The people who survive avoid snowball scenarios in which bad trades cause them to become emotionally destabilized and make more bad trades. They are also able to feel the pain of losing. If you don't feel the pain of a loss, then you're in the same position as those unfortunate people who have no pain sensors. If they leave their hand on a hot stove, it will burn off. There is no way to survive in the world without pain. Similarly, in the markets, if the losses don't hurt, your financial survival is tenuous.
The economic costs, the financial costs, the job losses, the income losses, the fiscal costs of bailing out financial system are becoming larger and larger.
The definition of winning has become distorted. If winning the rights to a property brings with it hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, what have you won? When faced with the prospect of heavy financial losses, we have consistently walked away and have done so again.
World economies are always so tenuous and we are subject to so many losses in life, but a compassionate attitude is something we can always carry with us.
The New York Times is fighting desperately for its relevance and its financial survival. And it probably won't even be around in a few years, based on its financial outlook, which wouldn't be a bad thing, if you want to know the truth.
In a crisis, stocks of financial companies are great investments, because the tide is bound to turn. Massive losses on bad loans and soured investments are irrelevant to value; improving trends and future prospects are what matter, regardless of whether profits will have to be used to cover loan losses and equity shortfalls for years to come.
Sanity is tenuous. Tenuous. Comes and goes. Many of the brightest people floating about this planet have only a finger's grip on sanity, if that.
Every time there are losses, there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper.
You are too much concerned with past and future. It is all due to your longing to continue, to protect yourself against extinction. And as you want to continue, you want others to keep you company, hence your concern with their survival. But what you call survival is but the survival of a dream.
A few losses won't hurt anybody.
Successful investment is a battle for financial survival.
Everyone who lives long enough to love deeply will experience great losses. Don't let fear of loss, or the losses themselves, take away your ability to enjoy the wonderful life that is yours.
Singing what's in your heart? Naming the things you love and loathe? You can get hurt that way. Hell, you will get hurt that way. But you'll get hurt trying to hide away in all that silence and leave your life unsung. There's no future without tears. Are you really setting your hopes on not getting hurt at all? You think that's an option? You clearly aren't listening to enough Morrissey songs.
I would argue that no financial instrument counted as regulatory capital should be allowed to receive any protection from losses.
If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.
Our greatest theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, recently declared that humans have no more than a hundred years to get off this planet to ensure the survival of our species. And when someone such as he does so, it is with an understanding not just of the science, but of both our tenuous place and our possibility in the universe.