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Skeptical Finance Quotes

"While money doesn't buy love, it puts you in a great bargaining position." —Anonymous

The Golden Rule - He Who Has the Gold, Makes the Rules
 

"If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability." -Henry Ford

Hyman Minsky, 1986

Keynes quotes:

See also John Maynard Keynes - Wikiquote

• "A 'sound' banker, alas, is not one who forsees ruin and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him."
• It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
• Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others. As quoted in Isms (2006) by Gregory Bergman, p.105
• The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods. National self-sufficiency (1933) Section 3, republished in Collected Works Vol. 11 (1982).
• They offer me neither food nor drink — intellectual nor spiritual consolation... [Conservatism] leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it conforms to no intellectual standard, it is not safe, or calculated to preserve from the spoilers that degree of civilization which we have already attained. On the Conservative Party; Skidelsky (1992:231) quoting Collected Writings Volume IX page 296-297
• The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
• Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone
• The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward.
• Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.
• If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid. John Maynard Keynes, "The Future" Ch. 5, Essays in Persuasion (1931)
• The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.  John Maynard Keynes, (attributed)
• The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again. John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923) Ch. 3
• I do not know which makes a man more conservative—to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past. John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-faire (1926) Ch. 1
• The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (13 December 1935)

“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing." Chuck Prince, Financial Times, July 10 2007

"Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you invest, investigate. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try. Before you retire, save. Before you die, give." —William A. Ward

Asked once what developing countries should do with the annual reports the IMF prepares on member nations, Stiglitz recommended "picking it up, saying `thank you very much' and dropping it straight in the garbage can."

“Any time you hear a money manager say there’s $3.5 trillion dollars in cash on the sidelines, take your money away from them. Because he doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation. -—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Those in possession of enough power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true." Eric Hoffer

"It is generally agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of Stock Exchanges." —John Maynard Keynes

henry-blodget-vs-ken-fisher

Back2Bat:

FR banking: Stealing purchasing power from all money holders including the poor and lending it out. 
 
Deuteronomy 24:14 
"You shall not oppress a hired servant who is poor and needy, 
whether he is one of your countrymen 
or one of your aliens who is in your land or in your towns." 
 
Job 20:19 
"For he has oppressed and forsaken the poor; 
He has seized a house which he has not built." 
 
Proverbs 14:31 
"He who oppresses the poor taunts his Maker, 
But he who is gracious to the needy honors Him." 
 
Proverbs 22:16 
"He who oppresses the poor to make more for himself 
Or who gives to the rich, will only come to poverty." 
 
Proverbs 28:3 
"A poor man who oppresses the lowly is like a driving rain which leaves no food." 
 
Proverbs 29:13 
"The poor man and the oppressor have this in common: 
The LORD gives light to the eyes of both." 
 
Ecclesiastes 5:8 
"If you see oppression of the poor and denial of justice and righteousness in the province, do not be shocked at the sight; for one official watches over another official, and there are higher officials over them." 
 
Ezekiel 18:12 
"...oppresses the poor and needy, commits robbery, does not restore a pledge, but lifts up his eyes to the idols and commits abomination,... " 
 
Ezekiel 22:29 
"The people of the land have practiced oppression and committed robbery, and they have wronged the poor and needy and have oppressed the sojourner without justice." 
 
Amos 4:1 
"Hear this word, you cows of Bashan who are on the mountain of Samaria, 
Who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, 
Who say to your husbands, 
"Bring now, that we may drink!" 
 
Zechariah 7:10 
"...and do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the stranger or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another." 
 
James 2:6 
"But you have dishonored the poor man. Is it not the rich who oppress you and personally drag you into court?"

