David Harvey Quotes

Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes a bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done.

Speculation, in its broadest sense, is not an evil in itself, but the contrary, and relieves public distress far oftener than it creates it.

It's not that we can predict bubbles - if we could, we would be rich. But we can certainly have a bubble warning system.

Electrical fire and the fire of greed kindle economies. In that flux, nations become digitized commodities on stock-exchange floors and on investors' rating screens. A country becomes a product to be rated for its obedience to paying of deficits and debts.

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.

Bubbles have quite a few things in common, but housing bubbles have a spectacular thing in common, and that is every one of them is considered unique and different.

The market, as we're all painfully aware in the aftermath of the banking crisis, can be an idiot. It has no perception of right or wrong, or even sensible or insane. It sees profit.

Money, again, has often been a cause of the delusion of the multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper.

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

Concentrating wealth in the hands of the few and deregulating financial institutions and practices lead to speculative bubbles that eventually burst - and that brings the whole country down.

The bubble, as investing phenomenon, has been well studied ever since the 17th-century tulip bulb frenzy. Its counterpart in bear markets is not well understood.

Financial markets have a tendency to go to excess.

At some point, there will be some other financial crisis. It's in the nature of a capitalist system.

These heroes of finance are like beads on a string; when one slips off, all the rest follow.

We say, 'The market plummets,' like it's some roaring creature.

Blaming speculators as a response to financial crisis goes back at least to the Greeks. It's almost always the wrong response.

Investors are impatient and they are also desperate for the 'next big thing,' and they are not paying attention to the fact that the 'next big thing' can be an economic crisis that they have created by being very irresponsible with their power.

One cannot see any world leader who has got a grip on the financial markets these days. They're too big, too fast. I think that's quite scary.

The stock market is the world’s largest Oujie Board.

When wealth concentrates at the very top, it can inflate unstable bubbles that threaten the economy.

Unregulated derivatives like credit default swaps threaten our regulated markets, or indeed our economy without any Federal agency knowing about it.

Unlike the 19th century, when real estate and government bonds were the primary form of capital, it is riskier assets that generate most of the wealth in the modern global economy — assets that can more quickly lose value as a result of changes in technology or global competition.

Now financial liberalization is just a catastrophe waiting to happen, and there are very well understood reasons for that.

The rise in the price of gold is a sign that capitalism has stumbled.