“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.”

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.

History demonstrates that participants in financial markets are susceptible to waves of optimism.

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

I think that real pressure is going to occur not by the initiation by the Federal Reserve, but by the markets themselves.

The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.

We need, in effect, to make the phantom ‘lock-boxes’ around the trust fund real.

The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.

Anything that we can do to raise personal savings is very much in the interest of this country.

Improvements in lending practices driven by information technology have enabled lenders to reach out to households with previously unrecognized borrowing capacities.

We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century credit tsunami. Central banks and governments are being required to take unprecedented measures.

Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.

Indeed, better risk management may be the only truly necessary element of success in banking.

Detested sport, That owes its pleasures to another’s pain.

Not suffering another existence is reaching the Way.

According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

The unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.

Knowledge is, indeed, that which, next to virtue, truly and essentially raises one man above another.

They saw the flicker of bats overhead. They smelt the drifting scent of honeysuckle, and the delicious smell of wild thyme crushed under their bodies. A reed-warbler sang a beautiful little song in the reeds below, and then another answered.

“Heaven help us,” said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another.