But here’s my advice to the rest of you: Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything but they can’t buy backbone. Don’t let them forget it. Thank you.
-Herman Blume in Rushmore
I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people…There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money that I can get away from everyone…I see the worst in people. I don’t need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I’ve built my hatreds up over the years, little by little, Henry… to have you here gives me a second breath. I can’t keep doing this on my own with these… people.
-Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood
Everything in the universe relates to the number 5, one way or another, given enough ingenuity on the part of the interpreter.
-Principia Discordia (ht: Chris)
Economics…has not truly come to grips with the main difficulty, which is the inordinate importance of a few extreme events.
-Benoit Mandelbrot (ht: Jeremy Grantham)
All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
-Blaise Pascal
It’s a zero-sum game. If you put trades on that worked so well that you bankrupt your counterparty, you will not collect on those trades.
-Jim Keegan, a senior vice president and portfolio manager at American Century Investments (from Calculated Risk)
Host: why does Ambac still have AAA rating?
Cramer: BECAUSE THE TRUTH IS TOO PAINFUL.
-Jim Cramer in this CNBC video
“Pro forma”. From the latin, meaning “lawyers jerking themselves off.”
-Detective McNulty from The Wire
Experienced happiness, we learned, depends mainly on personality and on the hedonic value of the activities to which people allocate their time. Life circumstances influence the allocation of time, and the hedonic outcome is often mixed: high-income women have more enjoyable activities than the poor, but they also spend more time engaged in work that they do not enjoy; married women spend less time alone, but more time doing tedious chores. Conditions that make people satisfied with their life do not necessarily make them happy.
Daniel Kahneman, 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics Recipient
“Which explains why the busts and reversals we deem inevitable are also the least preventable, and why they startle us, if briefly, when they come — because they were were inevitable for so long that they should have come already. That they haven’t, we reason, can mean only one of two things. Thanks to technology or some other magic, we’ve entered a new age when the laws of cause and effect (as propounded by Isaac Newton and Adam Smith) have yielded to the principle dream-and-make-it-happen (as manifested by Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey). Either that, or the thing that went up and up and up and hasn’t come down, though it should have long ago, is being held aloft by our decision to forget it’s up there and to carry on as though it weren’t.”
Walter Kirn in November 2007’s The Atlantic
“I’ll begin with a brief note about the stock market here. Suppose you’re considering riding a unicycle on a high-wire that by most evidence is not secure, but it’s possible that the wire might hold up for a while. If you keep riding, people will throw small bills at you until the moment the wire breaks. Once the wire breaks, you will be injured and will probably lose whatever you gained initially. Would you keep riding?”
John Hussman, Portfolio Manager of Hussman Funds in his Weekly Comment
Two from 30 Rock:
“This corporation has a strict bros before hoes policy.”“I like a woman with ambition; it’s like seeing a dog wearing clothes.”
-Jack Donaghy
Where there’s muck, there’s brass.
UK expression
I find it extraordinary that if you have two derivative dealers — Dealer A and Dealer B — and both write a ticket, Dealer A records a profit and Dealer B records a profit, particularly if it’s a 20-year contract. That is the kind of world I’d love to live in, but I haven’t found it yet.
Warren Buffett
HT to To the Hilt
