Management of scattered resources becomes easier and more profitable

There are many innovative firms which use scattered resources to generate profits. Uber is a typical example of this type of companies. Uber builds a platform to allow private drivers to use their cars and spare time to create wealth. Airbnb also uses a similar idea to run their business. Everyone has occasional excess resources that can be useful to others. Actually, this is not a new idea. The foundation of banks is based on this idea that banks borrow people's spare money to lend to people in need. However, nowadays, advanced technology and mathematical skills allow people to manage more scattered excess resources. Any company, which can find one type of people's excess resources and use its finding wisely, could become the next Uber and attract many investors.

The Chinese capital outflows create new opportunities for the global financial market

The Chinese financial market is relatively isolated from the rest of the world, many Chinese IT companies issue their IPOs in foreign financial markets. The Chinese capital outflows reduce China's forex reserves and weaken the capability of hedging against capital flight or bailing out domestic financial institutions. However, such outflows can have positive impacts on the global financial markets.  The prices of real estates and equities are more likely to rise, compared with the prices of commodities and bonds, as they have relatively higher returns. I think the first country which has its financial market fully covered will benefit the most from the Chinese capital outflows. From the current situation, I believe the US financial market is the most likely to benefit from the Chinese capital outflows.

How far can the ECB take its actions?

Mario Draghi has stated that the ECB will take any necessary action to hit its target without limits. However, we need to know "no limit" does not mean no limit, as the ECB needs to ensure that the Eurozone economy is recovered without causing the collapse of the currency union. Moreover, it is a central bank by definition. It cannot use any stimulus tools beyond the function of any other central banks. Moreover, all member countries have their governments who are making all different fiscal decisions, and these decisions may limit the effects of the ECB's policies. The move of setting negative base rates is already very radical; I think more radical moves might damage the currency union.

OPEC cannot achieve an agreement to push up oil prices in the short term

Many oil exporting countries are suffering from the low oil price, as the price is only half of the price a year ago. Saudi Arabia extended its outputs in November 2014, won the competition with the oil exporters who have higher production costs. Such move has helped Saudi Arabia win a larger market share, but damaged the possibility of cooperating with other oil exporters. In repeated games, when one player cheats once, in all future games, all players will not choose to cooperate with each other. Therefore, the unity within OPEC is much weaker now. In order to regain trust from other members, countries like Saudi Arabia have to give away some of their market shares to other member countries. If they do so, then the move of extending productions would become pointless, so I do not expect they can achieve any agreement to cooperate together to push up oil prices in the short term.

I don't think the ECB's decision will be effective.

The response to the ECB's decision of extending its QE is very negative. The stock market fell and many European countries' bond prices fell sharply today. People are tired about the ECB's continuous QE program with no end in sight. The result of the QE program is disappointing so far. Moreover, the ECB further cut its rate to minus 0.3 percent. This is a very radical move that a negative base rate can make the economy go either way. There could be a capital outflow from the Eurozone as people may feel insecure about the cash they are holding. The worst situation is "bank run" when people are extremely panic. In addition, cutting rates leads to a depreciation in the euro. This can increase the Eurozone coutnries' exports in order to help their domestic economic growth. Moreover, as people may feel insecure about the cash, people may want to spend as quickly as possible. This can boost consumptions but imports as well, as some of the countries rely on imports in certain sectors. Therefore, the improvement of some countries' current account is limited. Overall, I think the ECB's move could increase the inflation rate in a short term but will not make a significant improvement in the countries' economic performances.

Luck is measurable

Sometimes when we want to be successful, we need luck; however, we do not know when we have luck and how much luck we have. It is possible to look back and measure how much luck you had in the past. The first thing to do is to list all elements that you feel you can have a control with, e.g. education, time and efforts. Then you need to make a judgement on all things you did in the past, whether it is successful or not. If it is successful, then the outcome is 1; otherwise, the outcome is 0. Then by running a regression you can know how each element affects your achievements. Then you substitute data into each sample and calculate the unobservable heterogeneity term, and the unobservable heterogeneity term is a measurement of the luck if you assume that the God is fair that you have equal amounts of good luck and bad luck.

Two-party politics is not very different from one-party politics under certain assumptions

Imagine people's political opinions all lie on a single line from left to right and each political party chooses a point on this line. The people will choose the political party which has a point that is the closest to their political views on the line. We assume that people's political views uniformly distribute on this line. If there are only two parties in the game, the Nash equilibrium exists when both of the parties choose the central point. In this way, only the policies which match the central political view will be carried out no matter which political party is the dominant party. Therefore, even there are two political parties, however, both parties will choose the same policies. In this way, we cannot see that the difference between two-party politics and one-party politics. People may think that if there is only one party, one party can choose any policy it wants. It could be true. However, if the single party wants to maximise the country's total utility or satisfaction, it has to choose the middle point, if we assume that distance away from the point the party selects is negatively linearly corelated to that person's utility. Therefore, with assumption of when there are two parties, parties' priority is to maximise the number of their supporters and when there is only one party, the party wants to maximise the country's total satisifaction, both political structures will carry out the same result. If we have more than two political parties, there will be no pure strategy nash equilibrium, which means the political environment could be very unstable.