David R. Kotok
The Navigator
Judgement in the fog, money, risk and the call others cannot make.
David R. Kotok earns The Navigator designation by triangulating historical data, macro uncertainty, and policy risk into actionable bearings rather than predictions. He mined seven centuries of pandemic records to locate patterns, while explicitly flagging the unknowns that could capsize any thesis.
“Well, that's not easy to do because we don't have a lot of history. But we have some history. We have a century in the United States, two pandemics, and now this one, and we have some references in Europe, but not very much.”
“I would say that. History would show. That every pandemic accelerated the Procedures and directions and trajectories which were underway. That's what a shock would do. It also had another impact if the trajectory was in the direction of something that was going to fail. It accelerated the failure. Both happened.”
“Those incentives give them an opportunity to really examine a full picture. And that's what we created. And we had a very strong incentive package of moving expenses. We reimbursed bonuses. If you make the move, if you choose not to make the move, you stay at your desk in New Jersey. And all but two eventually made the move.”
“Okay, so if you look at the World War I period and you look at the Spanish flu pandemic, which was a worldwide event, and you say, I'm going to really combine them because actually the war in part was part of the reason the spread. So severe, what happened after the shock? Was it only the recovery from a post-war environment?”
Masters in Business: “David R. Kotok on Fed Studies of Pandemic Shocks (Podcast)”
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