Equities are boring; bonds are disgusting.

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 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.

Investment bubbles and high animal spirits do not materialize out of thin air. They need extremely favorable economic fundamentals together with free and easy, cheap credit, and they need it for at least two or three years. Importantly, they also need serial pleasant surprises in such critical variables as global GNP growth.

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

The potential for alternative energy sources, mainly solar and wind power, to completely replace coal and gas for utility generation globally is, I think, certain. The question is only whether it takes 30 years or 70 years.

By background I'm both a Quaker and a Yorkshireman, which I like to call double jeopardy.