New York as an industry is the best city for real estate. You're in a very transparent market. If you need to liquidate, you make three phone calls and you could sell something, even in the worst market. It is also less forgiving; if you make a mistake you can lose money.
I tried to oppose the academic to the marketplace.
The art market was very different before the mid-1980s: then, art was all about passion, whereas now it's become a commodity.
The whole New Deal was in a sense just a series of public options, some more optional than others, that offered government as an alternative to the often-flawed private market.
James Goldsmith is important because he used the power of the markets to break up the cosy patrician elite that ran Britain and its industries in the 1950s and '60s. In the process, Goldsmith helped transfer power in this country away from politics and towards the markets and the financial sector.
The pace of innovation may slow down or speed up depending on the appetite in the public markets, but the constant progress of technology doesn't really ever stop. There's always opportunities for new ideas and creative people to go build great things. I'm always interested in learning about those kinds of opportunities.
The Internet is, among other things, a massive, chaotic marketplace. Too much information, it turns out, is a lot like no information.
The economy works best when better ideas win out over worse ideas, harder work wins out over less work, when it's a fair fight in the marketplace.
'Reinventing the Bazaar,' by John McMillan, is a great and fun introduction to the wild variety and importance of markets throughout history and around the world. I finally understood how a Middle Eastern souk actually works economically and how to compare that to modern-day telecom-spectrum auctions. I love that book.
I saw Bitcoin as an actual market opportunity: as a trillion-dollar marketplace with long-term potential.
