Adam Smith > Quotes

“A mass-circulation magazine asked me to explain to its readers what was going on. I had this Fellini scene: We are all at a wonderful ball where the champagne sparkles in every glass and soft laughter falls upon the summer air. We know, by the rules, that at some moment the Black Horsemen will come shattering through the great terrace doors, wreaking vengeance and scattering the survivors. Those who leave early are saved, but the ball is so splendid no one wants to leave while there is still time, so that everyone keeps asking “What time is it? What time is it?” but none of the clocks have any hands. The Black Horsemen did come, of course, and”
― Adam Smith, Supermoney

“History may not repeat itself,” in Mark Twain’s wise formulation, “but it rhymes.”
― Adam Smith, Supermoney

“Some of you should leave this business.”
― Adam Smith, Supermoney

“suit”
― Adam Smith, 200 Brain Teasers For Adults: Logic and Creative Problems, Mathematical and Practical Reasoning Riddles

“Our man at the desk considering how goes the world, had he been in the City of London in 1913, would have been one of the merchant princes of the world: to him for capital came the Moscow Power and Light Company, the breweries of Bohemia, the trolley lines of Shanghai, the apples of Tasmania, the oil of Mexico, the ranches of Texas and Arizona, the tin mines of Malaya, the hemp of Tanganyika, and the railroads of absolutely everywhere. Half a century later our man was still at his desk and still at work, a bit shabbier,”
― Adam Smith, Supermoney

“Babson looked over his glasses at the audience. “Some of you should leave this business,” he said.”
― Adam Smith, Supermoney

“1. The conglomerate movement, “with all its fancy rhetoric about synergism and leverage.” 2. Accountants who played footsie with stock-promoting managements by certifying earnings that weren’t earnings at all. 3. “Modern” corporate treasurers who looked upon their company pension funds as new-found profit centers and pressured their investment advisers into speculating with them. 4. Investment advisers who massacred clients’ portfolios because they were trying to make good on the over-promises that they had made to attract the business. 5. The new breed of investment managers who bought and churned the worst collection of new issues and other junk in history, and the underwriters who made fortunes bringing them out. 6. Elements of the financial press which promoted into new investment geniuses a group of neophytes who didn’t even have the first requisite for managing other people’s money—namely, a sense of responsibility. 7. The securities salesmen who peddle the items with the best stories—or the biggest markups—even though such issues were totally unsuited to the customers’ needs. 8. The sanctimonious partners of major investment houses who wrung their hands over all these shameless happenings while they deployed an army of untrained salesmen to forage among even less trained investors. 9. Mutual fund managers who tried to become millionaires overnight by using every gimmick imaginable to manufacture their own paper performance. 10. Portfolio managers who collected bonanza incentives of the “heads I win, tails you lose” kind, which made them fortunes in the bull market but turned the portfolios they managed into disasters in the bear market. 11. Security analysts who forgot about their professional ethics to become storytellers and let their institutions be taken in by a whole parade of confidence men. This was the “list of horrors that people in our field did to set the stage for the greatest blood bath in forty years,”
― Adam Smith, Supermoney

“Beyond this, the problem is universal. It is that governments are now held responsible for the welfare of the people. The aspirations of the people can outrun their ability to pay for them, and nobody has yet found a way to create answers to the aspirations out of thin air.”
― Adam Smith, The Money Game