook for thew second quarter. - Please call 1-800-388-9700 for a free review of your financial portfolio.

- Kathy Smith, Chairman of Renaissance Capital discusses the 2012 and 2013 IPO market - Please call 1-800-388-9700 for a free review of your financial portfolio