Peter Thiel Quotes

I think everybody in this generation, and I'm the leading edge of the baby boom - I was born in 1946 - has benefitted from a 30-year explosion of debt, which created temporary but unsustainable economic prosperity and a financialization of the system through lower, and lower, and lower interest rates that has created massive rewards to speculation but not real investments so I benefitted from it. Almost everyone who has been in the market has benefitted but they didn't earn it.

Prices are going up. Unemployment continues to go up. And we have not had the necessary correction for the financial bubble created by our Federal Reserve system.

Presidential money is almost like the housing bubble. It's growing at such an astronomical rate, you think it can't get any bigger.

In the economy of the cuckoo people that populate central banks, everything is possible. What you have is gigantic bubbles, the NASDAQ in 2000, then the housing bubble and then commodities in 2008 when oil went from $78 to $147 before plunging to $32 within six months.

By putting downward pressure on interest rates, the Fed is trying to make financial conditions more accommodative - supporting asset values and lower borrowing costs for households and businesses and thus encouraging the spending that spurs job creation and a stronger recovery.

If the Fed is omniscient, why didn't they pull back on the excess money supply that inflated the massive housing bubble that popped so disastrously back in 2008?

I don't even know what that means. People who get credit have to get it from somewhere. Does a credit bubble mean that people save too much during that period? I don't know what a credit bubble means. I don't even know what a bubble means. These words have become popular. I don't think they have any meaning.

I just don't trust any of it. Every time I read something about how there's been another ridiculous climb of the Dow Jones, there's a part of me that goes, “This can't be good.” None of this is real money. You know what I mean? It's not like there's actually more of anything. It's just ideas. When people are getting richer and richer but they're not actually producing anything, it can't end well.

A snarky but accurate description of monetary policy over the past five years is that the Federal Reserve successfully replaced the technology bubble with a housing bubble

Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.

The problem is that you're creating a system of bubble finance where interest rates are so low that people can speculate. An asset value goes up. You put it up as collateral. You borrow against it. You buy more of the asset. You then take the rising asset. You borrow against it again. This is the nature of what's going on in the world. This isn't an excess of real savings. This is an excess of artificial credit that's being fueled by all the central banks.

Don't you know that there's another bubble as well An expectations bubble. Bigger houses private planes yachts ...... stupid salaries and bonuses. People come to desire these things and expect them. But the expectations bubble will burst as well as all bubbles do. Come to my gallery and I will sell you beautiful things at a more reasonable price. But the point is that they will have value. Things of real beauty things of the spirit.

If it were possible to take interest rates into negative territory I would be voting for that.

I don't think it's possible for the Fed to end its easy-money policies in a trouble-free manner. Recent episodes in which Fed officials hinted at a shift toward higher interest rates have unleashed significant volatility in markets, so there is no reason to suspect that the actual process of boosting rates would be any different. I think that real pressure is going to occur not by the initiation by the Federal Reserve, but by the markets themselves.

I think the role of the Federal Reserve is enormously exaggerated.

How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?

If you let interest rates be freed, be set by the free market, they would rise dramatically. There would be a lot of broken furniture on Wall Street. It needs to be broken. The back of the speculative bubble would be broken and we could slowly heal the financial system. That's what I think we need to do but it's never going to happen because there's trillions of asset values dependent on the Fed continuing to suppress, repress interest rates and shovel $85 billion a month of liquidity into the market.

I think it's time to travel, start gathering some real right-in-there experiences with street musicians around the world.

Printing money creates inflation, which weakens an economy. Unfortunately, this kind of common-sense thinking never seems to penetrate academic circles.

I love to create and I love to be challenged and I love to do things that are scary, so I think I would probably think about jumping off a bridge if somebody told me that's going to make that shot real great. I'd be like, "Okay, here we go, let's do it." Like, yeah.

In general, I'm pretty busy with the other things I charted ... I bought a piece of a sports-tech company. We do a lot of work with at the Clippers. I think that'll be great. We're really looking at the possibility of extending and building a real over-the-top distribution channel with value-added services for the Clippers, that could lead to other partnerships and investments. But most of the stuff I'm looking at isn't because I say, "Hey, I want to invest." It sort of comes around from the work we're doing with the Clippers.

I think people have a little wall they throw up real quick if they see swords and sorcery.

It's the greatest game I ever saw. You can't lose. Everybody buys to sell and nobody buys to keep. What's worrying me is who is going to be the last owner. It's just like an auction; the only one stuck is the last one.

I have to say, the other day I was reading some negative comments, and I was thinking they were really funny. So I guess they don't anymore.

People have notions of what a wife's role should be in this process, and it's been a traditional one of blind adoration. My model is a little different - I think most real marriages are.