In a different era, I would have called myself a natural philosopher. All my life, I have enjoyed the reputation of being someone who disrupted preva… - Benoit Mandelbrot

How Long Is the Coast of Britain?

"There is a rich vein of jokes about economists and their assumptions. Take the old one about the engineer, the physicist, and the economist. They find themselves shipwrecked on a desert island with nothing to eat but a sealed can of beans. How to get at them? The engineer proposes breaking the can open with a rock. The physicist suggests heating the can in the sun, until it bursts. The economist's approach: "First, assume we have a can opener....

"In the end, he says, his goal is to make the financial system work better and more safely. If the real market worked liked FXTrade, costs would come down, liquidity would rise. "The world economy is like your body," he says. "Your heart pumps six liters of blood a minute, and so if you weigh eighty kilos it would take about fifteen minutes to pump your body's weight. By that analogy, the world foreign exchange markets should be transacting $40 trillion every ten minutes. Today we do $1 trillion or so in twenty-four hours. My claim is the global economy is close to a heart attack.