Some societies are also more optimistic than others: the U.S. and Australia are my two picks Tell a European you think there’s a housing bubble and you’ll have a reasonable discussion. Tell an Australian and you’ll have World War III. Been there, done that!

Capitalism believes that its remit is exclusively to make maximum short-term profits.

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

Although value is a weak force in any single year, it becomes a monster over several years. Like gravity, it slowly wears down the opposition.

Ridiculous as our market volatility might seem to an intelligent Martian, it is our reality and everyone loves to trot out the 'quote' attributed to Keynes (but never documented): 'The market can stay irrational longer than the investor can stay solvent.' For us agents, he might better have said 'The market can stay irrational longer than the client can stay patient.'

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 believe the only things that really matter in investing are the bubbles and the busts