Andrés Mc Cormack

“In the immediate postbubble period, the wealth effect of asset price movements has a bigger impact on economic growth rates than monetary policy does. People tend to underestimate the size of this effect. In the early stages of a bubble bursting, when stock prices fall and earnings have not yet declined, people mistakenly judge the decline to be a buying opportunity and find stocks cheap in relation to both past earnings and expected earnings, failing to account for the amount of decline in earnings that is likely to result from what’s to come. But the reversal is self-reinforcing. As wealth falls first and incomes fall later, creditworthiness worsens, which constricts lending activity, which hurts spending and lowers investment rates while also making it less appealing to borrow to buy financial assets. This in turn worsens the fundamentals of the asset (e.g., the weaker economic activity leads corporate earnings to chronically disappoint), leading people to sell and driving down prices further. This has an accelerating downward impact on asset prices, income, and wealth.”
― Ray Dalio, A Template for Understanding Big Debt Crises

“Someday you will be on your deathbed and maybe you will remember me.  What I say to the world is that if you don’t do something about the way death and assisted suicide are dealt with, you may someday find yourselves in an unimaginably horrible situation with no way out.  Someday when you are helpless you may realize that your life is not your own after all and you will see that sometimes being forced to live is the ultimate tyranny and enslavement.”
― Clayton Atreus, Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“If, like me, you consider the Drug War a moral outrage, you’ll be distressed to learn that the police are maximizing drug convictions. Stopping motorists because you don’t like their race is reprehensible, but at least it doesn’t retard economic activity. If the police are going to harass a dozen motorists a day, it doesn’t much matter whether they target blacks, whites, or a representative sample; twelve harassed motorists are twelve harassed motorists. But it does matter whether they target drug dealers, because that discourages the drug trade and raises the price of drugs. That strikes me as bad—and in fact, worse than racism.”
― Steven E. Landsburg, More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics