“Why is it possible to rescue S&L buccaneers in the early ’90s and provide guidance to levered Wall Street investment bankers during the 1998 long-term capital management crisis, yet throw 2 million homeowners to the wolves in 2007?”

Companies typically borrow money at less than their return on equity and therefore compound their return at the expense of lenders.

Hawaii’s the 50th state? I thought it was a suburb of Guam.

Well, I, you know, I think at PIMCO we always try and be open with the press and the public. I mean, isn’t that what voters want from their politicians? Mohamed El-Erian, our CEO, writes several op-eds a week.

The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose ones attitude in any given circumstance.

You know those adages about smelling the roses and chasing butterflies? The markets are my butterflies and my roses.

Do you really like a particular stock? Put 10% or so of your portfolio on it. Make the idea count … Good [investment] ideas should not be diversified away into meaningless oblivion.

Imperceptibly, the developed world’s manufacturing base was gradually eroding and being replaced by securitized finance that destroyed itself and nearly its economies in 2008.

Retrain, rehire into higher paying and value-added jobs? That may be the political myth of the modern era. There aren’t enough of those jobs.

I have a 41-year track record of investing excellence… what do you have?

Dollar depreciation leads to higher inflation and ultimately forces foreign creditors to question their rationale and indeed their sanity for continuing purchases of U.S. Treasuries.

Whenever I read the newspaper, I say to myself, ‘At least my wife loves me.’

Bond investors are the vampires of the investment world. They love decay, recession – anything that leads to low inflation and the protection of the real value of their loans.

Whether a tops-down or bottoms-up investor in bonds, stocks, or private equity, the standard analysis tends to judge an investor or his firm on the basis of how the bullish or bearish aspects of the cycle were managed.

Bernanke and company are trying to reflate the economy with almost stated objective of inflation at 2 percent and higher in order to provide some type of safety margin for a future recession. That’s where they want to go.

I would admit Im an introvert. I dont know why introverts have to apologize.

Finding the best person or the best organization to invest your money is one of the most important financial decisions you’ll ever make.

I think we’re in the take-the-money-and-run stage of the economy. So the banks may go under, but the bankers, who make the policy, clean up.

The economic repercussions of a stock market crash depend less on the severity of the crash itself than on the response of economic policymakers, particularly central bankers.

The benefit of appointing a hawkish central banker is the increased inflation-fighting credibility that such an appointment brings.

For a country, everything will be lost when the jobs of an economist and a banker become highly respected professions.

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene.