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UNCDF: Women as Builders of Inclusive Digital Economies

The dramatic toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, at times, seemingly defies belief. Yet, every time there is an analysis of the pandemic’s damage — human, societal, economic — a recurring narrative emerges, one that is quite believable. That COVID-19 has

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Geoffrey Okamoto, First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF: Knightmare Uncertainty

The American economist Frank Knight theorised about the difference between risk and uncertainty in his classic book Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. Risk is “a quantity susceptible of measurement.” A precise outcome may not be known, but the probability of a

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Building the Bridge Between Non-financial and Mandatory Reporting

BP CEO Bernard Looney’s courageous announcement that BP will transition to becoming a green energy pioneer shows the need for a new supporting logic for a standard measurement system. If BP is prepared to publicly commit to do the right

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Appreciation of ESG Values Has Increased During Pandemic, says Asset Manager of Goldman Sachs Sheila Patel

As a keen angler, Sheila Patel knows that the secret to hooking a big trout is to deliver the fly in a precise and careful manner. So when Covid-19 lobbed a rock into the financial world’s waters, one might have

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Matein Khalid: A Random Walk Down Silicon Valley’s Pre-IPO Deal Flow

2020 was a spectacular year for investing in late stage technology unicorns and I am proud to have led significant investor syndicates from the Gulf for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the e-learning marketplace Udemy and Swedish fintech Klarna Bank. The secondary

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Tech, Trust, and Women’s Role in Creating the Future

Cecilia Harvey’s jaw-dropping career was launched by a chance careers-day visit to Wall Street. Today, she is a woman on a mission. Several missions, actually. One of those missions is to reverse a crisis of trust in technology. “Now is

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Markets Move in Anticipation of Boom Times

Yesterday, equity markets the world over went near-ballistic on the news that an effective vaccine had been developed to tame and possibly defeat the novel coronavirus. Already buoyed by Joe Biden’s win in the US presidential election, markets moved even

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Trumpism 2.0: Message to Survive Delivery Malfunction

A disconnect between the medium and Trump’s message deprived the incumbent President of a second term in office. However, seventy million voters cannot be wrong – or ignored. A sizeable part of the US electorate that didn’t burst into celebration

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The Book That Trump Rewrote

The lesson learnt from the 2020 US election is that 2016 was not a fluke. The surprise triumph of Donald Trump four years ago did not represent a momentary lapse of reason, but rather signalled the demise of the traditional

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Oops, He Did It Again?

Oops, he did it again. The choir of commentators that almost unanimously predicted a Biden landslide has been caught singing from the wrong hymn sheet. Though the outcome of yesterday’s US vote is still very much up in the air,

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