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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5fe2e2c | With traders scrambling to pay back debts, Neal Soss, an economist at Credit Suisse First Boston, explained to the Journal, "You don't sell what you should. You sell what you can." By leveraging one security, investors had potentially given up control of all of their others. This verity is well worth remembering: the securities may be unrelated, but the same investors owned them, implicitly linking them in times of stress. And when armies o.. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| c6a482a | As Keynes observed, there cannot be "liquidity" for the community as a whole. The mistake is in thinking that markets have a duty to stay liquid or that buyers will always be present to accommodate sellers. The real culprit in 1994 was leverage. If you aren't in debt, you can't go broke and can't be made to sell, in which case "liquidity" is irrelevant. But a leveraged firm may be forced to sell, lest fast-accumulating losses put it out of .. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 8aa8a76 | As the English essayist G. K. Chesterton wrote, life is "a trap for logicians" because it is almost reasonable but not quite; it is usually sensible but occasionally otherwise: "It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait" | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 3a34031 | Lawrence Summers, now the U.S. Treasury secretary , told The Wall Street Journal after the crash, "The efficient market hypothesis is the most remarkable error in the history of economic theory." | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 661f779 | But after Kapor took Merton's finance course, he decided that quantitative finance was less a science than a faith - a doctrine for ideologues "blinded by the power of the model." It appealed to intellectuals who craved a sense of order but could lead them disastrously astray if markets moved outside the model." | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 6f17a5b | Finance is often poetically just; it punishes the reckless with special fervor. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| ae45774 | A regulator is part protector, part godfather. He dislikes a public spectacle; he is most effective when he can wield his power discreetly, by merely threatening to act or by cajoling others to do his bidding. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 4fc7c77 | No stigma was attached; second acts on Wall Street are as common as they are in politics. Perhaps one cycle, be it an election cycle or an economic cycle, is the extent of the public's memory. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| b2ddf9c | Three questions divided reformers: Who should issue the new currency? To what degree should the system be centralized? And should bankers or politicians be in control? | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 726e329 | Warburg rifled off a congratulatory note to Owen. He revealed his true feelings about the Senate (including Owen) to a fellow European, to whom he groused, "It is a terribly tiring business to try to influence these hundred obstinate and ignorant men." | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 3a117ad | His talent sprang from his unrivaled independence of mind and ability to focus on his work and shut out the world, yet those same qualities exacted a toll. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| a335af3 | Warburg hesitated before daring to reply. "Your bank is so big and so powerful, Mr. Stillman, that when the next panic comes, you will wish your responsibilities were smaller." | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| b373a68 | Regardless of how earnestly bankers trumpeted the virtues of laissez-faire, in times of unrest markets looked to Washington to provide stability. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 63b6cbe | While a losing trade may well turn around eventually (assuming, of course, that it was properly conceived to begin with), the turn could arrive too late to do the trader any good - meaning, of course, that he might go broke in the interim. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| d77bb2d | Glass's nature was to fret. He was intensely agitated by the pressure from bankers for a centralized scheme and worried that bankers had gotten to Wilson (a suspicion, of course, that was entirely correct). | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| b6100d6 | Backed by their models, they felt more certain than others did - almost invincible. Given enough time, given enough capital, the young geniuses from academe felt they could do no wrong | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 5197a17 | America's abandonment of the gold standard would have shocked the founders, who took for granted that money had to be more than mere paper. More than anything, going off gold (which occurred in stages, culminating under Nixon) expanded the Fed's charter. It made the agency the supreme arbiter | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 1be9b72 | Prophesy as much as you like, but always hedge. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1861 | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 9639301 | Investors long for steady waters, but paradoxically, the opportunities are richest when markets turn turbulent. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 26805e7 | As Peter Bernstein has written, nature's pattern emerges only from the chaotic disorder of many random events. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| f9ae580 | For men who prided themselves on being disciples of reason, their drive to live on the edge seemd inexplicable, unless they believed that becoming the richest would certify them as also being the smartest. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 00d68ed | When you need money, Wall Street is a heartless place. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| b46269f | And in the late summer of 1998, the bond-trading crowd was extremely fearful, especially of risky credits. The professors hadn't modeled this. They had programmed the market for a cold predictability that it had never had; they had forgotten the predatory, acquisitive, and overwhelming protective instincts that govern real-life traders. They had forgotten the human factor. