In that, we agreed with Andrew Carnegie, who said that huge fortunes that flow in large part from society should in large part be returned to society. In my case, the ability to allocate capital would have had little utility unless I lived in a rich, populous country in which enormous quantities of marketable securities were traded and were sometimes ridiculously mispriced. And fortunately for me, that describes the U.S. in the second half of the last century.

In some corner of the world they are probably still holding regular meetings of the Flat Earth Society. We derive no comfort because important people, vocal people, or great numbers of people agree with us. Nor do we derive comfort if they don't.

But 300 million Americans, their lending institutions, their government, their media, all believed that house prices were going to go up consistently. And that got billed into a $20 trillion residential home market. Lending was done based on it, and everybody did a lot of foolish things.

Continually challenge and be willing to amend your best loved ideas.

People will always try to stop you from doing the right thing if it is unconventional.

I think it will get moving faster. I mean once you get it off the - once credit flows - now the recession is going to get worse.

A pack of lemmings looks like a group of rugged individualists compared with Wall Street when it gets a concept in its teeth.