It's not the bad ideas that do you in, but the good ones.

Economics is in many respects the queen of the soft sciences. It's expected to be better than the rest. It's my view that economics is better at the multi-disciplinary stuff than the rest of the soft science. And it's also my view that it's still lousy.

The safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.

A banker who is allowed to borrow money at X and loan it out at X plus Y will just go crazy and do too much of it if the civilization doesn't have rules that prevent it.

In business we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and or minimizing one or a few variables - like the discount warehouses of Costco.

The beauty of a financial institution is that there are a lot of ways to go to hell in a bucket. You can push credit too far, do a dumb acquisition, leverage yourself excessively - it's not just derivatives [that can bring about your downfall].

Wesco had a market capitalization of $40 million when we bought it [in the early 1970s]. It's $2 billion now. It's been a long slog to a perfectly respectable outcome - not as good as Berkshire Hathaway or Microsoft, but there's always someone in life who's done better.