Quotes & Sayings About Traders

The stock exchanges have converted from "open outcry" where wild traders face each other, yelling and screaming as in a souk, then go drink together. Traders were replaced by computers, for very small visible benefits and massively large risks. While errors made by traders are confined and distributed, those made by computerized systems go wild - in August 2010, a computer error made the entire market crash (the "flash crash"); in August 2012, as this manuscript was heading to the printer, the Knight Capital Group had its computer system go wild and cause $10 million dollars of losses a minute, losing $480 million. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Street traders were doing good business selling a paper toy which represented a pig, but if you put the paper together and unfolded it in a certain way it turned into Hitler's face. — Wladyslaw Szpilman

Most private traders on a losing streak keep trying to trade their way out of a hole. A loser thinks a successful trade is just around the corner, and that his luck is about to turn. He keeps putting on more trades and increases his size, all the while digging himself a deeper hole in the ice. The sensible thing to do would be to reduce your trading size and then stop and review your system. — Alexander Elder

In spite of these disasters, some of the tribesmen continued to fight for their territory, but they were quickly overwhelmed and taken into captivity, placed aboard ships and sold as slaves in the West Indies. At the same time the whites were bringing to America their own slaves whose skins were black. The first shipments of these unfortunates were brought to Jamestown for sale by the Dutch in 1619. Within two decades the British realized what a lucrative trade slavery was, so they ousted the Dutch slave traders and, in 1639, established their own Royal African Company to make massive raids on the native villages of the Dark Continent and bring the chained captives to America to satisfy the ever-growing demand for slave labor.6 In all such matters, the human cruelty inflicted on people of either red skin or black was of precious little concern to the imperious British. — Allan W. Eckert

Thinkers, makers and traders are the DNA of the world class company — Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Of course for professional traders on the stock exchange, money had always been imaginary - just as notional, just as easy come and easy go, as the points in a video game. Wage earners like Willing's mother thought money was real. Because the work was real, and the time was real, it seemed inconceivable that what the work and the time had converted into would be gossamer. — Lionel Shriver

The best traders are simply slaves to the market's price action — Steve Burns

Gratitude is like the good faith of traders: it maintains commerce, and we often pay, not because it is just to discharge our debts, but that we may more readily find people to trust us. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Everybody gets what they want out of the market — Ed Seykota

Art, music, and philosophy are merely poignant examples of what we might have been had not the priests and traders gotten hold of us. — George Carlin

We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Rivalry is the life of trade, and the death of the trader. — Elbert Hubbard

My experience with novice traders is that they trade three to five times too big. They are taking 5 to 10 percent risks on a trade when they should be taking 1 to 2 percent risks. The emotional burden of trading is substantial; on any given day, I could lose millions of dollars. If you personalize these losses, you can't trade. — Bruce Kovner

Unfortunately, skill in evaluating the business prospects of a firm is not sufficient for successful stock trading, where the key question is whether the information about the firm is already incorporated in the price of the stock. Traders apparently lackthe skill to answer this crucial question, but they appear to be ignorant of their ignorance. — Daniel Kahneman

The head is the phase when the stock is rising but nobody knows the reason. Most retail investors and traders are not in the stock and neither is it being talked about. This — Ashu Dutt

It's a little-known story that bicycles played a big role in propping up North Korea's informal and privatized economy, because they helped small traders shuffle goods between the manufacturers and markets. These bicycle riders, in turn, became an informal merchant class. — Felix Abt

When traders were able to earn a million dollars, of which base pay was $150,000 to $200,000 and the rest was bonus, they would go for it. Now if you're sitting there earning $600,000, you become less risk-seeking. And if you have less risk-seeking, the ability of the market to be incredibly volatile is increased. — Michael Hintze

This completed the curious reversal in roles that occurred in the early 1980s, when thrifts became traders and traders thrifts. — Michael Lewis

When I was getting ready for the release of 'Deadline,' when it was coming out soon, I decided that the appropriate way to get people excited about the book would be to write a novella in 30 pieces and publish a piece on my blog every day for a month ... during a convention, a week-and-a-half-long trip to New York, and a doll traders' expo. — Seanan McGuire

I know their game. First, the traders and the missionaries: then the ambassadors: then the cannon. It's better to go straight to the cannon. — Tewodros II

