Maybe you'll take the cash out. So a credit card company or a bank that goes into the business of saying we're going to be the broker, we're going to sell you a mortgage that you're going to be able to pay off, we're going to help you reduce your credit card debt, we're going to help you save for retirement, we're going to put you into mutual funds that have low fees rather than high fees.
Richard ThalerWhen should we nudge and when should we shove, I think, it's a political judgment. Obviously in some situations we need shoves, we need laws. Fraud is against the law, murder is against the law, drunk-driving is against the law. We don't need just nudges.
Richard ThalerRip Van Winkle would be the ideal stock market investor: Rip could invest in the market before his nap and when he woke up 20 years later, he'd be happy. He would have been asleep through all the ups and downs in between. But few investors resemble Mr. Van Winkle. The more often an investor counts his money - or looks at the value of his mutual funds in the newspaper - the lower his risk tolerance.
Richard ThalerI think the people who've been the most overconfident in our business in the last decade have been the people that called themselves risk managers.
Richard ThalerLTCM lost money when Russia defaulted on a certain class of bonds, and then they had other investments like on the spread between two different kinds of shares of Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company. Now that seems completely unrelated to Russian bonds. But they were related because other hedge funds saw similar discrepancies and they were all making similar bets.
Richard Thaler