J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

It's a very wise thing for people to rationally sit down and look at what the risks are not only on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis, on a yearly basis, on a lifetime basis, and then plan one's life accordingly.

I think the people who've been the most overconfident in our business in the last decade have been the people that called themselves risk managers.

The basic thing is, people want to get paid, so they'll say the things that get them paid, in entertainment or politics.

Market risk is like taking a plunge into a cool pool ... a lot of people are finding out right now what their risk tolerance is.

Father sticks to it that anything that promises to pay too much can't help being risky.

Risk managers and investment bankers and actually, all kinds of investors took on more risk than they expected. So there was a failure of risk management. There was a failure to recognize how much risk there was in some of these securities that people bought.

Health care is very different from other sectors of the economy in several respects, one of which is the fact that the risk can be very high beyond people's ability. That leads to insurance.

And then at the end of the day, the most important thing is how good are you at risk control. Ninety-percent of any great trader is going to be the risk control.

I'm not sure most of the people that get caught up in the middle of a bubble can be described as irrational. It seems pretty rational to buy a house and flip it in the next few weeks at a profit when that's been happening for along time.

Anything that forces you to act at the possible harm of your own existence is going to exact a cost. You have to then think about, "Can I pay this? What will this mean to me - to my relationships, to my family, to everybody? What is this going to take? How much of me is this going to take?"

The greater the potential for reward in the value portfolio, the less risk there is.

The proposal is frequently made that the government ought to assume the risks that are "too great for private industry." This means that bureaucrats should be permitted to take risks with the tax payer's money that no one is willing to take with his own.

I think people are wise to keep love and work separate.

The globally constituted accident can be compared to what people who work at the stock exchange call 'systemic risk'.

The people that lend you money basically give you an answer based on the risk that they are willing to take. But just because a bank is willing to take a particular risk doesn't mean that that is the right amount for me to spend.

There is the risk you cannot afford to take, and there is the risk you cannot afford not to take.

Risk is the price you pay for opportunity.

There are a lot of ways that investment banking models work, but these risks are not internalized by the people that are taking them.

If it is hard to imagine that 20% of losses on the stock market, you should never participate

At Berkshire, I both initiate and monitor every derivatives contract on our books ... If Berkshire ever gets in trouble, it will be my fault. It will not be because of the misjudgments made by a risk committee or chief risk officer.

The collateralized debt obligation, the CDO, is a structure which allows you to more or less continuously choose how much risk you want to take in a whole batch of securities. And the reason why they got us into so much trouble is that it's hard to figure out how much risk you really are taking.

We're not forcing people... you can support and be a supporter, but if you go beyond that and become a member, [and] if you're a businessman, your business will multiply... Everything you touch will multiply. I've always said that a wise businessperson will support the ANC... because supporting the ANC means you're investing very well in your business.

Of course if you happen to time the market really well, you can make more money with some of these smaller companies, but for someone with no exposure I wouldn't want to take the risk that they timed it wrong.

If for you the most important thing is to make a lot of money, then you don't want to take a certain type of risk. If, on another hand, the most important thing to you is to make people around you have a more fulfilled life, then there is a different set of things that are important to you. Unless you really know that about yourself, you will never be able to appropriately assess risk.

I think one lesson we have to learn is that there's a lot more risk than we're giving credit to, a lot more what economist calls systematic risk.