Everyone asks about gold. This is the irony: just as Jim Grant tells us (correctly) that we all have faith-based paper currencies backed by nothing, it is equally fair to say that gold is a faith-based metal. It pays no dividend, cannot be eaten, and is mostly used for nothing more useful than jewelry. I would say that anything of which 75% sits idly and expensively in bank vaults is, as a measure of value, only one step up from the Polynesian islands that attached value to certain well-known large rocks that were traded.

I like to be right. I try not to miss the big ideas, forget the little ones, and try to get them right. End of job description.

The stock market is overpriced. Everything is overpriced. Junk is king.

The pure administration of Graham-and-Doddery really needs a long-term lock-up like Warren Buffett has, or it will have occasional quite dreadful client problems.

The investment business has taught me – increasingly as the years have passed – that people, especially investors (and, I believe, Americans), prefer good news and wishful thinking to bad news; and that there are always vested interests to offer facile, optimistic alternatives to the bad news.

I hate gold. It does not pay a dividend, it has no value, and you can't work out what it should or shouldn't be worth," he said. "It is the last refuge of the desperate.

You can't run the economy on BMWs alone. If the average person is in a pickle, how do you have a healthy economy?