Charlie Munger Quotes

We are in a big, fat, ugly bubble. And we better be awfully careful.

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

For those of us in the financial world, Black Friday has a strong negative connotation, referring to a stock market catastrophe.

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.

From time to time, capitalism has a tendency to implode.

If you go into what I call a bubble boom, every bubble bursts.

I think the stock market is a very dangerous place to be at the present time. In fact, the stock market today is almost identical to where it was in October 2007 and then there was a $7 trillion crash and before that in March 2000.

A collapse in U.S. stock prices certainly would cause a lot of white knuckles on Wall Street. But what effect would it have on the broader U.S. economy? If Wall Street crashes, does Main Street follow? Not necessarily.

Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history; and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing.

Remember, 2000 was the year of the dot-com bust. The telecom industry lost about $2 trillion in market capital at that time.

I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several million dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea.

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

There are different flavors of recession. You can get into some pretty dark scenarios pretty quickly.

It was always tough, but today we are in the throes of something we have never seen in our history. It's clear in recent times the market is looking for a bottom.

Within a few months in 2008, household finances were crushed as asset values fell, millions of jobs were lost, countless credit cards were canceled, and thousands of homes were foreclosed on.

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.

Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business expansion.

Markets as well as mobs respond to human emotions; markets as well as mobs can be inflamed to their own destruction.

Everyone would like the world always to be in bubble times. But that doesn't happen.

Financial markets have a tendency to go to excess.

… a depression is for capitalism like a good, cold douche.

I have 13 bankers in my office, and they say that if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II.

People aren't as impressed by homes anymore after they saw how they collapsed in price with the financial crisis.

Top-rank global corporations are collapsing. That could happen sometime, and somehow even to Samsung.

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