It's important to understand economic trends, but, in my mind, it's more important to understand how to buck the trends.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
For me, geopolitical issues are becoming more important, because how can you understand economy if you don't understand geopolitics? People think economists just deal with spreadsheets and charts. That's a narrow-minded caricature.
What I sell is the higher knowledge of knowing what's next and not following the trend of what's now.
I think economics - and this is what I've tried to impart - has a tremendous amount of human interest in it.
Things get much easier if one jumps on the bandwagon of existing trends.
Growing is an important part of the business, but more important than that is to get better.
I'm an economist by training. And I know that what works is a permanent increase in buying power.
Part of my advantage is that my strength is economic forecasting, but that only works in free markets, when markets are smarter than people. That's how I started. I watched the stock market, how equities reacted to change in levels of economic activity, and I could understand how price signals worked and how to forecast them.
Figuring out what the next big trend is tells us what we should focus on.
I tend to look at things from the supply side, looking for ways to make it less expensive to do more production. I think that's what creates a demand and keeps an economy moving.
My first priority is growing this economy in the long term, and stimulating it in the short term.