To know our refuse is to know ourselves. We mark our own trail from past to present with what we've used and consumed, fondled, rejected, outgrown. — Jane Avrich

The violinist must possess the poet's gift of piercing the protective hide which grows on propagandists, stockbrokers and slave traders, to penetrate the deeper truth which lies within. — Yehudi Menuhin

Traders can cause short-term volatility. In the long run, the market must revert to a sensible price/earnings multiple. — Ben Stein

Traders focus almost entirely on where to enter a trade. In reality, the entry size is often more important than the entry price — Jack D. Schwager

This intelligence, or what I'll call "the wisdom of crowds," is at work in the world in many different guises. It's the reason the Internet search engine Google can scan a billion Web pages and find the one page that has the exact piece of information you were looking for. It's the reason it's so hard to make money betting on NFL games, and it helps explain why, for the past fifteen years, a few hundred amateur traders in the middle of Iowa have done a better job of predicting election results than Gallup polls have. — James Surowiecki

The best restraint is old-fashioned market discipline, in which financial traders know that they, personally, will lose a ton of money if they take risky bets that don't pan out. — David Ignatius

If there is no cosmic plan, and we are not committed to any divine or natural laws, what prevents social collapse? How come you can travel for thousands of miles, from Amsterdam to Bucharest or from New Orleans to Montreal, without being kidnapped by slave-traders, ambushed by outlaws or killed by feuding tribes? Look — Yuval Noah Harari

In the two decades after I left, I waited for the end of Wall Street as I had known it. The outrageous bonuses, the endless parade of rogue traders, the scandal that sank Drexel Burnham, the scandal that destroyed John Gutfreund and finished off Salomon Brothers, the crisis following the collapse of my old boss John Meriwether's Long-Term Capital Management, the Internet bubble: Over and over again, the financial system was, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet the big Wall Street banks at the center of it just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to twenty-six-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents' world when you can buy it and sell off the pieces? — Michael Lewis

First of all, most traders don't have a winning strategy. Second, even among those traders who do, many don't follow their strategy. Trading puts pressure on weaker human traits and seems to seek out each individual's Achilles' heel. — Gil Blake

The best traders I know are also the most humble people I know, coincidence? Or has the market taught them some very valuable lessons? — Steve Burns

The orders resting on BATS were typically just the 100-share minimum required for an order to be at the front of any price queue, as their only purpose was to tease information out of investors. The HFT firms posted these tiny orders on BATS - orders to buy or sell 100 shares of basically every stock traded in the U.S. market - not because they actually wanted to buy and sell the stocks but because they wanted to find out what investors wanted to buy and sell before they did it. BATS, unsurprisingly, had been created by high-frequency traders. — Michael Lewis

I think religion is very anti-man. I think it's a terrible distortion and exploitation of a very natural urge every human has - to be rejoined with the one somehow, to become a part of the universe. Once the high priests and the traders took over, we were lost as a species. — George Carlin

Goldman Sachs itself - and so Goldman was in the position of selling bonds to its customers created by its own traders, so they might bet against them. Secondly, there was a crude, messy, slow, but acceptable substitute for Mike Burry's credit default swaps: the actual cash bonds. According to a former Goldman derivatives trader, Goldman would buy the triple-A tranche of some CDO, pair it off with the credit default swaps AIG sold Goldman that insured the tranche (at a cost well below the yield on the tranche), declare the entire package risk-free, and hold it off its balance sheet. Of course, the whole thing wasn't risk-free: If AIG went bust, the insurance was worthless, and Goldman could lose everything. Today Goldman Sachs is, to put it mildly, unhelpful when asked to explain exactly what it did, and this lack of transparency extends to its own shareholders. If a team of forensic accountants went over Goldman's books, they'd be shocked at just how good Goldman is at hiding things, — Michael Lewis

Traders lose because the game is hard, or out of ignorance, or lack of discipline or because of both. — Alexander Elder

In order to remain undead, I must steal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own.' I've always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence. — Thomas C. Foster

They had a much more fundamental problem with the market: greed. Market motives were held to be inherently corrupt. The moment that greed was validated and unlimited profit was considered a perfectly viable end in itself, this political, magical element became a genuine problem, because it meant that even those actors - the brokers, stock-jobbers, traders - who effectively made the system run had no convincing loyalty to anything, even to the system itself. — David Graeber

