Top 1200 Prices Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

In 88 poor countries for which we have data, in each and every one of the 88, the PPP for food shows that poor people can buy less food than you would expect from the PPP that the World Bank is using. The reason for this is obvious on reflection. It has to do with the fact that most foodstuffs are tradable commodities: basic foodstuffs, such as rice, flour and beans, can easily be conveyed across national borders and their prices will therefore roughly mirror the exchange rates among currencies.

Fundamentals might be good for the first third or first 50 or 60 percent of a move, but the last third of a great bull market is typically a blow-off, whereas the mania runs wild and prices go parabolic... There is no training, classroom or otherwise, that can prepare for trading the last third of a move, whether it's the end of a bull market or the end of a bear market.

With housing it's something even more dramatic than that, because most people aspire to own their own home.If you really think that houses prices are going to go up next year and the year after, you feel if I don't buy it this year, I'm going to have to buy it next year.That's not true of an Internet stock. But it's true of a home.

If we somehow put a value on species extinction and factor that into our costs that bottom line would look very different. IF we put any resource depletion into costs our bottom line would change. So what we have is a dishonest market that does not take into account all the costs when it establishes its prices. We need an honest marketplace before we can let the market work for sustainability rather than against it as it works today.

Frankly, getting Mexico economically headed in the right direction with good energy policy - Canada, the United States, and Mexico have more known energy reserves than Saudi Arabia and Russia. So developing those and I think you'll see a major movement of people back into Mexico when that occurs when these prices get back. You're going to see a substantial development of the energy business in Mexico and Canada, domestic as well.

Children who willingly participate in sexual acts have the right to make that decision as well, even if it's distasteful to us personally. Some children will make poor choices just as some adults do in smoking and drinking to excess; this is part of life. When we outlaw child pornography, the prices paid for child performers rise, increasing the incentives for parents to use children against their will.

It is irrational to charge high prices for socially valuable innovations as this guarantees that they will be underutilized. It is much better to sell them at cost and then to reward the innovator in some other way. This is not always possible, because in some cases the value of an innovation is in the eye of the beholder; it's very difficult to value how much a new Madonna song is worth, for example. But in the case of medicines, green technologies and seeds in agriculture, such an alternative reward mechanism is fairly straightforward.

A global financial cabal engineered a fraudulent housing and debt bubble [2008], illegally shifted vast amounts of capital out of the US; and used 'privatization' as a form of piracy - a pretext to move government assets to private investors at below-market prices and then shift private liabilities back to government at no cost to the private liability holder Clearly, there was a global financial coup d'etat underway.

Investors are trying to work out some risk premiere that have some correspondence with actual risks. But they don't, they're not, they can't go very far that way, because the actual correspondence isn't really there in a lot of cases. So once people stop believing in these stories, and then the crash can come very, very quickly. They believe that house prices are correctly priced for some time and then suddenly they realized there's no real basis for that. But what is the correct price? We don't know that either. It's just that everything swings.

Requiring the payment of higher wages will lead to a loss of some jobs and a raising of prices which drives companies to search for automation to reduce costs. On the other hand, those receiving higher wages will spend more (the marginal propensity to consume is close to 1 for low income earners) and this will increase demand for additional goods and services. Henry Ford had the clearest vision of why companies can actually benefit by paying higher wages.

When you have weird policy decisions in the United States that then ripple out throughout the world, the rest of the world really takes it on the chin. When the U.S. decides to set their corn on fire rather than to eat it, which is what the biofuels policy basically is - then that drives up the price of corn. It drives up the price of substitutes. And all of a sudden you have a sort of spiral of food prices. And other countries don't have the resources, because they're not allowed to, to weather the storm.

Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

Let me tell you, you either have chemistry or you don't, and you better have it, or it's like kissing some relative. But chemistry, listen to me, you got to be careful. Chemistry is like those perfume ads, the ones that look so interesting and mysterious but you dont even know at first what they're even selling. Or those menues without the prices. Mystery and intrigue are gonna cost you. Great looking might mean something ve-ry expensive, and I don't mean money. What I'm saying is, chemistry is a place to start, not an end point.

