Quote

I'm not sure most of the people that get caught up in the middle of a bubble can be described as irrational. It seems pretty rational to buy a house and flip it in the next few weeks at a profit when that's been happening for along time.

Paul Samuelson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Paul Samuelson
Age: 94 †
Born: 1915
Born: May 15
Died: 2009
Died: December 13
Economist
University Teacher
Gary
Indiana
Paul Anthony Samuelson
Paul A. Samuelson
People
Week
Irrational
Pretty
Weeks
Middle
Rational
Sure
Happenings
House
Profit
Bubble
Next
Happening
Flip
Seems
Caught
Bubbles
Time
Along
Described

More quotes by Paul Samuelson

Image
The failure of market catallactics in no way denies the following truth: given sufficient knowledge the optimal decisions can always be found by scanning over all the attainable states of the world and selecting the one which according to the postulated ethical welfare function is best. The solution 'exists' the problem is how to 'find' it.
Paul Samuelson
Image
Good questions outrank easy answers.
Paul Samuelson
Image
Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.
Paul Samuelson
Image
Man does not live by GNP alone.
Paul Samuelson
Image
Two-thirds of a century after [The Road to Serfdom] got written, hindsight confirms how inaccurate its innuendo about the future turned out to be.
Paul Samuelson
Image
Companies are not charitable enterprises: They hire workers to make profits. In the United States, this logic still works. In Europe, it hardly does.
Paul Samuelson
Image
First, those who disagree with market efficiency simply assert that it stands to common sense that greater effort to get facts and greater acumen in analyzing those facts will pay off in better performance somehow measured. (By this logic, cure for cancer must have been found by 1955).
Paul Samuelson
Image
Econometrics may be defined as the quantitative analysis of actual economic phenomena based on the concurrent development of theory and observation, related by appropriate methods of inference.
Paul Samuelson
Image
Funeral by funeral, theory advances.
Paul Samuelson
Image
You know what happiness is: 'Having a little more money than your colleagues.' And that's not so tough in academic life.
Paul Samuelson
Image
I don't care very much for the People Magazine approach to applied economics.
Paul Samuelson
Image
Two factors explain our success. One, MIT's renaissance after World War II as a federally supported research resource. Two, the mathematical revolution in macro- and micro-economic theory and statistics. This was overdue and inevitable, MIT was the logical place for it to flourish.
Paul Samuelson
Image
Investing is like waiting for paint dry and grass grow so. If you like fun, let handle 800 USD and headed to Las Vegas
Paul Samuelson
Image
Mea culpa, mea culpa. MIT and Wharton and University of Chicago created the financial engineering instruments, which, like Samson and Delilah, blinded every CEO. They didn't realize the kind of leverage they were doing and they didn't understand when they were really creating a real profit or a fictitious one.
Paul Samuelson
Image
I don't care who writes a nation's laws - or crafts its advanced treaties - if I can write its economics textbooks.
Paul Samuelson
Image
Sooner or later the Internet will become profitable. It's an old story played before by canals, railroads and automobiles.
Paul Samuelson
Image
If we made an income pyramid out of a child's blocks, with each layer portraying $1,000 of income, the peak would be far higher than the Eiffel Tower, but almost all of us would be within a yard of the ground.
Paul Samuelson
Image
When the economy was going up, [Milton Friedman and I] both gave the same advice, and when the economy was going down, we gave the same advice. But in between he didn't change his advice at all.
Paul Samuelson
Image
By keeping labor supply down, immigration policy tends to keep wages high. Let us underline this basic principle: Limitation of the supply of any grade of labor relative to all other productive factors can be expected to raise its wage rate and increase in supply will, other things being equal, tend to depress wage rates.
Paul Samuelson
Image
You could be disqualified for a job [at Harvard] if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?
Paul Samuelson