Roger Lowenstein > Quotes

“Buffett found it 'extraordinary' that academics studied such things. They studied what was measurable, rather than what was meaningful. 'As a friend [Charlie Munger] said, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
― Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist

“Buffett was a billionaire who drove his own car, did his own taxes, and still lived in a home he had bought in 1958 for $31,500. He seemed to answer to a deeply rooted, distinctly American mythology, in which decency and common sense triumphed over cosmopolitan guile, and in which an idealized past held firm against a rootless and too hurriedly changing present.”
― Roger Lowenstein

“The modern spirit is a hesitant one. Spontaneity has given way to cautious legalisms, and the age of heroes has been superseded by a cult of specialization. We have no more giants; only obedient ants.”
― Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist

“Buffett's methodology was straightforward, and in that sense 'simple.' It was not simple in the sense of being easy to execute. Valuing companies such as Coca-Cola took a wisdom forged by years of experience; even then, there was a highly subjective element. A Berkshire stockholder once complained that there were no more franchises like Coca-Cola left. Munger tartly rebuked him. 'Why should it be easy to do something that, if done well two or three times, will make your family rich for life?”
― Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist

“Buffett does enjoy being a billionaire, but in offbeat ways. As he put it, though money cannot change your health or how many people love you, it lets you be in 'more interesting environments.”
― Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist

“Prophesy as much as you like, but always hedge. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1861”
― Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

“Merton ... humbly warned, however, "It's a wrong perception to believe that you can eliminate risk just because you can measure it.”
― Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

“Buffett's uncommon urge to chronicle made him a unique character in American life, not only a great capitalist but the Great Explainer of American capitalism. He taught a generation how to think about business, and he showed that securities were not just tokens like the Monopoly flatiron, and that investing need not be a game of chance. It was also a logical, commonsensical enterprise, like the tangible businesses beneath. He stripped Wall Street of its mystery and rejoined it to Main Street -- a mythical or disappearing place, perhaps, but one that is comprehensible to the ordinary American.”
― Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist

“As Fama put it, “Life always has a fat tail.”
― Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

“If Wall Street is to learn just one lesson from the Long-Term debacle, it should be that. The next time a Merton proposes an elegant model to manage risks and foretell odds, the next time a computer with a perfect memory of the past is said to quantify risks in the future, investors should run—and quickly—the other way. On Wall Street, though, few lessons remain learned.”
― Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

“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, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

“Buffett’s genius was largely a genius of character—of patience, discipline, and rationality.”
― Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist

“Investors long for steady waters, but paradoxically, the opportunities are richest when markets turn turbulent.”
― Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

“A year earlier, no company had been accorded more faith than Enron; by late November, none was trusted less. And so, a gasping gurgle, a desperate SOS: Enron, the emblem of free markets, the champion of deregulation, reached into its depleted treasury and forked over $100,000 to each of the major political parties' campaign war chests. Then, it shuttered its online trading unit - its erstwhile gem. On November 28, Standard & Poor's downgraded Enron to junk-bond level - which triggered provisions in Enron's debt requiring it to immediately repay billions of its obligations. This it could not do. Its stock was seventy cents and falling, and, now, no gatekeepers and no credit remained. Accordingly, in the first week of December, Enron, the archetype of shareholder value, availed itself of the time-honored protection for those who have lost their credit: bankruptcy.”
― Roger Lowenstein, Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing

“The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
― Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist

“You can overintellectualize these Greek letters,” Pflug reflected, referring to the alphas, betas, and gammas in the option trader’s argot. “One Greek word that ought to be in there is hubris.”
― Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

“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, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

“As Keyes noted, one bet soundly considered is preferable to many poorly understood.”
― Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

“As Peter Bernstein has written, nature's pattern emerges only from the chaotic disorder of many random events.”
― Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

“Graham’s first goal was never to make money—it was to avoid losing any.”
― Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist

“When you need money, Wall Street is a heartless place.”
― Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

“Over six feet tall, with a flowing handlebar mustache, he dressed in well-tailored suits and black bow ties and was a man of presence and intelligence. Rarely did he debate in public; the cloakroom, the back corridor, was where his work was done. A reporter with the New York Tribune noted the “side whiskers close cut” and the “brilliant dark eyes which he fastens closely upon the person with whom he is conversing.”
― Roger Lowenstein, America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve

“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, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

“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, America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve

“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, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

“A compact organization lets all of us spend our time managing the business rather than managing each other.”
― Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: the making of an American capitalist

“Price is what you pay, value is what you get.”
― Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Biography

“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 business. Leverage always gives rise to this same brutal dynamic, and its dangers cannot be stressed too often.”
― Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

“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 the laws of trade.”
― Roger Lowenstein, America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve

“Bundy sternly tool his fellow endowment fund managers to task - not for being too bold, but for being insufficiently so:
We have the preliminary impression that over the long run caution has cost our colleges and universities much more than imprudence or excessive risk-taking.”
― Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist