A Quote by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time. — © Nassim Nicholas Taleb
It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.
I suddenly realized that we were on borrowed time, that time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more.
Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
Obvious prospects for physical growth in a business do not translate into obvious profits for investors.
Not so long ago, companies that borrowed lots of money were considered risky, appropriate only for daredevil stock pickers. Those with lots of cash on hand and few outstanding debts might be dull stocks, but they were at least safe bets for bondholders.
What assurance have we that our masters will or can keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves? Let us not be deceived by phrases about 'Man taking charge of his own destiny'. All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it has done before?
Every rock or molotov cocktail thrown should make a very obvious political point. Random violence produces random propaganda results. Why waste even a rock?
It was exciting to work with director Jennifer Baichwal, who made Manufactured Landscapes and others, on the film of Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. It's called, simply, PAYBACK. Jennifer didn't want to do a transliteration of the book, a kind of illustrated version, but to go into the core of the book: owing and being owed, paying and paying back, on all sorts of levels. So she found real-life, visceral stories that embodied the themes of the book.
Accelerated depreciation helps companies bring forward capital-intensive investments by reducing payback time. It's not a hand out. Companies still have to pay the tax, but they simply get to defer it.
A huge part of Apple profits generated in Europe, in African countries, Middle East, and India were all booked in Ireland. And I think it is a very basic principle in taxation that your profits are taxed where the profits are generated.
It [moviemaking] is like a dream. When you're dreaming, you make some very strange connections between some random stuff and random people.
You still could go to some industry or some university or the government and if you could persuade them you had something on the ball—why, then, they might put up the cash after cutting themselves in on just about all of the profits. And, naturally, they'd run the show because it was their money and all you had done was the sweating and the bleeding.
Bombieri's Law: of Finance: Profits are on paper, losses are in cash
I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’m certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I’ve read books like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I think I’ve understood them. They’re about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash’s autobiography "Cash" by Johnny Cash.
I'm thinking in my head I'd like to have five minutes alone with this guy to get some payback. But you got to keep a level head. You just got to get to the house, search, find anything you can to put these guys away and bring some justice and get some revenge for our brothers who were lost.
The military budget is simply an enormous pork barrel of special privilege, the privileges taking the form of windfall profits, of no-risk profits and, most importantly, of enormous outlays of capital supplied by the Pentagon to arms contractors.
The danger of tautological propositions is considerable in discussions of the concept of normal profits. Because supernormal profits seem to invite newcomers to an industry and sub-normal profits seem to drive away those who are in an industry, some writers are inclined to define normal profits as the earnings of the fixed resources in an industry which neither grows nor declines in size or number of firms. It should be clear that such a definition is useless: it muddles together attractiveness and actual afflux, desirbility of entry and ease of entry, zero profits and monopoly rents.
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