Charles R. Morris > Quotes

“LTCM is now a classic case of “fat tails” in finance. Portfolio math mimics diffusion physics—a scattergram of the outcomes from trillions of small random movements maps smoothly onto a bell curve. In well-behaved markets, finance looks much the same. But markets are rarely well-behaved for long, and big deviations from the norm happen very frequently in finance—the finance bell curve, that is, has fat tails. When Russia defaulted on its sovereign bonds in 1998, it was a fat tail for LTCM, and it was on the wrong side of the trade, with very heavy leverage.”
― Charles R. Morris, The Sages: Warren Buffett, George Soros, Paul Volcker, and the Maelstrom of Markets

“The word aristocrat itself was becoming almost a curse throughout the North, and travelers’ reports of the South’s pestilence-ridden, barefooted backwardness were staples of the northern press. It was implicitly understood, as one historian put it, that “two profoundly different and antagonistic civilizations . . . were competing for control of the political system.”
― Charles R. Morris, The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy

“In raw markets, the scent of money deadens all other sensory and ethical organs.”
― Charles R. Morris, The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash

“in the brave new world of absolute markets, it is not only dangerously naive to trust your mortgage broker, but based on recent scandals in college tuition lending, even your student aid counselor.”
― Charles R. Morris, The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash

“experimented with rapid-fire weapons, known as Chambers guns, after their Philadelphia inventor.”
― Charles R. Morris, The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution

“Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.”6”
― Charles R. Morris, The Sages: Warren Buffett, George Soros, Paul Volcker, and the Maelstrom of Markets

“than any”
― Charles R. Morris, The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy