272 Finance Quotes

Bring your desires down to your present means. Increase them only when your increased means permit.

The trade of the petty usurer is hated with most reason: it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process which currency was meant to serve. Their common characteristic is obviously their sordid avarice.

Buy an annuity cheap, and make your life interesting to yourself and everybody else that watches the speculation.

I used to work in jobs I hated because I needed the money to buy a guitar. I know what it feels like to be depressed. On the other hand, I also know what it feels like to have money, to be successful, to be independent, but I can tell you that money and success never solve your problems.

Daddy pays for the water, daddy pays for the gas, daddy pays for the electricity, and if daddy didn't pay for the electricity, he'd pay for the candle on your nightstand, so you can study for the big test tomorrow.

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

I hate banks. They do nothing positive for anybody except take care of themselves. They're first in with their fees and first out when there's trouble.

Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money.

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

Don't give your money to the church. They should be giving their money to you.

There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.

Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.

Financial markets are supposed to swing like a pendulum: They may fluctuate wildly in response to exogenous shocks, but eventually they are supposed to come to rest at an equilibrium point and that point is supposed to be the same irrespective of the interim fluctuations. Instead, as I told Congress, financial markets behaved more like a wrecking ball, swinging from country to country and knocking over the weaker ones. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the international financial system itself constituted the main ingredient in the meltdown process.

The global crisis is caused by pathologies inherent in the global financial system itself.

The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios... The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.

It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it.

As we drive down the freeways, we see the new cars, but not the massive new-car loans that enslave their drivers to the banks.

What the insurance companies have done is to reverse the business so that the public at large insures the insurance companies.

We have some control over when we retire. However, we have very little control over how long we will live.

There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.

Let me remind you that credit is the lifeblood of business, the lifeblood of prices and jobs.

About the time we can make the ends meet, somebody moves the ends.

Prosperity cannot be restored by raids upon the public Treasury.

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.

Money is indispensable to a long-circuit heavy load energy system. It must be used when a sufficient surplus is being produced to allow a margin for exchange, and cost of transport, over a considerable distance. Money represents a storage battery when idle, and a generalized mode of the conversion of energy when it is in motion, with a function of equating time and space.

Owe money at Easter and Lent will seem short to thee.

Trust your husband, adore your husband, and get as much as you can in your own name.

Full service brokers, in this day and age of low cost mutual funds and discount brokers, are really nothing more than machines for ripping off retail investors.

I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living.

Though he love not to buy the pig in the poke.

When you see reference to a new paradigm you should always, under all circumstances, take cover. Because ever since the great tulipmania in 1637, speculation has always been covered by a new paradigm. There was never a paradigm so new and so wonderful as the one that covered John Law and the South Sea Bubble - until the day of disaster.

The safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket.

I don't want to tell you how much insurance I carry with the Prudential, but all I can say is: when I go, they go too.

I did the thing with bonds, which was about 30 million dollars, and didn't get none of the money on them.

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.

If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

It is generally agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of Stock Exchanges.

The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.

Wealth can only be accumulated by the earnings of industry and the savings of frugality.

Having, First, gained all you can, and, Secondly saved all you can, Then give all you can.

London is the clearing-house of the world.

We all know how the size of sums of money appears to vary in a remarkable way according as they are being paid in or paid out.

The hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.

Big pay and little responsibility are circumstances seldom found together.

Money without brains is always dangerous.

The fears of recession in the aftermath of Black Monday have turned to fears of the economy racing ahead too fast, with inflation edging up and a substantial current account deficit...people understandably feel more confident about their future than they've done for decades, but as a result they have been borrowing more and saving less...coming on top of a massive income investment boom, it's all been just a bit too much of a good thing.

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

Ah! That must be Aunt Augusta. Only relatives, or creditors, ever ring in that Wagnerian manner.

Mothers, of course, are all right. They pay a chap's bills and don't bother him. But fathers bother a chap and never pay his bills.

I am dying as I have lived: beyond my means.

Between 1999 and 2004 there was no investment in Australia, it all went into housing and consumption all borrowed on the current account. When Peter Costello runs around saying, 'Oh we've paid off the debt,' it's like the pea and thimble trick. The Government debt or the massive private debt abroad? It's continuing to grow.

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

Nobody was ever meant To remember or invent What he did with every cent.

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

Let me see if I get this right. We need to borrow $10 billion from China, and then we give it to Musharraf, who is a military dictator, who overthrew an elected government. And then we go to war, we lose all these lives promoting democracy in Iraq. I mean, what's going on here?

Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven't had capitalism. A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank. It's not capitalism when the system is plagued with incomprehensible rules regarding mergers, acquisitions, and stock sales, along with wage controls, price controls, protectionism, corporate subsidies, international management of trade, complex and punishing corporate taxes, privileged government contracts to the military-industrial complex, and a foreign policy controlled by corporate interests and overseas investments. Add to this centralized federal mismanagement of farming, education, medicine, insurance, banking and welfare. This is not capitalism!

Ron Paul: ...you have to develop the transition, and eventually the next step would be to prohibit the Fed from monetizing debt. This is the real evil. The politicians spend for war, welfare, and they don't have to do it responsibly. Question: When you say monetize the debt, you mean they would only be able to spend the cash that they had on hand. They couldn't write any cheques for which they don't have in their account any money? Ron Paul: That's right. And that is the key to it. Because when the Fed comes along, and there's starvation for capital and liquidity, and politicians are spending too much, the Fed can create 20, 30, 50 billion dollars in a day, just like they did trying to bail out this housing bubble crash. So they create money out of thin air endlessly, eventually that has to stop because that drives the value of the dollar down.

The phrase 'honest politician' is an oxymoron; yet in the sense that Paul never, ever votes against his stated principles -- which are libertarian and include the belief that much of our federal government, from the IRS to the Department of Education, and the massive taxes that support it, should be abolished -- the phrase describes him... The same beliefs that cause him to vote against every single appropriations bill in Congress also carry over to his private life. He intends, for example, to refuse his congressional pension. He would not let his children take out federally subsidized education loans. He actually returns money each year from his congressional office -- some $50,000 last year.

He's getting close to what I raised on our first day... so I am delighted that he's been able to raise what he needs to go forward...

The first time I heard Paul talk about monetary policy, I'd felt like a hostage, the only person in the room who didn't buy into the program. Then, slowly, like so many hostages, I started to open my mind and listen. By the time we got to Reno, unfamiliar thoughts were beginning to occur: Why shouldn't we worry about the soundness of the currency? What exactly is the dollar backed by anyway? And, if the gold standard is crazy, is it really any crazier than hedge funds? I'd become Patty Hearst, ready to take up arms for the cause, or at least call my accountant and tell him to buy Krugerrands.

If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good, makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is the bond lets money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%, where as the currency pays nobody but those who contribute directly in some useful way. It is absurd to say our country can issue $30 million in bonds and not $30 million in currency. Both are promises to pay, but one promise fattens the userers and the other helps the people.

The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery.

The 'democratisation' of the ownership of shares, from which the bourgeois sophists and opportunist so-called 'Social-Democrats' expect (or say that they expect) the 'democratisation of capital', the strengthening of the role and significance of small scale production, etc., is, in fact, one of the ways of increasing the power of the financial oligarchy.

Most Americans have no real understanding of the operations of the international moneylenders... the accounts of the Federal Reserve have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and ... manipulates the credit of the United States

I don't mean this to be political, but when Ron Paul was firing every revolver in Ben Bernanke's direction, there were a lot of people cheering down here, with regard to the only tools the Fed ever seems to use, are the easing tools. And on the inflation front, many traders were reading the subtitles and they went back and checked, with respect to the weaker dollar, it affects import prices but not domestic prices, that's kind of an inconsistency [...] I just think you don't understand the way traders think. Traders don't care about your analysis. They care about making money. And they obviously realize that the only thing the Fed has ever done to solve these problems is to ease, and they're making money. But if you ask these people, do you think you really gonna see a rate cut in December, half the people I talk to say by time we get into December, headline inflation would probably make it so the Fed can't ease.

It's expensive being me.

Neil Cavuto: Yeah but, you can't, Congressman, we've got a pretty good economy going here, right? We've got productivity soaring. We've got retail sales that are strong. We've got corporate earnings that for, what, the 19th quarter, are up double digit? We've got a market chasing highs, I mean, this isn't happening in a vacuum, right? Ron Paul: Yeah, that's nice, but when you have to borrow, you know... My personal finances would be very good if I borrowed a million dollars every month. But, someday, the bills will become due. And the bills will come due in this country, and then we'll have to pay for it. We can't afford this war, and we can't afford the entitlement system. Neil Cavuto: Look, Congressman, did you say this 10 years ago, when the numbers were similarly strong... Ron Paul: Go back and check. Neil Cavuto: ...and we were still borrowing a good deal then. Ron Paul: That's right, that means the dollar bubble is much bigger than ever. Neil Cavuto: So what's gonna happen? Ron Paul: We've had the NASDAQ bubble collapse already. We have the housing bubble in the middle of a collapse, so the dollar bubble will collapse as well. We have to live within our means. You can't print money out of the blue, and think you can print your money into prosperity.