James Buchan Quotes

The bull market, rising prices, earning lots of money, make it seem as if the good days will never end. When prices are falling and there is a recession, that also feels as though it will last for ever. Politics is the same. People simply can't imagine changing circumstances.

The trouble is that the average trader on Wall Street, he or she is so young, he doesn't even remember the recession of 2001, let alone the previous one.

The euphoria around economic booms often obscures the possibility for a bust, which explains why leaders typically miss the warning signs.

Between 1857 and 1929, while regulators largely stood idle, the American economy swung through 19 national boom-and-bust gyrations that sometimes threatened to wipe out whole industries within months.

You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don't understand that's going to happen, then you're not ready, you won't do well in the markets.

Normally, if you have a huge category that leads a bear market all the way down to the bottom - like tech after 2000, or energy in the '80-'82 bear market - you get one quick pop, and then years of lag as we fight the old war.

All markets have boom and bust cycles, and I think venture capital market has even more exaggerated boom and bust cycles.

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.

Having spent 10 years studying emerging markets, I know that you have patterns repeated over and over again. A bubble is like a fire which needs oxygen to continue... when you see there is no oxygen, things change.

When the market goes to hell, it's more of an opportunity than a problem.

A second reason why science cannot replace judgement is the behavior of financial markets.

The upward move at the beginning of a bull market is almost always huge compared with the vacillations late in the bear market. If you try to pick a bottom, you will miss a good part of the action.

What we need to understand is, one, that there are market failures; and two, that there are things like asset bubbles and irrational exuberance. There are periods of booms, bubbles, and manias. These things, if left to themselves, can lead to crashes, to busts, to panics.

When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed.

There's no statistical evidence that human beings have an ability to move in and out of the markets effectively. It's next to impossible.

There may be a recession in stock prices, but not anything in the nature of a crash..

I don’t know why the Stock Market does what it does.

The lesson of 2008 is that ultimately our markets are driven by confidence.

September 2001 turned out to be an unusually bad time to sell stocks: By New Year's Day 2002, little more than three months after the post-9/11 low reached on Sept. 21, the S&P 500 had gained close to 20 percent.

A bull market is like sex. It feels best just before it ends.

Boom and bust is a term that applied to the Conservative years and two of the worst recessions in history.

Nothing ever surprises me about the market.

Every serious deflation I've looked at is preceded by an asset bubble, and then it bursts.

Business cycles in emerging markets behave differently from developed markets.

There is almost no limit to the ability of investors to ignore the lessons of the past.