The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.

In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.

I begin with the renaming of the system. It used to be capitalism. But that evokes [Karl] Marx and [John] Rockefeller. So now we speak of the market system. That is a nice bland expression, which forgets those off-color references.

Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.

In the affluent society, no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessities.

Financial operations do not lend themselves to innovation. What is recurrently so described and celebrated is, without exception, a small variation on an established design . . . The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.

I've been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be.