John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

However, none of this was immediately apparent. If one has been a financial genius, faith in one’s genius does not dissolve at once. To the battered but unbowed genius, support of the stock of one’s own company still seemed a bold, imaginative, and effective course. Indeed, it seemed the only alternative to slow but certain death. So to the extent that their cash resources allowed, the managements of the trusts chose faster, though equally certain death. They bought their own worthless stock. Men have been swindled by other men on many occasions. The autumn of 1929 was, perhaps, the first occasion when men succeeded on a large scale in swindling themselves.

SOME YEARS, like some poets,and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year.

We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you're looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.

The worst continued to worsen. What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and also to insure that as few people as possible escape the common misfortune. The fortunate speculator who had funds to answer the first margin call presently got another and equally urgent one, and if he met that there would still be another. In the end all the money he had was extracted from him and lost. The man with the smart money, who was safely out of the market when the first crash came, naturally went back in to pick up bargains. The bargains then suffered a ruinous fall. Even the man who waited for volume of trading to return to normal and saw Wall Street become as placid as a produce market, and who then bought common stocks would see their value drop to a third or a fourth of the purchase price in the next 24 months. The Coolidge bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable.

Broadly speaking, [Keynesianism means] that the government has a specific responsibility for the behavior of the economy, that it doesn't work on its own autonomous course, but the government, when there's a recession, compensates by employment, by expansion of purchasing power, and in boom times corrects by being a restraining force. But it controls the great flow of demand into the economy, what since Keynesian times has been the flow of aggregate demand. That was the basic idea of Keynes so far as one can put it in a couple of sentences.

It is far, far better and much safer to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.

The consequences of successful action seemed almost as terrible as the consequences of inaction, and they could be more horrible for those who took the action. A bubble can easily be punctured. But to incise it with a needle so that it subsides gradually is a task of no small delicacy.

People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.

There is no major case against life’s enjoyments.

Trickle-down theory - the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.

No grant of feudal privilege has ever equaled, for effortless return, that of the grandparent who bought and endowed his descendants with a thousandshares ofGeneral Motors or General Electric.

It's a rule worth having in mind. Income almost always flows along the same axis as power but in the opposite direction.

Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.

The first is the extreme brevity of the financial memory. In consequence, financial disaster is quickly forgotten.