Quotes from John Kenneth Galbraith

All crisis have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.

Nothing in modern attitudes is believed more to signify exceptional intelligence than association with large pools of money. Only immediate experience with those so situated denies the myth.

Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead. - Friedrich Von Schiller, as quoted by Bernard Baruch

Galbraith's First Law: Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

The rule will often be here reiterated: financial genius is before the fall. I

There would also be, we may be certain, the traditional reassuring words from Washington. Always when markets are in trouble, the phrases are the same: "The economic situation is fundamentally sound" or simply "The fundamentals are good." All who hear these words should know that something is wrong.

The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version. All financial innovation involves in one form or another, the creation of debt secured in greater or lesser adequacy by real assets.

the speculative episode always ends not with a whimper but with a bang.

Speculation buys up, in a very practical way, the intelligence of those involved.

prime threat hovering over a society of general well-being.

The recurrent and sadly erroneous belief that effortless enrichment is an entitlement associated with what is thought to be exceptional financial perspicacity and wisdom is not something that yields to legislative remedy.

Speculation, it has been noted, comes when popular imagination settles on something seemingly new in the field of commerce or finance.

I have sufficiently urged that all suggestions as to financial innovation be regarded with extreme skepticism. Such seeming innovation is merely some variant on an old design, new only in the brief and defective memory of the financial world.

Tenure was originally invented to protect radical professors, those who challenged the accepted order. But we don't have such people anymore at the universities, and the reason is tenure. When the time comes to grant it nowadays, the radicals get screened out. That's its principal function. It's a very good system, really - keeps academic life at a decent level of tranquility.

Here in briefest form is the modern political dialectic. It is an unequal contest: the rich and the comfortable have influence and money. And they vote. The concerned and the poor have numbers, but many of the poor, alas, do not vote. There is democracy, but in no slight measure it is a democracy of the fortunate.

Financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated. Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present. So inaction will be advocated in the present even though it means deep trouble in the future. Here, at least equally with Communism, lies the threat to Capitalism. It is what causes men who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound.

There is the possibility, even the likelihood, of self-approving and extravagantly error-prone behavior on the part of those closely associated with money.

Scholars gather in scholarly assemblages to hear in elegant statement what all have heard before. Again, it is not a negligible rite, for its purpose is not to convey knowledge but to beatify learning and the learned.

dementia to come forward to capture the financial mind. It is also the time generally required for a new generation to enter the scene, impressed, as had been its predecessors, with its own innovative genius.

F or a decade after the bursting of the debt bubble in 1837, business conditions were depressed in the United States. The number of banks available for financing speculative adventures declined. Then, after another 10 years, public memory faded again.

Increasing values again brought increasing values. As with the canals and turnpikes, it was transportation, this time the railroads, that was the focus of the speculation. Here the horizons seemed truly without limit. Who could lose on what was so obviously needed?

Recurrent speculative insanity and the associated financial deprivation and larger devastation are, i am persuaded, inherent in the system. Perhaps it is better that this be recognized and accepted.

One does not fire or sack higher-income personnel; in the interest of greater efficiency, they are only shed.

to pursue the gold deposits that were presumed to exist in the great North American territory of Louisiana. There was no evidence of the gold, but this, as ever in such episodes, was no time for doubters or doubting