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Quote by Paul Samuelson

“I'm not sure most of the people that get caught up in the middle of a bubble can be described as irrational. It seems pretty rational to buy a house and flip it in the next few weeks at a profit when that's been happening for along time.”

Quote by Paul Samuelson

Author

Paul Samuelson was an American economist renowned for his contributions to the field of economics. Born on May 15, 1915, and passing away on December 13, 2009, Samuelson was a significant figure in modern economics. His book 'Economics' has been widely used as a textbook in universities. more

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“It isn't that greed's increased. What's increased is the realization that you've got a free field to reach out for what you'd like to do.”

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“Macroeconomics, even with all of our computers and with all of our information - is not an exact science and is incapable of being an exact science.”

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“Mea culpa, mea culpa. MIT and Wharton and University of Chicago created the financial engineering instruments, which, like Samson and Delilah, blinded every CEO. They didn't realize the kind of leverage they were doing and they didn't understand when they were really creating a real profit or a fictitious one.”

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“Profits are the lifeblood of the economic system, the magic elixir upon which progress and all good things depend ultimately. But one man's lifeblood is another man's cancer.”

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“Reasonable men are not reasonable when you're in the bubbles which have characterized capitalism since the beginning of time.”

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“That's what I would like to do until the end of time, to go on scribbling my articles on the third floor of the Sloan Building, in between playing tennis and drinking coffee at my other study in the Concord Avenue branch of Burger King.”

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“The niceties of existence were not a matter of concern, yet everything around was closed down most of the time. If you lived in a middle-class community in Chicago, children and adults came daily to the door saying, 'We are starving, how about a potato?' I speak from poignant memory.”

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“To prove that Wall Street is an early omen of movements still to come in GNP, commentators quote economic studies alleging that market downturns predicted four out of the last five recessions. That is an understatement. Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions! And its mistakes were beauties.”

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“Two factors explain our success. One, MIT's renaissance after World War II as a federally supported research resource. Two, the mathematical revolution in macro- and micro-economic theory and statistics. This was overdue and inevitable, MIT was the logical place for it to flourish.”

“When the economy was going up, [Milton Friedman and I] both gave the same advice, and when the economy was going down, we gave the same advice. But in between he didn't change his advice at all.”

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Author:Paul Samuelson