Alan S. Blinder Quotes

The main purpose of the stock market is to make fools of as many men as possible.

Markets are self-regulating only because some brave investors are prepared to bet against the market trend.

I don’t know why the Stock Market does what it does.

… a pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons..

Speculative markets have always been vulnerable to illusion. But seeing the folly in markets provides no clear advantage in forecasting outcomes, because changes in the force of the illusion are difficult to predict.

Wall Street, in the main, hates uncertainty, which manifests itself in depressed share prices of companies whose prospects lack 'visibility.' But where the market can err is in confusing uncertainty with risk.

We live in an age of great jitteriness in the financial markets. And there's no doubt at all, I think, that the volume of computer-traded stocks has helped contribute to that.

When you're public, you're at the mercy of the markets. You can be doing extremely well, but if the markets are in the tank or your industry is in the tank, you don't get rewarded for it.

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.

Markets do very weird things because it reacts to how people behave, and sometimes people are a little screwy.

I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them?

The market is incredibly inefficient and capable on rare occasions of being utterly dysfunctional. And people have a really hard time getting their brain around that fact. They want to believe that it's approximately efficient almost all the time, and it simply isn't true.

We do not want financial convulsions.

A free-enterprise economy depends only on markets, and according to the most advanced mathematical macroeconomic theory, markets depend only on moods: specifically, the mood of the men in the pinstripes, also known as the Boys on the Street.

There may be a recession in stock prices, but not anything in the nature of a crash..

The current crisis is not simply a market failure in which prices are not functioning properly, but a profound loss of faith in money’s capacity to tell the truth.

The stock market is not a good arbitrator of success over the long term.

I even don't dare to watch our stock price, because this is what other people think who you are. I dare not watch it. I think, let the market take care of themselves; we should take care of the business.

We never know what the Street is going to do with the funky trading.

No one likes to look at their stock price go down and say, 'I feel good about that.' It goes without saying.

I studied what happened in the bond and the stock markets during previous periods when the Fed stopped manipulating the bond market. In every single case, the moment the Fed announced that there would be a cessation of intervention, stocks declined and interest rates went up.

I've explained before the power psychology has on the markets.

A bull market is like sex. It feels best just before it ends.

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.

I'm not sure that the current value of the NASDAQ is justified, but I'm not sure that it isn't.