The problem is that everybody, everybody - Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, everybody - on the Republican side said they can't do tax reform until Obamacare is improved, they can't do it. I think a lot is known about Obamacare. I think that's why it's so consistently polls with people opposed to it. I think people know how much it's cost particularly to people that have entered the exchanges, but I think everybody does. there's not a person in the world in this country who is not aware of the oppressive, out of any scope of normalcy costs and prices associated with it.

Gas prices in many parts of the country are nearing $4 a gallon; it could get even worse as unrest spreads throughout the oil-exporting Middle East. Yet the Obama administration once again seems to see no crisis. It has curtailed new leases for offshore oil exploration for seven years and exempted thousands of acres in the West from new drilling. It will not reconsider opening up small areas of Alaska with known large oil reserves.

If Putin and those around him had been smart enough to go in a different direction... The country was ready. The conditions were extremely favorable - with oil prices as high as they were, it was possible to do anything. It was possible to solidify democracy. After the Yeltsin years people began to think that democracy is a disaster, that democracy equals misery. Putin got a lucky break - and he used it the KGB way. He turned out to be a wily KGB man, not a wise statesman.

It's critical to level the playing field, to make prices and risks clear up front, so when someone signs on for a student loan or a mortgage or a credit card, they know the tricks and traps hidden in the fine print. That's why the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been working on a new financial aid shopping sheet. A shorter, two-page credit card agreement, a simpler mortgage disclosure form. All those are aimed toward helping people understand the basic bargain.

In India, multiplex ticket prices are high; therefore people are a bit hesitant. The ticket price for a newcomer's film is the same as a Shah Rukh Khan or a Salman Khan film. Why would people pay, say Rs 400, for a newcomer's film when they can watch a Shah Rukh Khan film at the same price?

The most serious problems lie in the financial sphere, where the economy's debt overhead has grown more rapidly than the 'real' economy's ability to carry this debt. [...] The essence of the global financial bubble is that savings are diverted to inflate the stock market, bond market and real estate prices rather than to build new factories and employ more labor.

Black-Scholes is a know-nothing system. If you know nothing about value - only price - then Black-Scholes is a pretty good guess at what a 90-day option might be worth. But the minute you get into longer periods of time, it's crazy to get into Black-Scholes. For example, at Costco we issued stock options with strike prices of $30 and $60, and Black-Scholes valued the $60 ones higher. This is insane.

Now take a look at the way the Drug War is conducted over the past 40 years. It goes back farther, but start from 40 years ago: There's very little spent on prevention and treatment. There's a lot on policing, a ton of stuff on border control and a lot on out-of-country operations. And the effect on the availability of drugs is almost undetectable; drug prices don't change on measures of availability. So there are two possibilities: Either those conducting the Drug War are lunatics, or they have another purpose.

... Wild Bill had his faults, grievous ones, perhaps ... He would get drunk, gamble, and indulge in the general licentiousness characteristic of the border in the early days, yet even when full of the vile libel of the name of whiskey which was dealt over the bars at exorbitant prices, he was gentle as a child, unless aroused to anger by intended insults. ... He was loyal in his friendship, generous to a fault, and invariably espoused the cause of the weaker against the stronger one in a quarrel.

The theory of economic shock therapy relies in part on the roleof expectations on feeding an inflationary process. Reining in inflation requires not only changing monetary policy but also changing the behavior of consumers, employers and workers. The role of a sudden, jarring policy shift is that it quickly alters expectations, signaling to the public that the rules of the game have changed dramatically - prices will not keep rising, nor will wages.

The best that can be said for those like Senators Nelson and Landrieu is that they held out until Obama and Reid met their price. By now, I can't even recall what it took to make Joe Lieberman say 'Uncle!' But it just goes to prove that when politicians like these three refer to themselves as moderate Democrats, we should recognize that it's similar to the distinction made in a related field when call girls insist they're not streetwalkers. It's the same profession; only the prices differ.

