Quotes about money

Why throw money at problems? That's what money is for.Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.

He had only two moods: one suspicious and self-pitying, the other arrogant and boastful. The first mood applied when he was losing money. The second mood applied when he was making it.

Doctor Paul Proteus, son of a successful man, himself rich with prospects of being richer, counted his material blessings. He found that he was in excellent shape to afford integrity.

In case you are giving economic views: Don't tell me what you "think," just tell me what's in your portfolio.

You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.

[E]conomists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality. (page 85)

Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks — when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur... I shiver at the thought.

[In] economics... you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment. Now the spirit of such methods, called scientism by its detractors, continued into the discipline of finance as a few technicians thought their mathematical knowledge could lead them to understand markets. The practice of financial engineering came along with massive doses of pseudoscience. (page 115)

[E]conomics is a narrative discipline, and explanations are easy to fit retrospectively. (page 257)

Few people have the sense of financial individuality strongly developed. They do not know what it means to be a controller of wealth, to have that which releases the sources of social action—its medium of exchange. They want money, but not for money's sake. They want it for what it will buy in the way of simple comforts, whereas the financier wants it for what it will control—for what it will represent in the way of dignity, force, power.

A man, a real man, must never be an agent, a tool, or a gambler—acting for himself or for others—he must employ such. A real man—a financier—was never a tool. He used tools. He created. He led.

No, no, no, Hooch told himself silently. Getting even don't amount to nothing in this world. Getting even only gets you behind. The best revenge is to get rich enough to make them all call you sir, that's how you get even with these boys.