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Dr. Paul Shotton      

Founder & CEO, White Diamond Consulting & CEO, Biosurfactants LLC; Author, "Doomed To Fail"; Authority on Corporate Governance, Economics & Risk Management

Dr. Paul Shotton has over 30 years of experience in risk analytics and executive leadership. He is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of White Diamond Consulting, advising companies in the finance and technology sectors. In 2024, Dr. Shotton became the CEO of Biosurfactants LLC, which works at the intersection of natural rhamnolipid biosurfactants and artificial intelligence to help make our environment cleaner and safer for everyone. He is also a fractional CEO of Tachyon Aerospace, an aerospace technology company.

Dr. Shotton developed his knowledge of markets and honed his insights in high-level trading and risk management positions at financial institutions in major metropolitan hubs, first in fixed-income trading positions at Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank and thereafter in risk management positions for Barclays and JP Morgan Chase in London, and subsequently, in New York, as global head of market risk management at Lehman Brothers and deputy head of group risk control and methodology at UBS.

He is a keynote speaker and frequent publisher of articles on economics, corporate governance, and risk management. He is also the author of the widely acclaimed book "Doomed To Fail—Why Government Is Incapable Of Living Up To Our Hopes." Dr. Shotton holds a physics PhD from the University of Oxford.

Speech Topics


Doomed To Fail - Why Government Is Incapable Of Living Up To Our Hopes

For almost the entire existence of humanity our life experience has been what Thomas Hobbes described as: nasty, brutish and short. All of the progress we have made has occurred during just the last few hundred years and has occurred thanks to the mutually reinforcing developments of liberal democracy, capitalism and scientific enlightenment. It is therefore a tragedy that, in recent years, surveys of people’s satisfaction have shown a marked loss of faith in the ability of democracy and capitalism to deliver fair outcomes. Whilst I empathize with those who have been victims of the hollowing-out of the middle classes due to globalization, and who have suffered from increasing wealth disparity since the Global Financial Crisis of fifteen years ago, I fear that the alternatives to democracy and capitalism would be far worse.

Because people have individual agency, human society is a complex adaptive system (CAS). CAS have several important properties: they are highly non-linear, tending to obey power laws, and are deeply interconnected, rendering invalid classic techniques such as breaking a system down into individual components, having experts solve each component separately, and then reconstituting the whole. As in the world of quantum mechanics, there is no independence between the system under observation and the people doing the observing, resulting in these systems exhibiting the property of adaptivity; they change over time in ways which are unpredictable, rendering invalid forecasting techniques based of the analysis of historical data.

Collectively these properties are the reason why, in respect of human affairs, the future is fundamentally unknowable, and this is precisely why democracy is the best form of political organization, free-market capitalism is the best form of economic organization, and why true diversity is imperative for the long-term health and well-being of any organization.

Why It's Time To Re-Think The Role Of The Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve Bank was set up after an Act of Congress passed in 1913, in response to the Knickerbocker Trust crisis of 1907, to stabilize banks and the US financial system. Subsequent crises have seen the Fed's role expand further (never let a crisis go to waste!) to encompass the management of monetary policy to maintain low and stable inflation together with full employment in the US economy, as well as financial market stability.

However, as a result of well-intended, but nevertheless fundamentally misguided management of monetary policy and the mismanagement of bank regulation the Fed inadvertently caused the Global Financial Crisis of 2007 - 2009 and subsequently exacerbated its effects, driving the increasing wealth disparity which is at root the cause of the loss of faith in our democracy and in free market capitalism to deliver the American Dream.

Time for a re-think of the Fed's role.

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