Personally I don't think day traders are speculating, because traditional speculation requires some market knowledge. They are, instead, gambling, which doesn't. — Arthur Levitt Jr

Doctors are not servants of their patients, they are traders like everyone else in a free society and they should bear that title proudly considering the crucial importance of the services they offer. — Ayn Rand

Love is Compassion, Endurance, Equanimity, Impartiality, Magnetic, Patient and Just (and Where Justice Is Not, Hate-Traders Profit) — Elizabeth Lucye Robillard

In his searches, Schwall noticed something else, though at first he didn't know what to make of it: A surprisingly large number of the people pulled in by the big Wall Street banks to build the technology for high-frequency trading were Russians. "If you went to LinkedIn and looked at one of these Russian guys, you would see he was linked to all the other Russians," said Schwall. "I'd go to find Dmitri and I'd also find Misha and Vladimir and Tolstoy or whatever." The Russians came not from finance but from telecom, physics, medical research, university math departments, and a lot of other useful fields. The big Wall Street firms had become machines for turning analytically minded Russians into high-frequency traders. — Michael Lewis

Many traders ride an emotional roller coaster and miss the essential element of winning: the management of their emotions. — Alexander Elder

We're talking to every third-party supplier every day of the week, and our traders are talking to them and buying products from them. When we're doing that, we see opportunities which no one else sees. — Ivan Glasenberg

By accident, some traders had stumbled across a route controlled by Verizon that took 14.65 milliseconds. "The Gold Route," the traders called it, because on the occasions you happened to find yourself on it you were the first to exploit the discrepancies between prices in Chicago and prices in New York. — Michael Lewis

Good traders liquidate when they are wrong, great traders reverse when they are wrong — Jack D. Schwager

Our traditional stories are based on an aristocratic model without a middle class, whereas The Arabian Nights reflect people living in cities, traders, merchants, travelers, with a wide range of personalities. — Marina Warner

By contrast, all professional traders know full well that the market is a huge mass of people. — Anonymous

They don't try to trade 'reality', they try to trade
other people's perceptions of reality. If a market is dominated by enough technical traders, it could lapse into a 'postmodern' state, with traders trading perceptions of perceptions of reality. — Brett Scott

Senegal had always boasted one of Africa's most vibrant merchant cultures. The country's boubou-wearing traders had long colonized street corners in New York and many a European city, where they sold clothing, gadgetry, and assorted tourist fare. But in 2004, Dakar's traders woke up suddenly to the alarming notion that they were in turn being colonized by Chinese who seemed to be taking over the retail sector. Large protests followed in Dakar, with the striking Senegalese traders demanding government action to protect them from the Chinese newcomers. From — Howard W. French

The new structure of the U.S. stock market had removed the big Wall Street banks from their historic, lucrative role as intermediary. At the same time it created, for any big bank, some unpleasant risks: that the customer would somehow figure out what was happening to his stock market orders. And that the technology might somehow go wrong. If the markets collapsed, or if another flash crash occurred, the high-frequency traders would not take 85 percent of the blame, or bear 85 percent of the costs of the inevitable lawsuits. The banks would bear the lion's share of the blame and the costs. The relationship of the big Wall Street banks to the high-frequency traders, when you thought about it, was a bit like the relationship of the entire society to the big Wall — Michael Lewis

Many historians regard him [Offa] as the most powerful Anglo-Saxon king before Alfred the Great. In the 780s he extended his power over most of Southern England. One of the most remarkable extantfrom King Offa's reign is a gold coin that is kept in the British Museum. On one side, it carries the inscription Offa Rex (Offa the King). But, turn it over and you are in for a surprise, for in badly copied Arabic are the words La Illaha Illa Allah ('There is no god but Allah alone'). This coin is a copy of an Abbasid dinarfrom the reign of Al-Mansur, dating to 773, and was most probably used by Anglo-Saxon traders. It would have been known even in Anglo-Saxon England that Islamic gold dinars were the most important coinage in the world at that time and Offa's coin looked enough like the original that it would have been readily accepted abroad. — Jim Al-Khalili

