John Kenneth Galbraith Quotes

There is nothing reliable to be learned about making money. If there were, study would be intense and everyone with a positive IQ would be rich.

Fools, as it has long been said, are indeed separated, soon or eventually, from their money. So, alas, are those who, responding to a general mood of optimism, are captured by a sense of their own financial acumen. Thus it has been for centuries; thus in the long future it will also be.

Aunque todo lo demás falle, siempre podemos asegurarnos la inmortalidad cometiendo algún error espectacular.

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.

Economists are generally negligent of their heroes.

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.

The capacity for erroneous belief is very great, especially where it coincides with convenience.

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.

The second factor contributing to speculative euphoria and programmed collapse is the specious association of money and intelligence.

If the individual's wants are to be urgent, they must be original with himself. They cannot be urgent if they must be contrived for him. And above all, they must not be contrived by the process of production by which they are satisfied. For this means that the whole case for the urgency of production, based on the urgency of wants, falls to the ground. One cannot defend production as satisfying wants if that production creates the wants.

Were it so that a man on arising each morning was assailed by demons which instilled in him a passion sometimes for silk shirts, sometimes for kitchenware, sometimes for chamber pots, and sometimes for orange squash, there would be every reason to applaud the effort to find the goods, however odd, that quenched this flame. But should it be that his passion was the result of his first having cultivated the demons, and should it also be that his effort to allay it stirred the demons to ever greater and greater effort, there would be question as to how rational was his solution. Unless restrained by conventional attitudes, he might wonder if the solution lay with more goods or fewer demons.

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

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

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

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

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.