It seems my mission in history has already ended. I told myself that no matter what, I would not be the general secretary who mobilized the military to crack down on students….On the night of June 3rd, while sitting in the courtyard with my family, I heard intense gunfire.
—Zhao Ziyang, on a meeting with Deng Xiaoping and party elders during Tiananmen
Now that the dollar’s position is no longer so secure, we need to shift our priorities. This will entail investing in our crumbling infrastructure, alternative and renewable resources and productive human capital — rather than in unnecessary housing and toxic financial innovation. This will be the only way to slow down the decline of the dollar, and sustain our influence in global affairs.
—Nouriel Roubini
The economic recovery cannot be sustained unless China carries out structural reforms. China is too reliant on exports and investment.
—Yu Yongding
Raghuram Rajan – Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?
what a great idea
Statistics, on their own, do not tell the story of a great intellectual awakening. They only tell us where the market for culture stands. Grand statements about the dawn of mass intelligence are belied by everyone’s obsession with making their erudition public. No quicker is a book read than it appears in a personal profile online or is wedged inartfully into dinner party conversation .
“What of the social value of the sure informaton…? Suppose that by a collective payment to some knowledgeable outsider, an entire community consisting of the representative individuals above could all simultaneously be informed as to which future state will obtain – how large a payment would be justified? The answer is: NONE.”
—Hirshleifer, J. (1971). The private and social value of information and the reward to inventive activity, American Economic Review 61, 561-574.
Hirshleifer assumes a perfect, economical man, so the social value of information goes to zero when it’s given to everyone. But it flies in the face of common sense and experience. Therefore, implicit in that scenario is the question: what accounts for the variations among men that disprove the circumstances he describes and discredits, just a little, homo economicus?
It’s a special moment in the literature: kind of like he almost didn’t believe what he was writing.
“We have a society where economists can be as incompetent as they want”
—Nassim Taleb
“…there are some risks that you don’t want to take. Only people who went to the University of Chicago started taking these risks. normal people don’t make these mistakes unless they have a formula.”
—Nassim Taleb
“We have a civilization that is built up by experts, and this crisis is not so bad.”
—Robert Shiller
“We have been fighting the illusion of control and false experts since the dawn of civilization….Saying that we don’t have experts that are perfect means that we can have economists that are not perfect is a totally bogus argument.”
—Nassim Taleb
“It’s funny that I end up debating because you are a kindred spirit, but the point of this conference is the next one hundred days. We’re going to be giving an expert proposal to improve the situation. Are you seem to be saying that we should just give up and call the whole thing off?”
—Robert Shiller
“No…No. I have a clear plan to immunize society from the mistakes of experts. It’s very simple. it’s so logical to a cab driver.”
—Nassim Taleb
“Financial engineers are trying to figure out how to make a financial system that is less vulnerable to collapse…We’re going to have to use experts to design these systems.”
—Robert Shiller
“Cicero didn’t want governments to be in debt. Debt creates instability…wars…”
—Nassim Taleb
“It’s actually going to take the next five or ten years.”
—Robert Shiller
“It’s too obvious. they can’t see it because they have PhD’s in economics…Convert debt to equity.”
—Nassim Taleb
“Our capitalist system is like a sports game. We invent rules that we operate by. And we have referees who enforce them….players want the regulators…We have over the centuries developed a regulatory system that many people scoff at but i think it makes our system work well…this is just another crisis, another opportunity to improve it….”
—Robert Shiller
::Extracts from the New Yorker’s session on the financial crisis::
The consumer remains in a difficult situation. It remains unclear how they will proceed forward as credit access fades alongside further home price deterioration and an increasingly difficult financial environment.
—Maxwell Clarke, chief U.S. economist at IDEAglobal
We’re still working our way through the slowdown. I think it will get better as the year progresses. The month of May will still be tough and I suspect by the summer that things will be a little broader in terms of the improvement.
—Mike Niemira, chief economist at the ICSC
And then there’s this little piece of wisdom…Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker, not to be confused with Nick Paumgarten of corsair capital who happens to be on the board of Scripps Networks.
Amazon.com keeps 70% of the revenue from Kindle- based subscriptions, and the balance goes to the newspaper, according to James Moroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News
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