Quote Of The Day

You don't need to innovate in finance, you don't need to invent anything new. — Emilio Botin @ Santander

What’s lighter than the mind? A thought. Than thought? This bubble world.
—  Francis Quarles

Anybody who plays the stock market not as an insider is like a man buying cows in the moonlight. –Daniel Drew

What is amazing to me as I learn about this is how flimsy was the theoretical basis of the claims that derivatives and other complex financial instruments reduced risk, when their use in fact brought on instabilities. — Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, had put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiam, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religous and political illusions, it has substitued naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. – Manifesto of the Communist Party.

“There are cases where people who failed can suddenly make a go of it. In the U.S., you can get your second or third chance. In business school, we say that’s one of the virtues of this country.”

– Richard Sylla, economic and financial historian at New York University’s Stern School of Business, commenting on some people on some street starting some firm.

The Economist has also supported some left-wing issues such as progressive taxation, criticising the U.S. tax model in a recent issue, and seems to support some government regulation on health issues, such as smoking in public, as well as bans on spanking children.

- wikipedia

Darwin did not help, blowing apart the first book of the Bible. Nor did critical 19th-century German micro-examination of what was left. Still less did men like Marx, who saw the close links between the ruling class and the ruling churches, and was eager to blow up both; come the 20th century, the Soviet Union did so, literally. Religion was the opium of the people, give them the adrenalin of communism instead. God was dead, as Nietzsche had announced; and even if the superman Nietzsche envisaged to replace him somehow never got born, communist man could do it.

- the Economist