“If we are to remain preeminent in transforming knowledge into economic value, America’s system of higher education must remain the world’s leader in generating scientific and technological breakthrough, and in meeting the challenge to educate workers.”

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.

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.