I'll also make sure that America has trade relations with China that work for us. I've watched year in and year out as companies have shut down and people have lost their jobs because China has not played by the same rules, in part by holding down artificially the value of their currency. It holds down the prices of their goods. It means our goods aren't as competitive and we lose jobs. That's got to end.

The government has brought on the housing problem, partly by these very low interest rates, which encouraged many people to go way out on a limb. They've brought it on by highly restrictive building policies, which have caused housing prices to skyrocket artificially. And they've brought it on by the Community Reinvestment Act, which presumes that politicians are better able to tell investors where to put their money than the investors themselves are. When you put all that together, you get something like what you have.

The fact is I look at what's happening to this country, I look at the way China is just ripping us off, I look at OPEC the way they are ripping us off with the oil prices. I mean, people are gonna be paying six and seven dollars a gallon for gasoline very, very soon; and you're gonna be up to $150 a barrel; and they wouldn't even be there if it weren't for us.

I did not write it [Coming of Age in Samoa] as a popular book, but only with the hope that it would be intelligible to those who might make the best use of its theme, that adolescence need not be the time of stress and strain which Western society made it; that growing up could be freer and easier and less complicated; and also that there were prices to pay for the very lack of complication I found in Samoa - less intensity, less individuality, less involvement with life.

Think about the difference between how your local gas station and congressman respond to a spike in oil prices. One has the price placard outside changed to reflect the reality of the market within hours. The other sends out a press release, tries to organize a hearing, and at the end of amount accomplishes nothing. Meanwhile, the gas station has already made at least thirty additional adjustments to the realities of the market while your politico fails to get anything more than easy media.

It's a moral imperative, it's an economic imperative, and it is a security imperative. For we've seen how spikes in food prices can plunge millions into poverty, which, in turn, can spark riots that cost lives, and can lead to instability. And this danger will only grow if a surging global population isn't matched by surging food production. So reducing malnutrition and hunger around the world advances international peace and security - and that includes the national security of the United States.

Acceptable rules of conduct were suspended when it came to the spoon shortage. The deficit had gotten so bad that prices were all but unaffordable, and dynastic spoon succession had become a matter of considerable interest. Spoons were even postcode engraved and carried on one's person to eliminate theft, and good table manners, one of the eight pillars upon which the Collective was built, had been relaxed to allow tea to be stirred - shockingly - with the handle of a fork.

I also think there are prices too high to pay to save the United States. Conscription is one of them. Conscription is slavery, and I don't think that any people or nation has a right to save itself at the price of slavery for anyone, no matter what name it is called. We have had the draft for twenty years now; I think this is shameful. If a country can't save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say: Let the damned thing go down the drain!

Inflation is not a Robin Hood, taking from the rich to give to the poor. Rather, it deals most cruelly with those who can least protect themselves. It strikes hardest those millions of our citizens whose incomes do not quickly rise with the cost of living. When prices soar, the pensioner and the widow see their security undermined, the man of thrift sees his savings melt away; the white collar worker, the minister, and the teacher see their standards of living dragged down.

A major boom in real stock prices in the US after Black Tuesday brought them halfway back to 1929 levels by 1930. This was followed by a second crash, another boom from 1932 to 1937, and a third crash. Speculative bubbles do not end like a short story, novel, or play. There is no final denouement that brings all the strands of a narrative into an impressive final conclusion. In the real world, we never know when the story is over.

We have no paupers ... The great mass of our [United States] population is of laborers; our rich, who can live without labor, either manual or professional, being few, and of moderate wealth. Most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich and the competent such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families. ... Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?

There's no denying that a collapse in stock prices today would pose serious macroeconomic challenges for the United States. Consumer spending would slow, and the U.S. economy would become less of a magnet for foreign investors. Economic growth, which in any case has recently been at unsustainable levels, would decline somewhat. History proves, however, that a smart central bank can protect the economy and the financial sector from the nastier side effects of a stock market collapse.

At today's prices for medicines, doctors and hospitals-if the latter are available at any price-only millionaires can afford to be hurt or sick and pay for it. Very few people want socialized medicine in the U.S. But pressure for it is going to appear with the same hurricane force as the demand for pollution control if the medicine men and hospital operators don't take soon some Draconian measures... At the present rate of doctor fees and hospital costs under Medicare and Medicaid plans [taxpayers] are shovelling in billions with nothing but escalation in sight.

