Losing your capital is like losing your trousers. It is a real humiliation, and one not to be soon repeated.
— James Buchan
Profits in business always depend on the rate of interest: the higher the interest, the higher the rate of profit required.
The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce, first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages, was not suddenly abolished in modern times.
The great disadvantage of getting older is to be obliged to relive the salient economic events of one's youth, with nothing learned and nothing forgotten.
In modern society, where most people live in cities, and where both needs and wishes are absolved through the same remote agency - money - the distinction between wishes and needs has altogether vanished.
Because bankers measure their self-worth in money, and pay themselves a lot of it, they think they're fine fellows and don't need to explain themselves.
Any new financial order for the world must tackle the three chief challenges of our age.
Rarely in modern times has there been such a revolution in commercial sentiment as occurred in 2008, or such a display in government and business of panic and helplessness.
Life without oil, in fact, would be so different that it is frightening to contemplate. We are addicted, and it is no comfortable addiction.
A century ago, petroleum - what we call oil - was just an obscure commodity; today it is almost as vital to human existence as water.
The dividing line between wish and need was never clear.
An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.
Financial crises are like fireworks: they illuminate the sky even as they go pop.
Viewed from a distance, or through the eye of the All-Knowing CEO of the Universe, the crash of 2008 followed the usual pattern. A long-lived boom driven by cheap credit, going back as far as 1982 (though subject to interruptions in the mid-1980s and 1990s, and in 2001), came to grief because of a rise in the cost of borrowing money.
Soaring prices for crude oil, falling production surpluses, wild speculation in commodities, a rush into the precious metals, turmoil in the Middle East, assertive oil producers: it is 1973-74 all over again, and at dictation speed.
Where consumption is both conspicuous and competitive, humanity will never run out of new wishes. All the while, industry creates new desires that are marketed, in the great fashion paradox, as both novelty and need.
Economists, like royal children, are not punished for their errors.
For 50 years, nuclear power stations have produced three products which only a lunatic could want: bomb-explosive plutonium, lethal radioactive waste and electricity so dear it has to be heavily subsidised. They leave to future generations the task, and most of the cost, of making safe sites that have been polluted half-way to eternity.
