“It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade.”

The only effective regulation lies in the propensity of customers to choose alternatives, of investors to move their funds elsewhere and of labour to acquire technical skills’.

Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly,

Was sort of intellectually shocked. Contagion is the critical phenomenon which causes the thing to fall apart.

And whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction.

Senator, we are groping for understanding, the knowledge you assume I possess doesn’t exist’.

Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.

I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I’ve said.

Skilled shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition. [Visa quotas] have been substituted for the wage pricing mechanism.

Fear and euphoria are dominant forces, and fear is many multiples the size of euphoria. Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds.

The recent period has been marked by a transformation to an economy that is more productive as competitive forces become increasingly intense and new technologies raise the efficiency of our businesses…

Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere.

Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth.If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.

Senator, if I seem clear to you, you must have misunderstood me’.

We may be in a rapidly evolving international financial system with all the bells and whistles of the so-called new economy. But the old-economy rules of prudence are as formidable as ever. We violate them at our own peril.

The Iraq War is largely about oil.

While these tendencies were no doubt in train in the “old,” pre-1990s economy, they accelerated over the past decade as a number of technologies with their roots in the cumulative innovations of the past half-century began to yield dramatic economic returns.