The current U.S. and Eurozone depression isn't because of China. It's because of domestic debt deflation. Commodity prices and consumer spending are falling, mainly because consumers have to pay most of their wages to the FIRE sector for rent or mortgage payments, student loans, bank and credit card debt, plus over 15 percent FICA wage withholding for Social Security and Medicare actually, to enable the government to cut taxes on the higher income brackets, as well income and sales taxes.

In truth, the gold standard is already a barbarous relic. All of us, from the Governor of the Bank of England downwards, are now primarily interested in preserving the stability of business, prices, and employment, and are not likely, when the choice is forced on us, deliberately to sacrifice these to outworn dogma, which had its value once, of 3 pounds, 17 shill ings, 10 1/2 pence per ounce. Advocates of the ancient standard do not observe how remote it now is from the spirit and the requirements of the age. A regulated nonmetallic standard has slipped in unnoticed. It exists.

The current CEO of Wal-Mart says he has "no choice" but to sacrifice the welfare of his employees in order to serve his customers' need for low prices. So, why are they paying the guy millions a year if there is no possibility for him to change things? I think he is either kidding us or himself. The truth is more likely that he likes things the way they are, or he lacks the strategic imagination to come up with a viable and profitable ways to change them. If either is true, he is overpaid and probably not up to doing the job.

Clearly, there needs to be an increase in the capacity of the railway system. That's why there are these projections of increasing the capacity to carry freight on the railways by 30% over the next five years or so, because the volume of goods moved up and down, imports, exports, and within the country, has grown much larger than the capacity. And this is part of the higher costs to business, because charges, for instance, at the ports become too high and they put up the prices of these goods, whether they are imports or exports. You want to reduce that.

A considerable proportion of the developed world's prosperity rests on paying the lowest possible prices for the poor countries' primary products and on exporting high-cost capital and finished goods to those countries. Continuation of this kind of prosperity requires continuation of the relative gap between developed and underdeveloped countries - it means keeping poor people poor. Increasingly, the impoverished masses are understanding that the prosperity of the developed countries and of the privileged minorities in their own countries is founded on their poverty.

I believe in market economics. But to paraphrase Churchill - who said this about democracy and political regimes - a market economy might be the worst economic regime available, apart from the alternatives. I believe that people react to incentives, that incentives matter, and that prices reflect the way things should be allocated. But I also believe that market economies sometimes have market failures, and when these occur, there's a role for prudential - not excessive - regulation of the financial system.

It is almost impossible to open a newspaper without reading something about the London housing market. House prices are rising at such a rate that the vast majority of Londoners can't afford to buy, are being forced out of the boroughs they grew up in, or in the worst cases, are being made homeless. If nothing is done, people will continue to be driven out of the city and London will cease to be a hub for creativity and entrepreneurship.

This is not really currency that circulates. It's like the old joke about expensive vintage wine. Wine prices will go up and once in a while somebody will buy a 50-year-old bottle of wine and say, "Wait a minute. This has gone bad." The answer is, "Well, that wine isn't for drinking; that's for trading." These $100 bills aren't meant to circulate. They're not to spend on goods and services. They're a store of value. They're a form of saving.

Like gold, U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. By increasing the number of U.S. dollars in circulation, or even by credibly threatening to do so, the U.S. government can also reduce the value of a dollar in terms of goods and services, which is equivalent to raising the prices in dollars of those goods and services.

There is a clear and strong link between the economy's present woes and the Iraq war. The war was at least one of the factors contributing to rising oil prices - which meant Americans were spending money on imported oil, rather than on things that would stimulate the american economy. Hiring Nepalese contractors in Iraq, moreover, doesn't stimulate the American economy in the way that building a school in America would do - and obviously doesn't have the long term benefits.

