“I don’t understand it and haven’t understood in this world of technology: where every building has a camera, every ATM has a camera, why don’t we have cameras on police officers?”
“Leonardo Fibonacci, the great 13th century Italian mathematician (1175-1250) created the ‘Fibonacci sequence’ to explain behavior in nature mathematically. History has it that the first question he posed was how many rabbits would be created in one year starting with one pair.”
“Blame the Tea Party? Geez, no wonder Kerry did so well in an election. If it wasn’t for the Tea Party, they would have passed the debt ceiling thumbs up; we would have been rated BBB.”
“Government is promoting bad behavior… Do we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages? This is America!”
“When you are facing the wilderness on your own, you have a totally different attitude to someone who works in government or who has a monthly cheque.”
“When I was an institutional broker in a former life, I was a believer in the merits of using technical analysis. I found that it was a very useful tool that complemented the much more mainstream tools generically referred to as fundamental analysis.”
“Think Apple, think the FBI. We are living ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ Why is it so important? Because I would hate for the country to have that rhetorical question: Where is John Galt, who is John Galt? John Galt is all of us.”
“I think many agree, being on the plan till 26, good idea; preexisting conditions, they all have a cost. So you have to find a way to pay for it. But it doesn’t mean that you’re going to keep or change. Listen, cars have tires. You can reinvent the car, but it’s still going to have tires. Those aspects are components of healthcare.”
“In normal times, investors should pay more attention to the credit markets because it’s the energy by which everything is driven. It’s the oil in the engine.”
“I don’t believe anyone should ignore all the fires around you and stand pat and not worry about getting singed.”
“One thing that served me well with clients was that you back your winners and you back your losers.”
“I try to avoid political ties.”
“I’m pretty darn happy with my day job.”
“At the end of the day, the markets are my passion.”
“The government is promoting bad behavior.”
“If you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson – what we’re doing now in this country is making them roll over in their graves.”
“You need more people to perpetuate a myth because if the people stop the myth is known to all.”
“We have mountain of debt that isn’t going away and all the problems are here to stay, and anybody who tells you that is a good thing ought to get out of the business of helping the government down the road.”
“Challenging leaders is as American as it gets.”
“The unique thing about our country is that we don’t get behind politicians, politicians get behind us.”
“Our society, our culture – the greatness of America – goes hand-in-hand with energy, and our leaders need to wake up. We need energy, OK?”
“We cannot collect enough taxes to catch up with spending. Do I know a solution? Not really. Do your politicians know a solution? Does our commander-in-chief offer a solution? Absolutely not.”
“The jobs outlook in the U.S. isn’t very good. And it’s really about young people.”
“I believe there’s only one regulation in life that works: failure.”
“When Target gets hacked, I don’t hear people saying, ‘Hey, was it Kohl’s? Was it Wal-Mart?’ It doesn’t matter. There was a hack; you deal with it.”
“Most of the mainstream coverage of most of the crisis – the economy, the road to get here, and the Tea Party – has been very much lacking.”
“Many of us, of course, have children, and I think that the type of country that we are going to leave in our wake by rewarding bad behavior… is not a better handoff to the next generation and generation after that.”
“There’s so much compromise in politics. I’m not a good compromiser.”
“It seems to me that any reason for people getting more active in running or taking part in politics and government I think is just terrific.”
“I don’t think that there is a beer summit in the cards for me at the White House.”
“People in charge of intelligence are political as well.”
“There’s hearings on everything. They’re kabuki theater.”
“Let me see the ‘Cuban missiles on the island’ picture. Trump needs to see it before networks need to see it.”
“I think health care is a mess. I think that, as a free market person, you can’t even have that discussion unless you know what the service costs.”
“I have a daughter for a while that didn’t have insurance. She gets a different price than people who have insurance.”
“How many muni areas have actually defaulted, by the way? Just a question.”
“The last place I’m ever going to live or work is D.C.”
“I think we should all be proud that we are living in a country where we can question those we put in power because, at the end of the day, they work for every citizen.”
“It’s a philosophy that – ‘We, the People’ – it’s about us, that if the Americans want to do something, they have the power to try to put leaders in place to carry out whatever their notions are.”
“While the vandals are on the street corners, the Tea Party conservatives, they’re working state houses, the governorships, the mayorships, the Senate, the House.”
“How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage?”
“How about we all stop paying our mortgages! It’s a moral hazard.”
“People ask me if I’m the father of the Tea Party movement… I was the spark… that started it.”
“If being the lightning rod that started the Tea Party is what’s written on my tombstone, I’ll be very happy.”
“What about stocks? You got to buy them. What if they break? You have to buy the dips.”
“The markets are the world’s greatest Rubik’s cube. And I love solving puzzles.”
“I work hard, and I haven’t done badly in life. But I pretty much came from very modest roots… I go home on my train; I cut my own grass… I don’t have anything against people that are more elite, but it’s just not who I am or what I’m about.”
