Quotes that have resonated in 2022

If you are an economist there's still time to find a more rewarding life...

“An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today." -Laurence J. Peter

“Never confuse education with intelligence; you can have a PhD and still be an idiot.” - Richard Feynman.

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Hayek - “The Fatal Conceit”

“Mainstream economics is replete with ideas that “everyone knows” to be true, but that are actually arrant nonsense.” Jeremy Rudd. Federal Reserve Board. September 2021.

Or put another way “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.“ Mark Twain

God and an economist were arguing about who came first – Religion or Economics? God make his killer point… “before me there was nothing but chaos!”. The economist simply said: “I win.” Bill Blain - the Morning Porridge

“The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive the arts; the practical, business; and the left over, economics” Nicholas Taleb

Next, a story. The author of the novel Catch-22, Joseph Heller, attended a cocktail party hosted by a Wall Street tycoon with his friend, the writer Kurt Vonnegut, who said, ‘What do you think, Joe? That man earned more last month than you’ve made from all your books.’

Heller: ‘Maybe. But I have one thing he’ll never have.’

Vonnegut: ‘What’s that?’

Heller: ‘Enough.’

“Many investors today still pretend that we’re in the system that we had from 1980 to 2020. We’re not. We’re going through fundamental, lasting changes on many levels.” Russell Napier

"What is really amazing, and frustrating, is mankind’s habit of refusing to see the obvious and inevitable until it is there, and then muttering about unforeseen catastrophes.” Isaac Asimov

“I’m not going to tell you what to do, or what to think or how to live your life. I’m not interested in how many two-for-one offers you buy at the supermarket.”  Liz Truss

“So, we will fight a geo-political and geo-economic war, individually, fuelled by biscuits: how empoweringly British!” Michael Every - Rabobank

Mark Twain’s rhetorical question “Do you want the truth or a good story?”

“Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.” - Thomas Sowell

“There can be few fields of human endeavour in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.” John K Galbraith

“In general, the deployment of austerity as economic policy has been as effective in bringing us peace, prosperity, and crucially, a sustained reduction of debt, as the Mongol Golden Horde was in furthering the development of Olympic dressage.” Mark Blyth

The Federal Reserve apparently has upwards of 400 PhD economists…here’s what their leader said last week.

The committee decided to raise interest rates by 50 bps… and we still have some ways to go”

“We are taking forceful steps to moderate demand so that it comes into better alignment with supply”

“Reducing inflation is likely to require a sustained period of below trend growth”

“We will stay the course until the job is done”

“Our Focus is not on rate cuts or prematurely loosening policy”

“We’re going into next year with higher inflation than we thought”

And Janet Yellen thinks we can avoid a recession…another academic economist…

Over in Europe the ECB’s Lagarde was equally emphatic.

Based on the information that we have available today, that predicates another 50-basis-point rate hike at our next meeting, and possibly at the one after that, and possibly thereafter,

So don’t assume that it’s a one-shot 50; it’s more than that"

In the immortal words of fund manager Cullen Roche,  “The stock market is the only market where things go on sale and the customers run out of the store;” a time of great opportunity!

Please click the “like” button if you enjoyed reading this piece. Many thanks. Clive