“What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn’t be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.”

American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.

It’s a bubble. It has to have intrinsic value. You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven’t been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.

Anyone willing to do what is required to become president of the United States is thereby barred from taking that office. I’m only half joking

We cannot rule out a situation in which a preemptive policy tightening becomes necessary.

The use of a growing array of derivatives and the related application of more-sophisticated approaches to measuring and managing risk are key factors underpinning the greater resilience of our largest financial institutions…

Regulators have not been able to achieve the level of future clarity required to act pre-emptively.

If all currencies are moving up or down together, the question is: relative to what? Gold is the canary in the coal mine.

Without the triggers, that tax cut is irreponsible fiscal policy. Eventually, I think that will be the consensus view.

I’ve always argued that this country has benefited immensely from the fact that we draw people from all over the world.

By far the most significant event in finance during the past decade has been the extraordinary development and expansion of financial derivatives.

I didn’t believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn’t prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.

It is decidedly not true that “nice guys finish last,” as that highly original American baseball philosopher, Leo Durocher, was alleged to have said.

Excessive optimism shows the seeds of its own reversal in the form of imbalances that tend to grow over time.

Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.

The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.

The use of a growing array of derivatives and the related application of more-sophisticated approaches to measuring and managing risk are key factors underpinning the greater resilience of our largest financial institutions…

Nor can private counterparties restrict supplies of gold, another commodity whose derivatives are often traded over-the-counter, where central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise.

Derivatives have permitted the unbundling of financial risks.

Vision, the hallmark of leadership, is less a derivative of spreadsheets and more a product of the mind called imagination.