John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

La qualifica più comune di chi fa previsioni in campo economico consiste non già nel sapere, ma nel non sapere di non sapere. Il suo grande vantaggio è che tutte le previsioni, giusta o sbagliate che siano, vengono rapidamente dimenticate.

The Reichman brothers, with Robert Campeau the Canadian gift to financial excess, are indubitably broke with depressive effect on the banks that were captured by their euphoric mood.

The basic speculative impulse, which is to believe whatever best serves the good fortune you are experiencing.

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

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.

All this notwithstanding, the twenties in America were a very good time. Production and employment were high and rising. Wages were not going up much, but prices were stable. Although many people were still very poor, more people were comfortably well-off, well-to-do, or rich than ever before. Finally, American capitalism was undoubtedly in a lively phase. Between 1925 and 1929, the number of manufacturing establishments increased from 183,900 to 206,700; the value of their output rose from $60.8 billions to $68.0 billions.1 The Federal Reserve index of industrial production which had averaged only 67 in 1921 (1923–25= 100) had risen to 110 by July 1928, and it reached 126 in June 1929.2 In 1926, 4,301,000 automobiles were produced. Three years later, in 1929, production had increased by over a million to 5,358,000,3 a figure which compares very decently with the 5,700,000 new car registrations of the opulent year of 1953. Business earnings were rising rapidly, and it was a good time to be in business. Indeed, even the most jaundiced histories of the era concede, tacitly, that times were good, for they nearly all join in taxing Coolidge for his failure to see that they were too good to last.

Let the following be one of the unfailing rules by which the individual investor and, needless to say, the pension and other institutional-fund manager are guided: there is the possibility, even the likelihood, of self-approving and extravagantly error-prone behavior on the part of those closely associated with money. Let that also be the continuing lesson of this essay.

The no-business meetings of the great business executives depend for their illusion of importance on something quite different. Not the exchange of ideas or the spiritual rewards of comradeship, but a solemn sense of assembled power gives significance to this assemblage. Even though nothing of importance is said or done, men of importance cannot meet without the occasion seeming important. Even the commonplace observation of the head of a large corporation is still the statement of the head of a large corporation. What it lacks in content it gains in power from the assets back of it.

"And in unraveling the complex we should always be careful not to overlook the obvious." John Kenneth Galbraith - The Affluent Society.

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

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.

There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.

the heavy load of debt incurred in the effort to obtain and retain control during the years of financial pillage and devastation.

In fact, the Federal Reserve was helpless only because it wanted to be. Had it been determined to do something, it could for example have asked Congress for authority to halt trading on margin by granting the Board the power to set margin requirements. Margins were not low in 1929; a residue of caution had caused most brokers to require customers to put up in cash 45 to 50 per cent of the value of the stocks they were buying. However, this was all the cash numerous of their customers had.

There is nothing in economic life so willfully misunderstood as the great speculative episode. T