John Mackey on youth and innovation

I think one of the advantages of being young is not only do you have a lot of energy, but you don't know what you can't do.  You don't yet know your limitations...  We usually depend upon a lot of our breakthroughs with young people because they naturally think outside the box because they have never been in the box.  And they naturally just tend to be more creative and you see many of the innovations that are happening in our society by people in their 20s.  In my generation, how old was Bill Gates when he started Microsoft, or Steve Job when he started Apple, or Michael Dell when he was in his college dorm selling computers?  Now, how old is Mark Zuckerberg when he started Facebook?  It's story after story after story of very young people who just went for it and are successful.

~ John Mackey, co-founder of Whole Foods Market, interview with Patrick Gentempo, "Money Revealed - Part 5"

Chamath Palihapitiya: recession "next to impossible" (2019)

I don't see a world in which we have any form of meaningful contraction nor any form of meaningful expansion. We have completely taken away the toolkit of how normal economies should work when we started with QE. I mean, the odds that there's a recession anymore in any Western country of the world is almost next to impossible now, save a complete financial externality that we can't forecast.

~ Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO of Social Capital and minority stakeholder of the NBA's Golden State Warriors, as appeared on CNBC's Fast Money Halftime Report, April 30, 2019

Jerome Powell warns about the risks of creating asset bubbles

I think we are actually at a point of encouraging risk-taking, and that should give us pause.

~ Jerome Powell, October 2012 FOMC meeting

Deutsche Bank economist Torsten Sløk on the Goldilocks economy

Boring is good, because boring means no uncertainties that are unmanageable.  This backdrop of no recession and stable growth and low inflation and low rates is bullish for risky assets, in particular equities.

~ Torsten Sløk, chief economist, Deutsche Bank, April 18, 2019

(Sløk was quoted in the April 20, 2019 issue of Barron's by Ben Levisohn in "The Trader" column.)

Jamie Dimon on the business expansion: "no law that it has to stop" (2019)

Do you have to have a recession?... The consumer's in good shape, the balance sheet's in good shape, people are going back to the workforce, companies have plenty of capital... business confidence and consumer confidence are both high... So it could easily go on for years.  There's no law that says it has to stop.

~ Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase Q1 conference call, April 12, 2019

Max Stirner on the difference between crime and the law

The State calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.

~ Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own [1845]

Ruchir Sharma compares U.S. global market cap to Japan's in the late 1980s

The U.S. today is about 55% of the global market cap, and its share of the global economy is 25%.  The last time such a large gap existed was in the late 1980s, when the Japanese market was 45% of the global market cap and Japan's economy was about 15% of the world total.

~ Ruchir Sharma, Chief Global Strategist, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, "Global View, Local Stocks," Barron's, April 8, 2019