Why did investment banking pay so many people with so little experience so much money? Answer: when attached to a telephone they could produce even more money. How could they produce money without experience? Answer: producing in an investment bank was less a matter of skill and more a matter of intangibles – flair, persistence and luck.

this was capitalism at its most raw, and it was self-destructive.

Our Europeans – especially our Englishmen – tended to be the refined products of the right schools. For them work was not an obsession, or even, it seemed, a concern. And the notion that a person should subordinate himself to a corporation, especially an American corporation, was, to them, laughable.

In any market, as in any poker game, there is a fool. The astute investor Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.

The first thing you learn on the trading floor is that when large numbers of people are after the same commodity, be it a stock, a bond, or a job, the commodity quickly becomes overvalued.

Knowing about markets is knowing about other people’s weaknesses.

He disapproved of work days longer than eight hours because, he said, “You then arrive at the office in the morning with the same thoughts you left with late the night before.”

The markets in the long run are no doubt driven by fundamental economic laws; if the United States runs a persistent trade deficit the dollar will eventually plummet. But in the short run money flows less rationally. Fear and, to a lesser extent, greed are what make money move.

The only thing history teaches us, a wise man once said, is that history doesn’t teach us anything.