Capitalism is about adventurers who get harmed by their mistakes, not people who harm others with their mistakes.
When I trade, I don't have an agency problem; I have my neck on the line. When a bank or banker trades, it's not his neck on the line.
In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged.
Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.
We should ban banks from risk-taking because society is going to pay the price.
When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.
If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.
The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.
Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.
You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.
We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body.
Corporations take the humanity out of trade - they take the happiness out and replace it with something that is ugly.
It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.
If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.
You know, children philosophize more than adults - and they are critical of adults.
I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged.
Bailing out every bank that fails makes the system riskier, not safer.
We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.
In the United States, large corporations control some members of Congress. All this does is delay the corporation's funeral at our expense.
I've been telling anyone willing to listen that banks have a tendency to sit on time bombs while convincing themselves that they are conservative and nonvolatile.
