Benjamin Graham Quotes

The markets don't like instability and they don't like uncertainty.

As discomfiting as it is to both market optimists and policy activists, a certain amount of instability is inherent to the economy.

Gold and silver are no doubt subject to fluctuations, from the discovery of new and more abundant mines; but such discoveries are rare, and their effects, though powerful, are limited to periods of comparatively short duration.

Markets don't like instability, investors shy away from uncertainty, and consumer confidence goes down in difficult times.

The Mexican debt crisis, Latin American debt crisis, the crises of the 1990s, the Wall Street stock market crash, and other events should have reminded us, and did remind us, that financial instability remains a concern, remains a problem.

The price of a commodity will never go to zero. When you invest in commodities futures, you're not buying a piece of paper that says you own an intangible piece of company that can go bankrupt.

Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.

When volume drops off, prices settle down. Volume is the force that turns stocks higher.

With the sugar market hysteria, the people are obviously worried and expect higher inflation. When this hysteria subsides, which we're probably observing, then I hope that people will also get less worried about the future of inflation.

I put forward a pretty general theory that financial markets are intrinsically unstable. That we really have a false picture when we think about markets tending towards equilibrium.

The commodity price easing really does not play too much role in our margins because our basic raw material - steel - is not really a commodities engineering steel.

So, there is enormous instability in the global economy with a shift of winners and losers.

No one can forecast the economy with certainty.

Uncertainty is killing this economy.

There's a lot of strength in the U.S., but there's a lot of froth also. The froth will blow off. We're going to have to face up to some realities that we're not fully facing up to right now.

Prices are always lower when the troops are in the street.

It's a volatile time.

The reality is that financial markets are self-destabilizing; occasionally they tend toward disequilibrium, not equilibrium.

As long as there's political uncertainty around the energy space, stock prices will come down.

Uncertainty about sales impedes business planning and could harm capital formation just as much as uncertainty about inflation can create uncertainty about relative prices and harm business planning.

With such enormous bucks devoted to trading in oil and other commodities, the distortions that they cause have been exacerbated.

[It] is exactly what politicians want. They want you to feel and behave like children while they pretend to be the all-knowing benevolent father. While they rile you up about how immigrants are stealing your jobs, they distract you from enlightening facts, including the assessment of some experts that the influx of Latino immigrant workers of the past 25 years has had less effect on employment patterns than factories that moved abroad, the decline of labor unions and the recurring recessions. So while we’re told to focus on building a massive wall to keep out immigrants, the real causes of job loss and economic instability continue unabated.

There is no such thing as agflation. Rising commodity prices, or increases in any prices, do not cause inflation. Inflation is what causes prices to rise. Of course, in market economies, prices for individual goods and services rise and fall based on changes in supply and demand, but it is only through inflation that prices rise in aggregate.

Let the market, not politicians, determine the flow of rice, oil and other commodities. Lower, more stable prices will ensue.

Gasoline prices are a direct reflection of the cost of the raw materials to produce the gasoline, no different than any other product that you would buy, whether it's a good or some other consumable, or it's a luxury item. It's all a function of what do the raw materials cost.