The economy, virtually all the new income has gone to the top 10 percent, and we need to find those areas where we can actually make a change in that. And that includes enhancing manufacturing jobs in this country, it includes the ability to go to community college for free, it includes the ability to have debt-free higher education, it includes career technical education in our high schools. It also includes taking on the pharmaceutical companies on the extravagant prices that they`re charging for the drugs. Americans need to stay healthy.

The market performs miracles so routinely that we take it for granted. Supermarkets provide 30,000 choices at rock-bottom prices. We take it for granted that when we stick a piece of plastic in a wall, cash will come out; that when we give the same plastic to a stranger, he will rent us a car, and the next month, Visa will have the accounting correct to the penny. By contrast, "experts" in government can't even count the vote accurately.

In 302, the Roman emperor Diocletian commanded "there should be cheapness," declaring, "Unprincipled greed appears wherever our armies ... march. ... Our law shall fix a measure and a limit to this greed." The predictable result of Diocletian's food price controls were black markets, hunger and food confiscation by his soldiers. Despite the disastrous history of price controls, politicians never manage to resist tampering with prices -- that's not a flattering observation of their learning abilities.

To invest successfully, you need not understand beta, efficient markets, modern portfolio theory, option pricing or emerging markets. You may, in fact, be better off knowing nothing of these. That, of course, is not the prevailing view at most business schools, whose finance curriculum tends to be dominated by such subjects. In our view, though, investment students need only two well-taught courses - How to Value a Business, and How to Think About Market Prices.

But, surprise - none of these blockbuster events made the slightest dent in Ben Graham's investment principles. Nor did they render unsound the negotiated purchases of fine businesses at sensible prices. Imagine the cost to us, then, if we had let a fear of unknowns cause us to defer or alter the deployment of capital. Indeed, we have usually made our best purchases when apprehensions about some macro event were at a peak. Fear is the foe of the faddist, but the friend of the fundamentalist.

Index funds are... tax friendly, allowing investors to defer the realization of capital gains or avoid them completely if the shares are later bequeathed. To the extent that the long-run uptrend in stock prices continues, switching from security to security involves realizing capital gains that are subject to tax. Taxes are a crucially important financial consideration because the earlier realization of capital gains will substantially reduce net returns.

You could take all the gold that's ever been mined, and it would fill a cube 67 feet in each direction. For what that's worth at current gold prices, you could buy all -- not some -- all of the farmland in the United States. Plus, you could buy 10 Exxon Mobils, plus have $1 trillion of walking-around money. Or you could have a big cube of metal. Which would you take? Which is going to produce more value?

The people that buy music might not be able to afford to buy music. It might not even be a situation where people don't want to buy your stuff. It might be a situation where they can't afford to buy it because food prices are too high. I can respect that.

The obvious one, in a market system, in a really functioning one, whoever's making the decisions doesn't pay attention to what are called externalities, effects on others. I sell you a car, if our eyes are open we'll make a good deal for ourselves but we're not asking how it's going to affect her [over there.] It will, there'll be more congestion, gas prices will go up, there will be environmental effects and that multiplies over the whole population. Well, that's very serious.

A good school is a relative concept, and the better schools are located in more expensive neighborhoods. But when everyone bids more for a house in a better school district, they succeed only in bidding up the prices of those houses. As before, 50 percent of all children will attend schools in the bottom half of the school quality distribution. As in the familiar stadium metaphor, all stand, hoping to get a better view, only to discover that no one sees better than if all had remained seated.

Speculation in oil stock companies was another great evil ... From the first, oil men had to contend with wild fluctuations in the price of oil. ... Such fluctuations were the natural element of the speculator, and he came early, buying in quantities and holding in storage tanks for higher prices. If enough oil was held, or if the production fell off, up went the price, only to be knocked down by the throwing of great quantities of stocks on the market.

Near the top of the market, investors are extraordinarily optimistic because they've seen mostly higher prices for a year or two. The sell-offs witnessed during that span were usually brief. Even when they were severe, the market bounced back quickly and always rose to loftier levels. At the top, optimism is king, speculation is running wild, stocks carry high price/earnings ratios, and liquidity has evaporated. A small rise in interest rates can easily be the catalyst for triggering a bear market at that point.