“I’m very happy at CNBC. It’s the passion, it’s the movement – there’s a lot of moving parts. And spontaneous TV and spontaneous debates… I don’t know that there’s anyone that enjoys their job more than I do.”
“I think hacking’s important. Most Americans should worry about it no matter what side of the aisle you’re on.”
“All the way back to 2010, the takeover of Congress, there is an unnerved part of the public that understands the history of Hillary Clinton. We’ve seen her for decades. They understand Donald Trump. There’s no disclosure needed there. The sour grapes that we are experiencing isn’t going to make a better tasting wine for the Democrats in the future.”
“This is America. And we’ve basically invented the computer, and we should invent ways to protect all those that use it.”
“No, traditions and norms aren’t rules in the Constitution. There’s a difference between a tradition and a law.”
“This is America. Dissenting voices will continue to voice their dissent. Because they’ve read the operating instructions for the United States of America, and it’s their right.”
“The markets represent the aggregate interaction of many investors. Their attitudes, philosophies, and behavioral patterns on many levels are predictable… and repetitive.”
“One of the greatest technicians of all time was a man named W. D. Gann (1878-1955). He had tremendous success predicting market moves much in advance. Legend has it that he occasionally sent notes to ‘The Wall Street Journal’, which accurately predicted tops and bottoms in grain markets months ahead of time.”
“A republic and a democracy are pretty much identical, pretty much on every level.”
“We are a republic, very inefficient. If you want a really efficient form of government, you have a king or a dictator. And in the end, you hope it’s a benevolent one. But then you could get things done. There’s no lurching; there’s no bumps. That’s the cornerstone of checks and balances.”
“The president doesn’t hold all the cards. The cards are evenly split up!”
“This country is a republic.”
“If the country is ever attacked as it was on 9/11, we all respond with a sense of urgency.”
“Many other states ultimately – they might not have the same balance sheet as Wisconsin – but collective bargaining from the federal level… these are big issues, and these costs need to be put under control.”
“I started trading around 1979, fresh out of college. In the early ’90s, I started guesting for major news media.”
“Around 1999, CNBC offered me a full-time post, and I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”
“People with 401(k)s need to be very conservative. Picking bottoms should be for insiders and traders.”
“A Treasury Secretary or a President should be out here not fighting S&P, not grabbing the other coach and slapping him around, taking the umpire behind the barn. He should be getting the team psyched to overcome.”
“We all know deep inside that no country is the same as it was 5 years ago.”
“I remember I had a professor in college. I wrote a great paper. Could never please this guy. But it made me better.”
“Working with Russia, we worked with Iran. Are they our friends? You have to take each situation uniquely.”
“I like free markets, but I do like fair markets.”
“I’ve said from day one, when Donald Trump gets in there, he’s going to make an equal number of Republicans unhappy as Democrats unhappy.”
“I think it is a mistake for candidates, or once they get elected in office, to be dwelling too much on the topic of markets.”
“Markets are unforgiving, and sometimes they move for reasons we can’t possibly foresee.”
“We now have the technology to pretty much hear everything. Can you imagine how our holiday dinners would be if every relative’s entire conversations from birth to that moment in time was shown to every other relative?”
“Believe me. When you’re talking about trust in government, you’re preaching to the choir, whether it’s on the financial side, the central banking side: we see areas where the government does good jobs; we see areas where they don’t do as good a job.”
“I come from immigrant grandparents. The country would not be what it is if it wasn’t for the immigrants in this country.”
“There’s not a lot of wealth throughout all the country shared equally.”
“I don’t even look at gold as gold anymore. Gold is just another piece of paper.”
“If you trade in paper, the notion of many who trade gold – the Ayn Randers – if the financial world comes to an end, they’re going to have the gold. If you’re playing in ETFs, you’re going to have a piece of paper.”
“When it comes to policies of central bankers, the biggest systemic risk we have… are those policies.”
“I’ve talked about commodity price volatility in the past: go back to the tape… I never said it was about inflation.”
“Printing money – is it really the answer? … If we just print a million dollars for every man, woman, and child in the country and handed it to them, won’t that fix everything? Because in order to really look at printing – I like to take everything to the extreme.”
“Look at the Weimar Republic and their hyperinflation in the early ’20s. It didn’t happen overnight. I’ve used the analogy, it’s a lot like soybeans: you plant ’em, you wait. Conditions take some time. You need some sun; you need some water, but ultimately things start to grow, and are we in that phase or not?”
“The issue is, you’re not going to have a lot of inflation showing up when you have no velocity.”
“You know what that big number was? It was 1957. It’s not the year I was born. I’m a little older than that. I wish it was the year I was born. It was the year one of my favorite books was written: ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ Ayn Rand.”
“We need to understand that in the end, if we’re going to make a positive difference in the future, we can’t have election cycles where one side, the middle and the right side, they talk trash.”
“Maybe we should shut Wall Street down for 24 hours, see how everybody who blames Wall Street for everything likes that. Maybe we should shut energy down for 24 hours, see how people like that.”
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