Laurence D. Fink

To finance longer life spans, we must convince individuals to start investing now for the long term. But longevity should be an asset that can be levered, not a curse. They must understand that there's a cost to sitting in cash. No one talks about that cost.

What Wall Street is, they're market makers. Wall Street's business model is making money on velocity of money. They're a click industry. That's what Wall Street is. They make a lot of money when there's a lot of turnover. And they make a lot of money when that velocity is fast.

I personally have said many times I'd be a hundred percent in equities. That fits my risk profile and my views of the world, though obviously it's not appropriate for everyone. Most investors need a more diversified portfolio.

Early in the 1990s, I flew alone in a dandelion-yellow, single-engine, 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee from Westchester County Airport in New York westward to the Rocky Mountains, landing and refuelling a good many times in middle-sized cities and towns along the way.

Well, there's no question that the law passed in 1996 was flawed. It deregulated the wholesale market, meaning the price that the utilities had to pay energy companies for power, but not the retail market.