The financial industry is a service industry. It should serve others before it serves itself.
Interpretation
The financial industry should prioritize the needs of its clients over its own profits.
Christine Lagarde emphasizes that the core responsibility of the financial industry is to serve its clients and society at large rather than focusing solely on profit-making. This perspective highlights the importance of ethical practices and customer-centric approaches in a sector that greatly influences the economy and individuals' lives.
In practice
During a financial seminar highlighting ethical practices in banking.
In the 2013 Economists Program, we hired 51 percent women, 49 percent men. And the reason for that is that we have a draft from all over the world, and we've hired, for instance, in that group, a good number of Chinese economists - highly qualified, all Ph.D.s from the best universities of the world. And guess what? They're all women.
Tackling climate change is a collective endeavour, it means collective accountability and it's not too late
I have lived with extraordinary women, whether it was my grandmother, my mother. My father passed away when I was 16... I was witness to a woman who single handedly brought up the entire family and managed to do everything... She was an extraordinary role model for me.
I'm of those who believe that excesses in all matters are not a good idea, whether it's formation of bubbles, whether it's excess in the financial market, whether it's excess of inequality, it has to be watched, it has to be measured, and it has to be anticipated in terms of consequences.
You know, when I sit in meetings and things are very tense and people take things extremely seriously and they invest a lot of their ego, I sometimes think to myself, 'Come on, you know, there's life and there's death and there is love.' And all of that ego business is nonsense compared to that.
Very often as a little girl, then as a young woman, I have suffered my lot of discrimination. I was brought up with brothers; I grew up in a boys' world. You have to elbow your way in. When you come with that sentiment of having been in a minority for a long period of time, then you are much more attentive to minorities.
Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it ... he who doesn't ... pays it.
Your priorities, passions, goals, and fears are shown clearly in the flow of your money.
We believe that according the name 'investors' to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a 'romantic.'
I cannot invest the way I want the world to be; I have to invest the way the world is.
The grim irony of investing is that we investors as a group not only don't get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don't pay for.
If you wait to see how much money you have left at the end of the month to put toward savings, the answer may be zero. So, set up an automated monthly transfer from your checking to savings account. Once you lock into that commitment, you'll be forced to scale back spending to make ends meet.
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