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| fcdfd32 | The moment was highly polarizing. Populists agitated for an income tax, tariff reform, regulation of railroads, and direct election of U.S. senators (who were chosen by the legislatures). Workers erupted in sometimes violent strikes--notably, the Pullman strike of 1894, which halted much of the nation's rail traffic and led to rioting and acts of sabotage, and was ultimately suppressed by federal troops. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 26c66a4 | The professors' conceit was to think that models could forecast the limits of behavior. In fact, the models could tell them what was reasonable or what was predictable based on the past. The professors overlooked the fact that people, traders included, are not always reasonable. This is the true lesson of Long-Term's demise. No matter what the models say, traders are not machines guided by silicon chips; they are impressionable and imitativ.. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 4f4939b | The risk models developed by private firms, whether hedge funds, rating agencies, or banks, are not reliable guides to the future. Even when these models are applied by government regulators, their application is flawed, because they look to past market history as received truth. But markets, we must emphasize, are imperfect; they are the agglomeration of myriad investors, most of whom usually act rationally - usually, as history has shown,.. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| b48e984 | A chief attraction of the real bills theory was that it took decisions regarding the money supply out of human hands. John Carlisle, Treasury secretary under Cleveland, maintained that issuing notes "is not a proper function of the Treasury Department, or of any other department of the Government." The task was just too difficult. Rather, Carlisle said, currency should be "regulated entirely by the business interests of the people and by th.. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 6fb3899 | Warburg was shocked by the primitiveness of American finance. Whereas banks in Germany functioned with near-military cohesiveness, banking in America, he concluded, suffered from an ethos of extreme individualism. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 0fc9156 | VARIOUS OTHER BANKERS--heirs to the Indianapolis convention--carried on the fight for reform. However, unlike Warburg, they favored establishing an asset currency, a decentralized scheme based on each individual bank's loans. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| c7f415c | The shadows of woman and child lie heavily athwart our own fears and nightmares and the two become translated, in the empty, indifferent place, from the local to the monumental. They are nobodies and thus become everybody. | Simon Schama | ||
| e209654 | An ox carcass by Rembrandt seems so utterly butchered as to be agonisingly still alive. A | Simon Schama | ||
| 2920776 | Be angry only for a grave cause that rightly calls for indignation,' Maimonides wrote in his Mishneh Torah. What | Simon Schama | ||
| 14735a2 | The bulk of the Bible, from generation to generation, was written when the weaknesses of state power were most apparent. The portable scroll-book became the countervailing force to the sword. Once that happened, the idea that Jewish life was Jewish words, and they could and would endure beyond the vicissitudes of power, the loss of land, the subjection of people, took off into history. Since other monotheistic book-faiths allied word and sw.. | Simon Schama | ||
| 7d8f459 | Rozbojnicy" i ,,bandyci" to terminy od dawna stosowane przez bogatych (do ktorych z pewnoscia zaliczal sie Jozef [Flawiusz]) na okreslenie buntownikow sposrod obciazonych podatkami i zubozalych." | rich | Simon Schama | |
| b52a853 | The Almoravids yielded to the madder fury of the Almohades and the days of worldly accommodation in Al-Andalus passed for good. | Simon Schama | ||
| dff2bb5 | sentinel | Simon Schama | ||
| b590884 | When imperial powers fray at the edges, ethnic groups perceived to be the beneficiaries of their trust suddenly start to look like aliens not natives, however long they may have been settled. | Simon Schama | ||
| 5a17461 | obstinate | Simon Schama | ||
| d11a76d | That the two religions were engaged in a contested Passover-Easter dialogue at this formative moment is not in doubt. Even after the Council of Nicaea in 325, with Constantine himself present, separated out the two holidays and made sure that should they fall on the same day it would be the Jews who moved their Passover, that combative dialogue continued. | Simon Schama | ||
| 5299318 | The year 388 saw an epidemic of mob attacks against synagogues all over the eastern empire including Alexandria, but especially fierce in Syria. At Callinicum on the Euphrates, the synagogue was burned to the ground by a crowd egged on by the local bishop. At first Theodosius responded with exemplary severity, ordering the synagogue to be rebuilt with the bishop's own funds, but the decision provoked a storm of protest from clerics horrifie.. | Simon Schama | ||
| 4cf4022 | Likewise, Augustine made the effort of historical imagination to register to the full the Jewishness of Jesus and the apostles. And now, he wrote to Jerome in a series of subtly argued polemical exchanges, it was necessary to preserve Jews in the undisturbed observance of their traditions and laws, for God must have wanted them to be universally dispersed, wandering the face of the earth, as custodians of the Bible's prophecies of Christ - .. | Simon Schama | ||
| 631e61d | The impression given by the Bible is of a cyclical swing between the cult of many gods and the cult of a single exclusive YHWH. But there may have been a prolonged period in which YHWH was worshipped as top God rather than the only God. Even the first of the commandments says 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me', presupposing that there were others - a matter of seniority rather than exclusiveness. It is only with 'Second Isaiah' as la.. | Simon Schama | ||
| bbdacdc | He was also deemed an irreproachable holy man who had returned to Antioch only when a life of self-mortification threatened to kill him should he persist with it. John had work to do: the most urgent task was to separate Christians from Jews, once and for all. | Simon Schama | ||
| 6668106 | a young student had written to his father, justifying his decision to volunteer by declaring that "our liberty can only be assured if it will have for its bed a mattress of cadavers... I consent to become one of those cadavers." | Simon Schama |