Quotes from Roger Lowenstein

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.

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.

The continuation of the Yankee blockade threatens more danger to our cause, by the consequent scarcity & high prices of necessaries of life, than do the Yankee arms & armies & fleets.

As Keynes observed, there cannot be "liquidity" for the community as a whole.6 The mistake is in thinking that markets have a duty to stay liquid or that buyers will always be present to accommodate sellers.

If you aren't in debt, you can't go broke and can't be made to sell, in which case "liquidity" is irrelevant.

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. —JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

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.

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).

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Prophesy as much as you like, but always hedge. - Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1861

Merton ... humbly warned, however, "It's a wrong perception to believe that you can eliminate risk just because you can measure it.

The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Buffett's genius was largely a genius of character—of patience, discipline, and rationality.

As Fama put it, "Life always has a fat tail.

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.

Investors long for steady waters, but paradoxically, the opportunities are richest when markets turn turbulent.

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

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.

When you need money, Wall Street is a heartless place.