“The only sustainable way to increase demand for vacant houses is to spur the formation of new households. Admitting more skilled immigrants, who tend to earn enough to buy homes, would accomplish that while paying other dividends to the U.S. economy.”

Some succeed for a time. But while there may occasionally be mis-configurations among market prices that allow abnormal returns, they do not persist.

The gut-feel of the 55-year old trader is more important than the mathematical elegance of the 25-year old genius.

Since I’ve become a central banker, I’ve learned to mumble with great incoherence.

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

History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.

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.

The companies could hire the educated workers they need. And those workers would compete with high-income people, driving more income equality.

I have one other issue I’d like to throw on the table. I hesitate to do it, but let me tell you some of the issues that are involved here.

Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices.

There is no safe store of value. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth.

At the risk of some oversimplification, if the skill composition of our work force meshed fully with the needs of our increasingly complex capital-stock, wage-skill differentials would be stable.

And she always has so much fun doing it. We make a good team.

I’ve been in and out of Wall Street since 1949, and I’ve never seen the type of animosity between government and Wall Street. And I’m not sure where it comes from, but I suspect it’s got to do with a general schism in this society which is really becoming ever more destructive.

As long as we issue fiat currency, I see no alternative to a legal tender law.

The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.

Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity are in a state of shocked disbelief.

I, therefore, demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim State in the best interest of India and Islam.

Although the theory of relativity makes the greatest of demands on the ability for abstract thought, still it fulfills the traditional requirements of science insofar as it permits a division of the world into subject and object (observer and observed) and, hence, a clear formulation of the law of causality.

Public opinion is presumptively an input to policy formation in a democracy because politicians respond to it or at least are believed to respond [to it].

Human nature, as we know it, is in a formative state. It is being changed into the image of the thing it loves.

When diving to attack always leave a proportion of your formation above to act as top guard.

But the revolutions and changes which are responsible for the present state of the earth are not limited to the upsetting of the ancient strata and to the ebbing of the sea after the formations of new layers.

A script is not a piece of literature, it’s a process.

So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.