Quotes from Edward Chancellor

Forming impressions of the CEO's character, intelligence, energy and trustworthiness can be gleaned using a variety of questioning techniques. Intellectual honesty can be tested by asking the CEO to pick out what he or she thinks is important. To unsettle the more promotional CEOs, we like to ask what is not working and wait to see whether they have given the matter much thought.

Financial repression returned to the West after 2008. Short-term rates in the United States and Europe were held below the level of inflation and remained negative in real terms for years on end.

We were equally impressed to learn that senior executives at another company preferred the underground to chauffeured limousine when travelling around London. The number of IR representatives in attendance is a good indicator as to how carefully a company counts its pennies. Of course, we have made mistakes when assessing management teams. But, in our view, trying to spot a great manager remains a game very much worth playing.

If we are delighting customers, eliminating unnecessary costs and improving our products and services, we gain strength ... . On a daily basis, the effects are imperceptible; cumulatively, though, their consequences are enormous. When our long-term competitive position improves as a result of these almost unnoticeable actions, we describe the phenomenon as "widening the moat.

This book is about the role of interest in a modern economy. It was inspired by a Bastiat-like conviction that ultra-low interest rates were contributing to many of our current woes, whether the collapse of productivity growth, unaffordable housing, rising inequality, the loss of market competition or financial fragility. Ultra-low rates also seemed to play some role in the resurgence of populism as Sumner's Forgotten Man started to lose patience.

The most encompassing view of interest is contained in the notion of interest as the 'time value of money' or, simply, as the price of time.

It was time to move on, which is why I'm now living here in the land of the cuckoo clock. Didn't someone once say, "all successful careers in finance end up in Switzerland?

As Bastiat understood, a very low rate of interest may benefit the rich, who have access to credit, more than the poor.

Tis not altogether improbable, that when the nation become heartily sick of their debts, and are cruelly oppressed by them, some daring projector may arise with visionary schemes for their discharge. And as public credit will begin, by that time, to be a little frail, the least touch will destroy it, as happened in France; and in this manner it will die of the doctor. David Hume, 'Of Public Credit', 1752

It is relatively easy to identify those industries where these conditions exist currently (just look at existing returns on capital), and it is for this reason that the really juicy investment returns are to be found in industries which are evolving to this state. The joy from a capital cycle perspective is that most investors are, for a variety of behavioural reasons, taken by surprise. Across many competitive battlefronts, we are always looking out for the next outbreak of peace.

whose father was Aeolus, god of the winds, and whose mother was a Caledonian nymph … As soon as he was fully grown his father taught him the secret of catching the wind in balloons.

world, where competition was seen as regional in nature, have suddenly become global. Because of the difficulty of assessing what motivates competitors under conditions of state capitalism, capital cycle analysis tends to be more effectively applied to industries which are largely domestic in nature or where the dominant players are inclined to Anglo-Saxon style capitalism (as is the case in the global beer industry).

After Augustus' death, the Emperor Tiberius hoarded money, with the result that interest rates rose above the legal limit and a banking crisis erupted in AD 33. Tiberius then decided to lend out the imperial treasure free of interest to patrician families, which brought about an immediate decline in interest rates and an end to the crisis.55 His actions constituted the world's first experience of quantitative easing.fn9

Wilson then goes on to provide a new definition of interest: 'Usurye is also saide to be the price of tyme, or of the delaying or forbearing of moneye.' Interest has been described in many ways over the years – it's often referred to as the 'price of money'. But Wilson knew better. Interest, he said, is the price of time. There is no better definition. In

Homer and Sylla, History of Interest Rates, p. 191.

The herd-like behaviour of companies and their managements never loses its power to astound. All too often, when one company decides that buybacks are the thing to do, then its competitors will play the game too. By the same token, capital raising (secondary issues) often appears at the same time among multiple companies in the same industry. One reason they act together is that no company wants to see competitors gain a funding advantage.