Economic Volatility Quotes

Anything can happen anytime in markets. And no advisor, economist, or TV commentator-and definitely not Charlie nor I-can tell you when chaos will occur. Market forecasters will fill your ear but will never fill your wallet.

When you’re highly leveraged, everything is exaggerated. Good times are better—but bad times are much worse.

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.

Is the economy something organic or is it something engineered? I think it's closer to the organic. You harm it by artificially suppressing volatility in it.

Uncertainty about sales impedes business planning and could harm capital formation just as much as uncertainty about inflation can create uncertainty about relative prices and harm business planning.

Financial markets need to become less, not more, efficient.

The markets don't like instability and they don't like uncertainty.

The reality is that financial markets are self-destabilizing; occasionally they tend toward disequilibrium, not equilibrium.

The Mexican debt crisis, Latin American debt crisis, the crises of the 1990s, the Wall Street stock market crash, and other events should have reminded us, and did remind us, that financial instability remains a concern, remains a problem.

Unfettered markets eventually get out of whack.

2011 was a year in which events rarely turned out as predicted, and when much of the world seemed shrouded in turmoil and uncertainty. It was difficult for government analysts back in Washington to know just where they were on the map, let alone where they were heading.

A farmer is dependent on too many things outside his control; it makes for modesty.

In these times of uncertainty for paper-based currency, I feel more secure in holding gold.

Over time, there's a very close correlation between what happens to the dollar and what happens to the price of oil. When the dollar gets week, the price of oil, which, as you know, and other commodities are denominated in dollars, they go up. We saw it in the '70s, when the dollar was savagely weakened.

We are a small, open economy, highly dependent on global flows. It is inevitably a demand that dramatically alters and that is reflected in what we feel here in New Zealand. So there is at its most basic level a limit to what we can do and that is true everywhere.

No one can forecast the economy with certainty.

One of the things that has been very difficult in Libya is the sense of uncertainty - the sense that they haven't actually finished the revolution, that there was still a great deal of uncertainty. That uncertainty has made Libya harder for business in terms of oil and other things as well.

American investors [abroad] receive an interest return higher by at least 2 percent on the average than they would receive from similar government or industrial investment within the United States …. It is obvious that they are taking a correspondingly greater risk. A considerable portion of this investment is in areas (as in parts of Latin-America) where political unrest is chronic and where legislation changes rapidly, or in areas in which there is a serious possibility of war or bankruptcy.

It's a volatile time.

Banking is a very treacherous business because you don't realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.

It has therefore been justly observed that however honestly the coin of a country may conform to its standard, money made of gold and silver is still liable to fluctuations in value, not only to accidental, and temporary, but to permanent and natural variations, in the same manner as other commodities.

There's never been a time in my life where you had the names the United States and political uncertainty in the same sentence.

Look, I think if you've got a niche portfolio or just operating in one country, like the United States, your ability to absorb the volatility is much less.

The outlook for the economy, as always, is highly uncertain.

Blaming speculators as a response to financial crisis goes back at least to the Greeks. It's almost always the wrong response.