PFI
Talks

Rafał Brzoska, the founder and CEO of InPost, a logistics company that operates over over 25 000 parcel lockers throughout Poland, constituting the largest business structure of this type in the country.

Andre Chelhot is an advisor to the board of directors of the British investment company Zelof & Partners. He is an investor in holiday property in Greece and has been Chief Economist at the Prague Finance Institute since this autumn.

David Petraeus is a retired U.S. Army general, former head of the CIA and current partner at KKR, an American investment firm that operates around the world and has inspired the creators of the Hollywood blockbuster Wall Street. With a combination of experience and the ability to clearly understand world events, Petraeus is an authority on the implications and risks of world politics facing globally connected investment and business.

Daron Acemoglu, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), does not share the general optimism about artificial intelligence. But instead of dystopian accounts of a world in the grip of algorithms, the author of the bestseller Why Nations Fail measures the impact on the performance of the global economy, in the language of numbers.

Three years ago, she had no social media audience, and now more than 650,000 people follow her on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and her newsletter. Economist Kyla Scanlon uses her reach to make economic issues accessible to both lay and professional audiences. She has her own podcast, provides video commentary for Bloomberg, and lectures at universities including MIT and Harvard. She also recently published her own book.

"Central European financial groups are increasingly active in investing in markets previously dominated by their Western competitors, but they are also venturing into developed Western markets," says Božidar Djelić, Managing Director of Lazard Investment Bank, where he also heads the CEE region. He discusses the appetite for expansion of these capital-intensive groups and their position in M&A in the next podcast in the PFI Talks series.

Americans’ distrust of the economy is miles away from the hard data that indicates all is well. “With the unemployment rate at its lowest level in 50 years and inflation approaching two percent, it’s pretty strange that the consumer confidence indicator is still pretty low,” thinks Nobel laureate and economics professor Paul Krugman.

Nebýt mimořádně vysoké inflace, přijetí eura by v České republice mezi lidmi nyní nebylo vůbec tématem, myslí si předseda Národní rozpočtové rady Mojmír Hampl. V rozhovoru ze řekl, že pokud budou Češi se svojí měnovou a fiskální historií někdy přijímat společnou evropskou měnu, budou k tomu dotlačeni. Spíše než ostatní státy unie ale bude případný tlak na přijetí eura vyvíjet vlastní špatná hospodářská politika.