Brilliance is often accidental, and so it was at Goldman Sachs' annual meeting on Friday.

In an attempt to pinpoint exactly what's wrong with the global economy — why demand is weak, why growth is anemic, why jitters on one side of the planet can turn into panic all over — CEO Lloyd Blankfein happened upon why Wall Street is so hated.

It was, as I said, an accident.

Blankfein said that what the world needs now is confidence. In investment banking, when people are confident there are "more financings, more equity raises, because people invest more money in their own businesses when they're confident," he said, according to Business Insider's Portia Crowe, who was on the scene.

This explanation sounds right. When people think they can make money they put their money to work.

The problem is that "confidence" doesn't go far enough. More than confidence, for people to invest in the world they have to trust in it — in the systems and people that make it work.

The fact that Blankfein missed that mark, though, explains exactly why people hate Wall Street.

The financial crisis, the scandals and the fraud and the dark headlines, have all helped erode that trust. And that lack of trust is what is holding the world back right now.

This is not a drill

Think of a simple trust-building exercise, the fall game. When you're the fall guy, you can be confident that everyone is going to catch you. That, after all, is how the game is completed. You have to believe that everyone understands the rules.

What's better than knowing that everyone understands the rules, though? Trusting that everyone around you is going to catch you — believing beyond a shadow of a doubt that they want to follow the rules.

That's the difference between trust and conviction. Trust is something you can rely on, beyond certainty.

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Now one can operate in markets without trust, with only conviction.

Conviction doesn't demand that you, or anyone else, play by the rules, though. It just demands that you understand what's going on (and what motivates everyone around you) at all times. It's a daunting task that neither the common person nor Wall Street's all-seeing CEOs were able to accomplish before the financial crisis. It is, however, part of the latter's full-time job — mitigating risk, seeing the unforeseen.

Of course, some of that burden would be lifted if we operated on more trust and less conviction.

Your correspondent is hardly the only person thinking this way. This week, Andrew G. Haldane, chief economist of the Bank of England, gave an incredibly compelling speech on what's wrong with global economy. Unlike Blankfein, though, he got it right. The speech was called The Great Divide, and he argued that the only way to close that divide is with trust.

"Evidence has emerged, both micro and macro, to suggest trust may play a crucial role in value creation. At the micro level, there is now ample evidence the degree of trust or social capital within a company contributes positively to its value creation capacity," said Haldane.

"At the macro level, there is now a strong body of evidence, looking across a large range of countries and over long periods of time, that high levels of trust and co-operation are associated with higher economic growth. Put differently, a lack of trust jeopardizes one of finance’s key societal functions — higher growth."

Watchers on the wall

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