If it happens every year like clockwork, what's so extraordinary about it?

I would argue that a majority of the horrors we face would not have happened if the accounting profession developed and enforced better accounting.

Choose clients as you would friends.

A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind, loving diagnosis involving multiple variables. And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.

I also want to raise the possibility that there are, in the very long term, "virtue effects" in economics- for instance that widespread corrupt accounting will eventually create bad long term consequences as a sort of obverse effect from the virtue-based boost double-entry book-keeping gave to the heyday of Venice. I suggest that when the financial scene starts reminding you of Sodomand Gomorrah, you should fear practical consequences even if you like to participate in what is going on.

Beta and modern portfolio theory and the like - none of it makes any sense to me.

There's a lot wrong [with American universities]. I'd remove 3/4 of the faculty - everything but the hard sciences. But nobody's going to do that, so we'll have to live with the defects. It's amazing how wrongheaded [the teaching is]. There is fatal disconnectedness. You have these squirrelly people in each department who don't see the big picture.