Lawrence B. Lindsey Quotes

Gentlemen. There is no man nor group of men who can buy all the stocks that the American public can sell.

We should rely on the markets to move on their own.

In the world I've known most of my life, old stories quickly lose their power over capital markets and get replaced by new surprises. That which everyone fixates on gets priced into the stock market quickly and can't drag on.

The markets do numbers, not nuance.

All market response results from a reduction of uncertainty.

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

Markets love volatility.

If you think that government regulators are going to outwit the market, you've got a Jurassic Park fantasy.

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.

The one thing about markets is that they do not give any advance notice. If they did, they would be arbitraged away.

Looking at the stock market to understand the economy is like studying a manic depressive in order to understand human nature.

I believe, in the stock market - that's one of my fields - that most people are irrational. And to be irrational, you can be irrational in so many different ways that, practically, the result is indeterminate.

In fact, of all hoodoos in Wall Street I think the resolve to induce the stock market to act as a fairy godmother is the busiest and most persistent.

One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.

I don't entirely reject the idea of efficient markets. It needs updating.

Speculators get a bad rap. In the popular imagination they're greedy, heedless, and amoral, adept at price manipulations and dirty tricks. In reality, they often play a key role in making markets run smoothly.

When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed.

Short-sellers perform a useful function in the market as conduits of negative information, and shorts often complain that they are discriminated against by regulators.

The older I get, the less respect I have for the signals emitted by our vaunted speculative markets.

The market is not an invention of capitalism …. It is an invention of civilization.

Most politicians want to be seen as leading the parade. Thus they act to make a good thing better, and when markets slip, they find ways to limit the economic freedom of others.

The stock market is the world’s largest Oujie Board.

Most places of the realm are pestered with purveyors, who take up eggs, butter, cheese, pigs, capons, hens, chickens, hogs, bacon, etc., in one market under pretence of their commissions, and suffer their wives to sell the same in another, or to poulterers of London. If these chapmen be absent but two or three market days then we may perfectly see these wares to be more reasonably sold, and thereunto the crosses sufficiently furnished of all things. In like sort, since the number of buttermen have so much increased, and since they travel in such wise that they come to men's houses for their butter faster than they can make it, it is almost incredible to see how the price of butter is augmented: whereas when the owners were enforced to bring it to the market towns, and fewer of these butter buyers were stirring, our butter was scarcely worth eighteen pence the gallon that now is worth three shillings fourpence and perhaps five shillings. Whereby also I gather that the maintenance of a superfluous number of dealers in most trades, tillage always excepted, is one of the greatest causes why the prices of things became excessive: for one of them do commonly use to outbid another.

Markets don’t always self-correct fast enough. Until they do there is an immense amount of damage that has been done which is why we need government intervention.

Markets are smart and governments are dumb.