I hope I need not confess that a large part of my stock in trade consists of platitudes rescued from the cobwebbed shelves of yesterday ... This borrowing and refurbishing of shop-worn goods, as a matter of fact, is the invariable habit of traders in ideas, at all times and everywhere. It is not, however, that all the conceivable human notions have been thought out; it is simply, to be quite honest, that the sort of men who volunteer to think out new ones seldom, if ever, have wind enough for a full day's work. — H.L. Mencken

I've heard it said that there are men who read in books to convince themselves there is a God. I know not but man may so deform his works in the settlements, as to leave that which is so clear in the wilderness a matter of doubt among traders and priests. — James Fenimore Cooper

Regulators in Britain, America and Switzerland fined six banks - HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup - a total of $4.3 billion for manipulating foreign exchange markets. Britain's Financial Conduct Authority said that traders at the banks had colluded to rig important benchmark exchange rates between 2008 and 2013. — Anonymous

We fought with those cocksuckers all the way down," says one Deutsche Bank trader. And, all the way down, the debt collectors at Deutsche Bank sensed the bond traders at Morgan Stanley misunderstood their own trade. They weren't lying; they genuinely failed to understand the nature of the subprime CDO. — Michael Lewis

Most traders believe that 'getting into the zone' happens when you have 'a hot streak.' I believe you can create the zone. The zone is a psychological state. It is when you are focused, disciplined, and fully engaged in the process at hand ... trading in the zone will certainly increase your capacity to perform and succeed. — Ari Kiev

In the empty expanses of space, the wandering traders need men like myself to care for the spiritual side of a life so given over to commerce, and worldly pursuits. — Isaac Asimov

There is, in short, nothing wrong and everything right with inside trading. If anything, inside traders should be hailed as heroes of the free market instead of being apprehended in chains. But, you say, it is "unfair" for some men to know more than others, and actually to profit by that knowledge. But what kind of a world-view dubs it "unfair" for some men to know more than others? It is the world-view of the egalitarian, who believes that any kind of superiority of one person over another - in ability, or knowledge, or income, or wealth - is somehow "unfair." But men are not ants or bees or robots; each individual is unique and different from others, and ability, talent, and wealth will therefore differ. — Anonymous

In the interest rate area, traders have for a long time used a version of what is known as Black's model for European bond options; another version of the same model for caps and floors; and yet another version of the same model for European swap options. — John Hull

We are all assumed, these days, to reside at one extreme of the opinion spectrum, or another. We are pro-abortion or anti-abortion. We are free traders or protectionist. We are pro-private sector or pro-big government. We are feminists or chauvinists. But in the real world, few of us holds these extreme views. There is instead a spectrum of opinion. — Michael Crichton

You listen to the street traders any morning. They don't shout, 'Nearly-fresh oranges, only slightly squashy, reasonable value,' do they? No, they shout, 'Git chore orinjes, they're luvverly.' Good business sense." He — Terry Pratchett

The entrepreneur who is reckoning in terms of a currency with a stable value is unable to compete with the entrepreneur who is prepared to make a quasi-gift of part of his capital to his customers. In 1920 and 1921, Dutch traders who had sold commodities to Austria could buy them back again after a while much cheaper than they had originally sold them, because the Austrian traders completely failed to see that they were selling them for less than they had cost. — Ludwig Von Mises

Be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy.' Easier said than done for the vast majority of stock traders ... On every stock trade there is someone who wants to sell and someone who wants to buy, at least at a particular price ... the person who is selling thinks that she is getting out just in time while the person buying thinks that he is about to make good money.
... The truth is that the market doesn't really reflect some magical perfect valuation of a stock under the efficient market hypothesis. It reflects the mass consensus of how actual individual investors value the stock. It is the sum total of everyone's hopes and fears ... — M.E. Thomas

If he descended from heaven today the great warrior who beat the money-traders you would shout your "crucifige!" and nail him to the cross which he himself bore. But he mildly smiles upon your hate: "The truth will prevail, even if the bearer falls; the faith will live, for I give my life ... and stand tall at the cross for all warriors of the world. — Baldur Von Schirach

If I was dealing with a trader, every other word had to be a four-letter word. — Muriel Siebert

Where you want to be is always in control, never wishing, always trading, and always first and foremost protecting your ass. That's why most people lose money as individual investors or traders because they're not focusing on losing money. They need to focus on the money that they have at risk and how much capital is at risk in any single investment they have. If everyone spent 90 percent of their time on that, not 90 percent of the time on pie-in-the-sky ideas on how much money they're going to make, then they will be incredibly successful investors. — Paul Tudor Jones

