Benjamin Graham Quotes

The people of this country have been erroneously encouraged to believe that they could keep on increasing the output of farm and factory indefinitely and that some magician would find ways and means for that increased output to be consumed with reasonable profit to the producer.

We can't cure a shortage by increasing the supply.

It's almost as if we have two lobes in our brain. There's the consumer and investor mode, and we're doing better and better at that lobe. But at the producer and seller mode, we have to work harder and harder. And the better we do as consumers and investors - the easier it is for us to choose something better, to exit every commercial relationship - the harder we have to work as sellers and producers. One follows from the other.

There came into the world an unlimited abundance of everything people need. But people need everything except unlimited abundance.

Producer's Surplus is a convenient name for the genus of which the rent of land is the leading species.

A home is a home, and excess supply leads to prices falling.

A shortage is a sign that somebody is keeping the price artificially lower than it would be if supply and demand were allowed to operate freely.

Since scarcity is the basic economic problem, if it does not exist then there is no reason for my economics course. Devoting time to the study of how people use limited resources to fulfill unlimited wants and needs should help us to discover how to best utilize the resources we have at our disposal.

The margin for making mistakes has gotten much smaller. In a commodity economy, it's hard to kill off your business. You still have the mine. You still have oil wells. You can always rebuild. In a knowledge economy, if you make a mistake, you're in trouble.

There just doesn't seem to be a market for something with aspiration anymore.

But my shift to the serious study of economics gradually weakened my belief in Major Douglas's A+B theorem, which was replaced in my thought by the expression MV = PT.

If all you needed to do is to figure out what company is better than others, everyone would make a lot of money. But that is not the case. They keep raising the prices to the point when the odds change.

The diversification of the people's demand could not be followed by the state apparatus.

You'd rather have a surplus versus a shortage in your position.

It used to be that people needed products to survive. Now products need people to survive.

We have an imbalance over how much we produce relative to how much we consume.

This island is almost made of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish in Great Britain at the same time.

When you’re dealing with a commodity, high productivity means that nobody makes any money.

The fruits [game and natural resources] may be easier tasted than believed.

Supply and demand don’t work on a legislative schedule.

The ultimate benefit of trade is not the generating of economic surpluses but the more efficient allocation of economic resources.

Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated.

Those underlings who in all the preceding ages of history had formed the herds of slaves and serfs, of paupers and beggars, became the buying public, for whose favor the businessmen canvass. They are the customers who are “always right,” the patrons who have the power to make poor suppliers rich and rich suppliers poor.

Supply creates its own demand

You want supply to always be full, and you use price to basically either bring more supply on or get more supply off, or get more demand in the system or get some demand out.