 

• "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem." —JP Getty
• The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance." —Oscar Wilde
• I know from experience that nobody can give me a tip or a series of tips that will make more money for me than my own judgment. - Jesse Livermore, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator).
• Economics is the only field in which two people can get a Nobel Prize for saying exactly the opposite thing. —Anonymous
• an aphorism of Warren Buffett’s: invest only in businesses that an idiot can run, because sooner or later an idiot will.
• "One of the lessons that investors seem to have to learn over and over again, and will again in the future, is that not only can you not turn a toad into a prince by kissing it, but you cannot turn a toad into a prince by repackaging it. But very imaginative people in the securities market try to do that. If you have bad mortgages they do not come better by repackaging them. To some extent the chickens are coming home to roost for the mortgage originators and securitisers." Warren Buffett, Financial Times, October 26, 2007
• "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter." Dick Cheney to Paul O'Neill

• “'The bottom line is that all those McMansions that were bought during this housing boom are going to go the way of the 1973 Lincoln Continental

  ...The housing bubble was the most over-owned, overleveraged and oversupplied real-estate market ever, and its unwinding will take years.

  The revival of consumers saving their money for retirement - rather than expecting their homes to provide the cushion - added with ‘move down’ buyers will depress real-estate prices.”

  David Rosenberg, Dow Jones, December 20, 2007
   

• The free market didn't build subways, bridges, highways and tunnels. Not to mention adequate numbers of schools and hospitals. It never will. 
   
• What we now see coming is the inevitable result of the west's switching over to fiat currencies. In the past spending was limited to how much gold could be squeezed out of the population. The "moderns" decided that it wasn't always necessary to tax people outright, that they could take peoples wealth by devaluing their savings. The bureaucrats got giddy with this and threw all spending restraints to the wind. It became fashionable to tar anyone who was fiscally responsible as evil . In reality printing money does not create wealth from nothing. It takes wealth from everybody.
   
• The rednecks don't realize they are meant to play this foolish left v. right blame game while the Banksters laugh all the way to the ... the Bank of course.

• "I care not who controls the government, as long as I control the printing of its money"
  Nathan Meyer Rothschild
   

• "It is well enough that people of our nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I beleive there would be a revolution before morning."
  Henry Ford
   

• “Economics was the only profession where a person could be considered an expert without having once been right.”

  -George Meany

   
• "There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle" Alexis de Tocqueville
   
• “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 . . . The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.”

  John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria
   

• Jean Baptiste Colbert once said, “The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing”
• Some of the most serious fallacies of traditional economics have been due to confusion between optimum and equilibrium conditions; the apparent influence of Dr. Pangloss upon the development of economic thought is for the most part nothing but pure intellectual error. —J. R. Hicks, "The rehabilitation of consumers' surplus," Review of Economic Studies 8(2), February 1941, pp. 108-116, footnote 1, p. 112.
   
• At the beginning of the Clinton administration in the early 1990s, adviser James Carville was stunned at the power the bond market had over the government. If he came back, Carville said: I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.
  • Wall Street Journal (February 25, 1993, p. A1)
  • James Carville - Wikiquote
     

• "When it comes to being visionary in stealing, the Republicans do better than anybody. It's really something to see." - in his 25th January 2006 appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
   

• Republicans want smaller government for the same reason crooks want fewer cops: it's easier to get away with murder.
   

• Don't get mad. Don't get even. Just get elected
   
• Between Paoli (one of Philadelphia's westernmost suburbs) and Penn Hills (one of Pittsburgh's easternmost suburbs), Pennsylvania is Alabama without the blacks.
   
• “Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.”
   
• "There is a huge statistical fog around the US economy." FT.com
• Markets will always move ahead of the news. Joe Granville
• '"When the capital development of a country becomes a byproduct of the activities of a casino,
  the job is likely to be ill-done.'' Lord Keynes
   
• Honesty may not be the best policy, but it is worth trying once in a while. --Richard Nixon

• Three percent exceeds 2% by 50%, not by 1%. -- Edward Denison
   

• Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas leading the reader from sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions to precisely stated but irrelevant theoretical conclusions. —Wassily Leontief, Science, Volume 217, 9 July 1982, p. 106.
   

