QUOTES OF THE DAY

“Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity.”

Tacitus

“It [Nixon closing the gold window on a Sunday evening in 1971] was one of the most dramatic economic events ever, a very big deal and I was at the epicentre of it on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange… He [Nixon] was spinning political speak, but what he was saying was that the U.S. has defaulted on its debts. And it got me thinking about what money is. What are dollars if they are not tied to gold?

I saw how the government lied or certainly spun things in a certain way. I had all these philosophical questions, like ‘Whom do you believe? What is actually truthfully going on?’ All of this pulled me into the global macro markets. The currency markets would be important to me for the rest of my life.”

Ray Dalio

“Gold has worked down from Alexander’s time… When something holds good for two thousand years I do not believe it can be so because of prejudice or mistaken theory.”

Bernard Baruch

“The commerce and industry of the country, however, it must be acknowledged, though they may be somewhat augmented, cannot be altogether so secure, when they are thus, as it were, suspended upon the Daedalian wings of paper money, as when they travel about upon the solid ground of gold and silver.

Over and above the accidents to which they are exposed from the unskilfulness of the conductors of this paper money, they are liable to several others, from which no prudence or skill of those conductors can guard them.”

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 262