You will never see as many great women investors or traders as men. Period. End of story. — Paul Tudor Jones

The best traders have trading habits, daily routines they repeat day after day. — Henrique M. Simoes

Despite the deep reforms we are making, traders and speculators have forced interest rates on Greek bonds to record highs. — George Papandreou

Tuthmosis IV was, like his father Amenhotep II, a belligerent pharaoh and one of the first to wage war without provocation beyond Egypt's boundaries. As a result of his aggressive attacks slaves and foreign elements were common in Egypt. Consequently, there was more intermarriage during his reign than at other times. Egypt was visited by merchants and traders and was extremely prosperous and cosmopolitan during this period. — Michael Tsarion

Lights burn on the upper floors, traders and analysts letting commerce take precedence over family one more time in a desperate attempt to add to a Christmas bonus they won't have time to spend. — Nick Harkaway

Riker tells Data to just get on with it already, so Data says Ferengi are like Yankee traders from 18th-century America. This indicates that, in the 24th century, the traditional practice of using 600-year-old comparisons is still in vogue, like when you're stuck in traffic on the freeway, and say, Man, this is just like Vasco de Gama trying to go around the Cape of Good Hope! — Wil Wheaton

A state in India will have more traders than perhaps a European nation. Trade is a great way to integrate people. — Narendra Modi

Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss - the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery - that you must offer them values, not wounds - that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. — Ayn Rand

well-functioning market requires all three types of investors for socially beneficial projects to have access to cheap capital. Value investors allocate capital to its most productive use. Speculators, because they trade frequently, provide the liquidity and trading volume that allows value investors and relative value traders to execute their trades cheaply. They also ensure that information is disseminated quickly. — Michael Pettis

There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You mean that this is a matter of patriotism and traders aren't patriotic?"
"Notoriously not. Pioneers never are. — Isaac Asimov

Had Volcker never pushed through his radical change in policy, the world would be many bond traders and one memoir the poorer. — Michael Lewis

The fratricidal Yoruba wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a great boost to the transatlantic traffic in human beings. There were constant skirmishes between the Ijebus, the Egbas, the Ekitis, the Oyos, the Ibadans, and many other Yoruba groups. Some of the smaller groups might even have been wiped out from history, as the larger ones enlarged their territory and consolidated their power. The vanquished were brought from the interior to the coast and sold to the people of Lagos and to communities along the network of lagoons stretching westward to Ouidah. And they in turn arranged the auctions at which the English, the Portuguese, and the Spanish loaded up their barracoons and slave ships. Some of these intertribal wars were waged for the express purpose of supplying slaves to traders. At thirty-five British pounds for each healthy adult male, it was a lucrative business. — Teju Cole

I grew up in the East End of London, the youngest of three boys in a Catholic household. Both my parents were market traders and worked seven days a week. — James Herbert

All the land our forefathers had was a little strip of country, here between the mountains and the ocean. All the way from here west was Indian country, and Spanish and French and English country. It was farmers that took all that country and made it America." "How?" Almanzo asked. "Well, son, the Spaniards were soldiers, and high-and-mighty gentlemen that only wanted gold. And the French were fur-traders, wanting to make quick money. And England was busy fighting wars. But we were farmers, son; we wanted the land. It was farmers that went over the mountains, and cleared the land, and settled it, and farmed it, and hung on to their farms. — Laura Ingalls Wilder

The free-trade idea, logically applied, will abolish usury; and with usury will disappear the chief bone of contention between labor and capital. But, just at this point, free-traders go over to the enemy; and many writers on political economy, in flat contradiction of the essential principles of that science, have made elaborate arguments to prove self-government in finance, impossible! What shall we think of men who, having dethroned kings, demolished popes, destroyed slave oligarchies and assailed tariff monopoly, advise submission to the most oppressive and dishonest of despotisms, Usury? — Ezra Heywood

Short-term trading is very time-consuming. That is why even "successful" short-term traders can easily have negative real ROI. — Robert Rolih

I come from a family of traders; my grandmother and my mother were very good at making money. — Anne Robinson