• It is however always important to remember that the ability to see things in their correct perspective may be, and often is, divorced from the ability to reason correctly and vice versa. That is why a man may be a very good theorist and yet talk absolute nonsense.... Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper & Row, Colophon edition, 1975, p. 76, footnote 3.
   
• Niccolo Machiavelli “Never waste the opportunities offered by a good crisis.”
   
• "Money is of value for what it buys, and in love it buys time, place, intimacy, comfort, and a private corner alone." —Mae West
• Do not value money for any more nor any less than its worth; it is a good servant but a bad master. ~Alexandre Dumas fils, Camille, 1852
   
• An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today. —Laurence J. Peter (1919 - 1988)
   
• “When I'm bearish and I sell a stock, each sale must be at a lower level than the previous sale. When I am buying, the reverse is true. I must buy on a rising scale. I don’t buy long stocks on a scale down, I buy on a scale up.” —Jesse Livermore
   
• $700 Billion Dollar Attaboy The Big Picture
• "The uniform, constant and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition, the principle from which public and national, as well as private opulence is originally derived, is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite both of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration. Like the unknown principle of animal life, it frequently restores health and vigour to the constitution, inspite, not only of the disease, but of the absurd prescriptions of the doctor." —Adam Smith

  Financial crises can hit you regardless of whether you are a saint or a sinner.

  Guillermo Calvo's presidential address
  at the International Economic Association Congress

• The financial market globally is up to its elbows in one of the strangest and most complicated credit crises in history. Events have come in rapid succession with mind-numbing effect. No sooner does the dust settle in one part of the market than it is kicked up in another. Through it all, the reactions on the part of the participants have been the stuff of a good financial thriller. We thought it would be interesting to catalog some of that reaction for you on one web page. So here they are - from the witty and profound to the scary and downright silly - our Top 25 Quotes on the Credit Crisis of '07.
• In one way, I'm sympathetic to the institutional reluctance to face the music. I'd give a lot to mark my weight to 'model' rather than to 'market.' - Warren Buffett, Fortune, 8/16/07 (On the financial institution practice of valuing subprime assets on the basis of a computer model rather than the free market price.)
•  The Federal Reserve was not founded to bail out Bear Stearns or a few hedge funds. It was founded to keep a stable currency and maintain its value. - Jim Rogers, Rogers Commodity Fund

• For the second time in seven years, the bursting of a major-asset bubble has inflicted great damage on world financial markets. In both cases--the equity bubble in 2000 and the credit bubble in 2007--central banks were asleep at the switch. The lack of monetary discipline has become a hallmark of unfettered globalization. Central banks have failed to provide a stable underpinning to world financial markets and to an increasingly asset-dependent global economy. - Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley

• There is a lot of pain still to be had in the equity markets, particularly aimed at the risky end of the spectrum. We think the fair value on the market is about a third lower in the U.S. . . - Jeremy Grantham, Grantham, Mayo and Van Otterloo

• Suddenly, the world is realizing that gold is still a safe haven asset. We've seen pretty substantial losses in equity markets. I think this is genuine safe-haven buying. - James Moore, theBullionDesk

• At this juncture, the impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime market seems likely to be contained. - Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, Congressional testimony, March, 2007

• "If prices go down, we will have problems -- problems in the sense of spillover to other areas," Greenspan said. While he hasn't seen such spreading yet, "I expect to." - Former Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, speech, March, 2007 as reported by Bloomberg.com

• This is not a rescue. - Goldman Sachs Chief Financial Officer David Viniar after Goldman poured $3 billion into one of its hedge funds

• When you're in a pit, the first thing to do is to stop digging. - James Ellman, Seacliffe Capital

