Investors must keep in mind that there's a difference between a good company and a good stock. After all, you can buy a good car but pay too much for it.

So the world is much more correlated than we give credit to. And so we see more of what Nassim Taleb calls "black swan events" - rare events happen more often than they should because the world is more correlated.

I'm all for empowerment and education, but the empirical evidence is that it doesn't work. That's why I say make it easy.

I think one lesson we have to learn is that there's a lot more risk than we're giving credit to, a lot more what economist calls systematic risk.

The reason is they failed to learned the primary lesson we should have learned from when Long Term Capital Management went belly up ten years ago. That is, investments that seem uncorrelated can be correlated simply because we're interested in it.

I don't go by the ratings. I buy wine that tastes good. Statistically, anybody's ability to predict what will be a good wine a decade from now is limited.

When an economist says the evidence is "mixed," he or she means that theory says one thing and data says the opposite.