"Buffett once told me there are three 'I's in every cycle. The 'innovator,' that's the first 'I.' After the innovator comes the 'imitator.' And after the imitator in the cycle comes the idiot." -Theodore Forstmann, quoting Warren Buffett
Showing posts with label quotes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quotes. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Quote of the Day
"Allowing investment banks to be leveraged to the tune of 30 to 1 is the equivalent of playing Russian roulette with five of the six chambers of the gun loaded. If one adds the off-balance-sheet liabilities to this leverage, you might as well fill the sixth chamber with a bullet and pull the trigger." - Michael Lewitt
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Quote of the Day
“The rule is that financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation. What is recurrently so described and celebrated is, without exception, a small variation on an established design, one that owes it distinctive character to the aforementioned brevity of the financial memory. The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version. All financial innovation involves, in one form or another, the creation of debt secured in greater or lesser adequacy by real assets.” - J.K. Galbraith, "A Short History of Financial Euphoria"
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Quote of the Day
"This bright new system, this practice in the United States, this practice in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, has broken down. Growth in the economy in this decade will be the slowest of any decade since the Great Depression, right in the middle of all this financial innovation. It is the most complicated financial crisis I have ever experienced, and I have experienced a few... Changes are going to have to be made to the global financial system." - Paul Volcker
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Quote of the Day
“Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works”. - John Stuart Mill
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Quote of the Day
"A lot of people in the car industry - and this is a seachange since the 1990s - have come to see dependence on gasoline as the growth bottleneck in the industry's future. They think that the real constraint on the ability to grow the car market will be dependence on a fuel that causes global warming, that puts money in the pockets of dictators, that has enormous price volatility and so forth. So they want to get off gasoline, because they now see it as a limit to their future prospects." - Jonathan Rauch, in an interview with Russ Roberts on EconTalk discussing the Chevy Volt
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Quote of the Day
“When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?” - John Maynard Keynes
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Quote of the Day
"Spreadsheets are easy; science is hard." - Shaywitz and Taleb
Shaywitz and Taleb in answer to the question "Why do pharmaceutical companies, which spend billions of dollars each year trying to turn advances into treatments, have so little to show for their efforts?"
Quote of the Day
"The problem is that we have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor." Martin Luther King
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Quote of the Day
“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” - Henry Ford
Sunday, July 27, 2008
When to start - Seth Godin
"The best time to start was last year. The second best time to start is right now." - Seth Godin
Notes:
When to start
Actually, as you've probably guessed, the best time to start was last year. The second best time to start is right now.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Quote of the Day
"It's probably true that hard work never killed anyone, but why take the chance?" - Ronald Reagan
Notes:
Quote of the Day
"We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us." - Churchill
Notes:
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Quote of the Day
"Is there something obviously distortionary or market-abusive about me entering into a contract today to deliver a stock at a known price one week from now without me owning the stock today or borrowing it today and holding the stock for another week?" - Willem Buiter
Notes:
Umair Haque: I think there just might be: it distorts the relationship between shareholders and management. Any incentive shareholders might have had for value creation in the long-run vaporizes (with predictably perverse results). If shareholders aren't in it for the long-run, what's the point of equity? There isn't one: the edifice begins to crack.
If we're really going to argue that short selling is healthy because it aids price discovery, we must also ask: where was this so-called price discovery for the last decade? Why does short selling as price discovery only work when crises accelerate? Conversely, if yesterday's price discovery is meaningless tomorrow, perhaps the real problem is that the institutions we've built aren't adequate for a hyperconnected world.
"A stockmarket is a mechanism of price discovery and should be regulated only with regard to the accuracy of numbers and facts."
Really? Maybe in a textbook - in the real world, today's so-called stock markets are more like mechanisms of information manipulation with almost zero accuracy in terms of "numbers and facts". So perhaps if we focused a bit less on the numbers, and a bit more on the logic, we'd have morepower to understand what's really going on.
What's really going on? In a world of marginal resource scarcity, the value of efficient resource allocation is going to explode.
But can we really trust markets as we know them to allocate resources efficiently anymore? Especially when the only jobs that pay are those that have mostly to do with, well, making markets fail?
Quote of the Day
"Stock markets work in a fractal way, not in a Gaussian way. Ignore the fat tails at your peril." - anon.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Quote of the Day
"A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits." - Robert Heinlein
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Quote of the Day
"When you have to fit a sixth-order polynomial to capture price history because exponential growth is too conservative, you're probably close to a peak" - John P. Hussman
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