The very nature of finance is that it cannot be profitable unless it is significantly leveraged... and as long as there is debt, there can be failure and contagion.

Credit-default swaps, I think, have serious problems associated with them.

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.

The process of innovation is, of course, never ending.

It's a bubble. It has to have intrinsic value. You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is. I haven't been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.

I was a good amateur but only an average professional. I soon realized that there was a limit to how far I could rise in the music business, so I left the band and enrolled at New York University.

If I've made myself clear, I've misspoken.