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Otaviano Canuto: Dependency and Disconnect of U.S. Financial Markets

U.S. stock and corporate bond markets performed extraordinarily well from the March financial shock caused by covid-19 to the end of last month. Then, three consecutive weeks of decline in the three major stock market indexes have been followed this

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Lockheed Martin President and CEO Jim Taiclet: Next-Generation Battlefield Integration

Notoriously slow in absorbing customer feedback and adjusting to market dynamics, the US defence industry is at long last becoming much more responsive to the needs and concerns of buyers. Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest purveyor of military hardware with

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Harvard Business School Impact-Weighted Accounts: Accounting as a Force for Humility and Prosperity

Amid the immeasurable human tragedy and losses from the COVID-19 pandemic, there are innumerable lessons to be learned. While it may seem callous to derive such lessons from the disaster so early, finding meaning has been added as a sixth

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Otaviano Canuto: Economic Recovery From the Pandemic May Come to Resemble a Square Root

Signs of recovery in various parts of the global economy started in May, after the depressive dip imposed by Covid-19. They emerged after the easing of restrictions on mobility and reflected policies of flattening the recession curve (income transfers to

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Boston Consulting Group (BCG) CEO Rich Lesser: Inspiring Excellence

In his seven years as CEO of Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Rich Lesser (58) has doubled both the firm’s revenue and its workforce. Moreover, BCG was the only major global management consultancy to keep growing strongly through the Great Recession.

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UNCDF and Convergence: Getting the Right Blend in Game-Changing Finance

In December of 2015, the global news website, Quartz, published a piece entitled “Both Venture Capitalists and Banks are Betting on Blockchain.” In the five or so years since this piece was posted, the debate over blockchain persists — whether

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Otaviano Canuto on Central Banks and Climate Change: Turning Black Swans Into Green

There are three possible motivations for the engagement by central banks with climate change: financial risks, macro-economic impacts, and mitigation/adaptation policies. Regardless of the extent to which individual central banks incorporate the three prongs of motivations, they can no longer

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ISID, McGill University: Updating the DFIs’ Operating Models to Achieve the UN 2030 SDG Agenda

The UN General Assembly set the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) five years ago. The estimated annual amount of investment needed to achieve them is short — by $2.5tn to $3tn. The stakeholders that play a key role in directing and

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Waiting for the Government to Come Knocking

Streamlined to a skeleton, the US federal government is singularly unable to keep up with politicians eager to dole out trillions of dollars to businesses and individuals caught short by the pandemic. Jolted out of their small-is-beautiful philosophy, lawmakers and

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Book Review: The Ride of a Lifetime by Robert Iger – Iger’s Wild Ride to the Top of ‘the Happiest Place on Earth’

Back in 2005, Robert Iger’s 31-year journey at Disney and ABC looked like it could come to an end. Pulitzer prize-winner James B Stewart had released his book DisneyWar, an exposé on Michael Eisner’s 20-year reign as CEO of the

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