• The US financial system is teetering. Its USDollar currency is losing global support, with some outright revolts in crucial territories. The chief private sector export from the US financial sector has been fraud-ridden asset-backed bonds and their toxic credit derivatives. What should anyone expect? For years an institutional dishonesty within all things financial in the United States has been engrained, spreading, and become integrated with high levels of the USGovt. The Wall Street hucksters exported fraud. The backlash might be more severe than the soft soap gurus anticipate. Look for an international boycott. The shock waves in the US financial markets are preliminary symptoms of bigger events soon to come. Stability identified is nothing but quiet between tremors. - Jim Willie, Hat Trick Letter

• The German banks' situation is not uncritical. - Alexander Stuhlmann, Germany's Landesbank

• After all, in a credit crunch, cash is deemed to be king. In which case, gold owned outright has just been crowned emperor. - Adrian Ash, BullionVault

• [C]apitalism without financial failure is not capitalism at all, but a kind of socialism for the rich. - James Grant, Grant's Interest Rate Observer

• US sub-prime is just the leading edge of a financial hurricane. - Bernard Connolly, AIG

• When the music stops in terms of liquidity, things will get complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing. - Chuck Prince, Citigroup

• Why is it possible to rescue S&L buccaneers in the early '90s and provide guidance to levered Wall Street investment bankers during the 1998 long-term capital management crisis, yet throw 2 million homeowners to the wolves in 2007? - Bill Gross, Pimco

• So perhaps the most worrying single remark made by a responsible banking official during the current crisis came from Jochen Sanio, the head of Germany's banking regulator BaFin. He warned on Aug. 1 that his country could be facing the worst banking crisis since 1931 -- a reference to the collapse of Austria's Kredit Anstalt, which provoked a wave of bank failures across Europe. - Martin Walker, United Press International

  Angelo Mozilo, chief executive of Countrywide Financial Corp, which is one of the chief victims of the sub-prime home loan debacle, said the housing crisis was the result of "one of the greatest panics I have ever seen". When asked if housing would lead the US into a recession, he said: "I can't believe ... that this doesn't have a material effect ... on the psyches of the American people and eventually on their wallet." - Phillip Inman, The Guardian

• As calamitous as the sub-prime blowup seems, it is only the beginning. The credit bubble spawned abuses throughout the system. Sub-prime lending just happened to be the most egregious of the lot, and thus the first to have the cockroaches scurrying out in plain view. The housing market will collapse. New-home construction will collapse. Consumer pocketbooks will be pinched. The consumer spending binge will be over. The U.S. economy will enter a recession." - Eric Sprott, Sprott Asset Management

• The U.S. economy, once the envy of the world, is now viewed across the globe with suspicion. America has become shackled by an immovable mountain of debt that endangers its prosperity and threatens to bring the rest of the world economy crashing down with it. The ongoing sub-prime mortgage crisis, a result of irresponsible lending policies designed to generate commissions for unscrupulous brokers, presages far deeper problems in a U.S. economy that is beginning to resemble a giant smoke-and-mirrors Ponzi scheme. And this has not been lost on the rest of the world. - Hamid Varzi, International Tribune

• It's a crisis if everybody calls it a crisis. - Morgan Downey, Lasalle Global

• It's inappropriate [for money market funds to invest in credit derivatives]. It doesn't have a place in money market funds. When I created the first money market fund, I said you have to have immediate liquidity, safety and a reasonable rate of return. You also have to have a situation where you're not giving people headline risk. - David Evans

• The crisis in the US sub-prime mortgage market could bolster the gold price not only because gold provides a safe investment haven. The crisis is expected to slow GDP growth, spurring lower real interest rates and a weaker US dollar that will boost gold investment demand. Gold's traditional role as a safe haven asset in times of financial turbulence and instability is enforced in the current market as the metal recouped the majority of losses which occurred in a flight to cash in the beginning of August. Supporting this view is the fact that gold recovered despite a rise in the US dollar caused by a European Central bank intervention that boosted liquidity in Europe. - Dr. Peter Richardson, Craton Capital