The Future Tense

Thoughts On Life and the Financial Markets

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Davidowitz On Why The American Shopper Has Not Returned

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

- Andre Gide

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

- Charlie Munger

"When it comes to science and technology, man learns, but when it comes to love, war and finance, he makes the same mistake over and over again."

- Bill Bonner

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

- Dick Russell

"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

"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

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

- Warren Buffett

"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

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

- Vladimir Lenin

"Interest on the debt grows without rain."

- Yiddish Proverb

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

- James Grant

"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

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

- Keynes

"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 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

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

"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

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

-Thomas Edison

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

-Herbert Stein

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

- Amschel Rothchild

"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

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

-Jean Monnet

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

- Seneca

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

- Eugene Fama

"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

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

- Gandhi

"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

"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

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

- Mike Tyson

"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

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

- Jim Grant

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

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

- Jim Grant

"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

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

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

-Warren Buffett

"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

"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

"The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That just leaves us."

- Phil Knight