Hope sustains life, but misplaced hope prolongs recessions.

To suppose that the value of a common stock is determined purely by a corporation's earnings discounted by the relevant interest rates and adjusted for the marginal tax rate is to forget that people have burned witches, gone to war on a whim, risen to the defense of Joseph Stalin and believed Orson Welles when he told them over the radio that the Martians had landed.

Credit is money of the mind.

[T]he first bad bank loan was no doubt made around the time of the opening of the first bank.

It's about bums on seats. If nobody wants to listen to what you are doing, it kind of defeats the purpose really, doesn't it?

Nothing beats a little cash in a bear market, of course, and the oldest form of cash is gold.

The art of banking is always to balance the risk of a run with the reward of a profit. The tantalizing factor in the equation is that riskier borrowers pay higher interest rates. Ultimate safety - a strongbox full of currency - would avail the banker nothing. Maximum risk - a portfolio of loans to prospective bankrupts at usurious interest rates - would invite disaster. A good banker safely and profitably treads the middle ground.