Winners feel rewarded when price moves in their favor, and losers feel punished when it moves against them. Crowd members remain blissfully unaware that by focusing on price they create their own leader. Traders who feel mesmerized by prices create their own idols. — Anonymous

Denying the necessary role of the creative mind as expressed in capital and technology, Marx ended up vindicating the zero-sum vision of anti-Semitic envy, in which bankers, capitalists, arbitrageurs, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, and traders are deemed to be parasitical shysters and dispensable middlemen. — George Gilder

Wal-Mart has become the whipping boy for political demagogues, unions and anti-traders. I suggest that they have the wrong target ... Wal-Mart exists and prospers because tens of millions of Americans find Wal-Mart to be a suitable source of goods and services ... unions and anti-traders should direct their outrage and condemnation at the tens of millions of Americans who shop at Wal-Mart and keep it in business. — Walter E. Williams

But it had always been my mom's philosophy that the way we treat animals goes hand in hand with the way we treat people, and so she would dedicate her life to stopping men like this one, bushmeat traders hoping for sale — Eliot Schrefer

What else can you tell us about this batna, Surendranath?" "I learnt it from English traders in Surat," said the befuddled Surendranath, "It stands for Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. — Neal Stephenson

It is literally true that millions come easier to a trader after he knows how to trade, than hundreds did in the days of his ignorance. — Jesse Lauriston Livermore

Novice Traders trade 5 to 10 times too big. They are taking 5 to 10% risks on a trade they should be taking 1 to 2 percent risks. — Bruce Kovner

The goal of a successful trader is to make the best trades. Money is secondary. — Alexander Elder

A big Wall Street bank's biggest advantage was its access to vast amounts of cheap risk capital and, with that, its ability to survive the ups and downs of a risky business. That meant little when the business wasn't risky and didn't require much capital. High-frequency traders went home every night with no position in the stock market. They traded in the market the way card counters in a casino played blackjack: They played only — Michael Lewis

It often horrified the English community that she spent her time with local farmers and horse traders, eccentrics and mystics, but she valued expertise over convention and had long believed if you were going to make discoveries in the world you must first quit your Englishness and open your eyes. — Sara Sheridan

Traders take a good system and destroy it by trying to make it into a perfect system. — Robert Prechter

The sophisticates of Java, the traders of Sumatra, the peasants from the outer islands found no common ground. During siesta time from one to five, the Islamic group met separately, the Nationalist group met separately, the Federalist and Unitarians met separately. — Sukarno

I found that options traders - the Amex was mainly an options exchange - routinely conspired to keep as wide as possible the spreads between the prices investors paid and the prices floor traders paid for the same securities. — Gary Weiss

Once we had a rail station in Montgomery that connected to Columbus and went all the way up to Virginia, slave traders could transport thousands of slaves at a fraction of the cost than they could transport by boat, and certainly by foot. And that's how Montgomery became such an active slave-trading space. — Bryan Stevenson

Bakhchisaray was formerly the capital of the Crimean khanate and once an important crossroad of the Silk Road, where traders met from across the Black Sea, the steppes of Central Asia, Russia, and eastern Europe. — Tim Cope

But a further question arises: Is passion different from reason also, or only a kind of reason; in which latter case, instead of three principles in the soul, there will only be two, the rational and the concupiscent; or rather, as the State was composed of three classes, traders, auxiliaries, counsellors, so may there not be in the individual soul a third element which is passion or spirit, and when not corrupted by bad education is the natural auxiliary of reason? Yes, he said, there must be a third. Yes, I replied, if passion, which has already been shown to be different from desire, turn out also to be different from reason. But that is easily proved: - We may observe even in young children that they are full of spirit almost as soon as they are born, whereas some of them never seem to attain to the use of reason, and most of them late enough. Excellent, — Plato

I believe now that there's real fear of what happens once The Narrative blows up - because once we've ripped the rich to shreds, what we're left with is a whole bunch of broke people wondering where the hell their money went, without even a soothing fairy tale to help them get to sleep at night.
People in the financial community who actually worked in that world, the traders and the bankers themselves who joked with me about "those motherfuckers," did not have these illusions. You're not going to be good at making money if you need there to be a halo around the moneymaking process. The only people who really clung to those illusions were the financial commentators, right up to the point where those illusions became completely unsustainable. — Matt Taibbi