249 Quotes by James Surowiecki

The financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by investment banks betting against the housing market in 2007. It was caused by the fact that too few investors – including all of the big investment banks – bet too heavily on the housing market in the years before 2007.

Critics of consumer capitalism like to think that consumers are manipulated and controlled by those who seek to sell them things, but for the most part it’s the other way around: companies must make what consumers want and deliver it at the lowest possible price.

The paradox of Steve Jobs’s career is that he had no interest in listening to consumers – he was famously dismissive of market research – yet nonetheless had an amazing sense of what consumers actually wanted.

The world’s central banks and the International Monetary Fund still have vaults full of bullion, even though currencies are no longer backed by gold. Governments hold on to it as a kind of magic symbol, a way of reassuring people that their money is real.

Companies, like people, don’t much like to change.

Procrastination also can be a way of self-handicapping: if you don’t do a great job, you can always say to yourself, “If I’d only started sooner, I’d have been able to produce something excellent.”

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.

You can’t fuel real economic growth with indiscriminate credit. You can only fuel it with well-allocated, long-term investment.

If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don’t need tax loopholes to make money.