Niall Ferguson: We're Playing Russian Roulette

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Monday, November 7, 2011

Niall Ferguson: We're Playing Russian Roulette

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"When buying a used car, punch the buttons on the radio. If all the stations are rock and roll, there's a good chance the transmission is shot."

- Larry Lujack

"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."

- Vladimir Lenin

"Bull markets bail you out of your mistakes. Bear markets make you pay for them."

- Dick Russell

"We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and but she will never sit down on a cold one either."

- Mark Twain

"It's waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can't stand to wait."

- Charlie Munger

"One of the best rules anybody can learn about investing is to do nothing, absolutely nothing, unless there is something to do. I just wait until there is money lying in the corner, and all I have to do is go over there and pick it up. I wait for a situation that is like the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel."

- Jim Rogers

"Capitalism without financial failure is not capitalism at all, but a kind of socialism for the rich."

- James Grant

"Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again."

- Andre Gide

"When people are getting richer and richer but they're not actually producing anything, it can't end well."

- Louis CK

"Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken."

- Warren Buffett

"Interest on the debt grows without rain."

- Yiddish Proverb

"Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful."

- Warren Buffett

"Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon."

- Jesse Livermore

"Most investors think quality, as opposed to price, is the determinant of whether something's risky. But high quality assets can be risky, and low quality assets can be safe. It's just a matter of the price paid for them."

- Howard Marks

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those that falsely believe they are free."

-Goethe

Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die on euphoria. The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell.

-Sir John Templeton

"People only accept change in necessity and see necessity only in crisis."

-Jean Monnet

"Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?"

-Steve Jobs

"The market can stay irrational longer than the investor can stay solvent."

- Keynes

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits - practical, emotional, and intellectual - systemically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be."

-William James

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

- Stephen Hawkings

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.

- Sigmund Freud

If you think you can or think you cannot, you are correct.

-Henry Ford

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

-Herbert Stein

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

-Thomas Edison

"There's one good financial idea every decade or so, and 5 to 10 marketing ideas a week."

- Eugene Fama

"It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor."

- Seneca

"A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain."

- Robert Frost

"It isn't bold to print money. It will be bold to withdraw it later."

- Jeff Frank

"Government bonds once offered risk-free return. They now offer return-free risk."

- Jim Grant

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."

- Gandhi

"At this juncture, the impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime market seems likely to be contained."

- Ben Bernanke, March 2007

"In economics things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could."

- Rudiger Dornbusch

"I don't write about what I know. I write to find out what I know."

- Patricia Hampl

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."

- Mike Tyson

"You can have comfort, or you can have value. You cannot have both."

- Jim Grant

"No very deep knowledge of economics is usually needed for grasping the immediate effects of a measure; but the task of economics is to foretell the remoter effects, and so to allow us to avoid such acts as attempt to remedy a present ill by sowing the seeds of a much greater ill for the future."

- Ludwig von Mises

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

-Ludwig von Mises

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."

-Mark Twain

"The longer the markets disobey basic rules of valuation, the bigger the opportunity for good investors to reap the benefits. Value investing works precisely because markets become dysfunctional at times."

-John Coumarianos

"No very deep knowledge of economics is usually needed for grasping the immediate effects of a measure; but the task of economics is to foretell the remoter effects, and so to allow us to avoid such acts as attempt to remedy a present ill by sowing the seeds of a much greater ill for the future."

- Ludwig von Mises

Requiring a central bank to print money to increase government's purchasing power invariably ignites a hyperinflationary firestorm. The result through history has been toppled governments and severe threats to societal stability.

- Alan Greenspan

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

- Henry Ford

"I'd be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were always efficient."

-Warren Buffett

"While the government struggles to save one crumbling enterprise at the expense of the crumbling of another, it accelerates the process of juggling debts, switching losses, piling loans on loans, mortgaging the future and the future's future. As things grow worse, the government protects itself not by contracting this process, but by expanding it."

-Ayn Rand, 1974

"Men it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

-Charles Mackay

"Give me control of a nations money supply, and I care not who makes it's laws."

- Amschel Rothchild

These are personal observations on the market and the economy. I am not a financial advisor. Please consult with one before making any financial decisions.

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