Stieg Larsson Quotes
The Stock Exchange is something very different. There is no economy and no production of goods and services. There are only fantasies in which people from one hour to the next decide that this or that company is worth so many billions, more or less. It doesn't have a thing to do with reality or with the Swedish economy.
Larsson, Stieg. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Translated by Reg Keeland, Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
This quote is misattributed to Keynes. The first recorded version of this was a 1986 presentation given by Gary Shilling, an influential financial advisor twice named Wall Street’s top economist in a poll conducted by Institutional Investor magazine, as reported by The Advertiser newspaper of Montgomery, Alabama. The next recorded evidence is a Forbes article by Shilling in February, 1993. See linked quote.
He distressed most of the other stock brokers on Wall Street by pointing out that if brokers were so smart, why would they not want to buy the stock for themselves rather than sell it to you. Therefore, he generally concluded that the best stocks are bought by the brokers and bankers for their own accounts, and the lesser quality shares are sold to the public.
Jobs led Apple when it became the technology company with the largest stock market valuation ever, yet he freely admitted that he did bit understand the market. He just ran a great company which produced wonderful, innovative products and paid relatively little attention to the stock market and Wall Street.
Karl Stig-Erland "Stieg" Larsson was a Swedish journalist and writer. He is best known for writing the Millennium trilogy of crime novels, which were published posthumously, starting in 2005, after the author died suddenly of a heart attack. The trilogy was adapted as three motion pictures in Sweden, and one in the U.S. (for the first book only). The publisher commissioned David Lagercrantz to expand the trilogy into a longer series, which has six novels as of September 2019. For much of his life, Larsson lived and worked in Stockholm. His journalistic work covered socialist politics and he acted as an independent researcher of right-wing extremism.
