Paul Samuelson Quotes
It is not easy to get rich in Las Vegas, at Churchill Downs, or at the local Merrill Lynch office.
Samuelson, Paul A. "Challenge to Judgment." The Journal of Portfolio Management, vol. 1, no. 1, Institutional Investor, Inc., 1974, p. 17.
At the time, it was generally felt that gambling was particularly harmful for poor and middle class people, than for wealthy aristocrats who could afford losses more easily. The solution was to make gambling casinos difficult and expensive to get to and so discourage their use by all except for the rich. Keynes, however, observed that the stock market was essentially a gambling system, and should socially and legally be treated the same as other gambling forms.
The military had made a mess of the Argentine economy and inflation was rampant. Some Argentines turned their Argentine pesos into dollars betting that the Argentine economic situation would get worse, This run from the peso would make it worse. If Argentina stabilized the peso, speculators in dollars would lose money. The Minister trying to discourage a run from the peso, warned Argentinians against the dollar investment. A days later the dollar went up over 30%. Those who had listened to the minister lost much of their money, He was soon forced to resign by the military dictators who controlled the government.
Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist who was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. When awarding the prize in 1970, the Swedish Royal Academies stated that he "has done more than any other contemporary economist to raise the level of scientific analysis in economic theory". Economic historian Randall E. Parker has called him the "Father of Modern Economics", and The New York Times considers him to be the "foremost academic economist of the 20th century".
