Marc Faber on the logic of the Greek crisis

In a democracy, no problems are solved, they are just postponed until the ultimate crash destroys everything.

~Marc Faber, editor, Gloom, Boom and Doom Report, Bloomberg TV, April 30th, 2010

Donald Tang on the symbiotic relationship of the US and China

In this ocean, underneath the surface at the very bottom is an anchor of a symbiotic relationship, an interdependency between the US and China. And that's the real story. Everything else going on up above the water I think is noise. Waves come and go, sometimes it's calm, sometimes there are stormy waters and that's noise.

It happened in the Clinton years, Bush I, Bush II, it happened for the last two decades and it will continue to happen. But the end story is China will need the United States, the United States will need China and we can coexist very well and benefit each other and each other's people.

~Donald Tang, CEO, Citic Securities International Partners, CNBC Closing Bell, April 29th, 2010

Donald Tang on the Chinese Bubble and China's effective stimulus efforts

Last year, people talked about, "They can't make 8% [growth], it will be 2% or negative." Today, everyone talks about how it's uncontrollable, [the growth] will keep on going 10, 15, 20%, the bubble is going to burst. The same people who were talking about not making [the growth targets] now are talking about too much [growth]. The fact of the matter is that they are, or they were ahead of the curve of the cycle. [The Chinese government] put out a very effective stimulus package that led us out of the depression-like kind of recession.

And now, they are ahead of the curve again doing the recapitalization of the banks and taking the administrative measures to make sure that property prices do not get out of control. So, all of those things tell me that the leadership in China is really paying attention.

Everything else that they talk about in the media is noise. [The Chinese government] is really doing a good job of trying to stay ahead of the curve.

~Donald Tang, CEO, Citic Securities International Partners, CNBC Closing Bell, April 29th, 2010

Napoleon on history

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

~ Napoleon Bonaparte, Corsican, military commander and emperor of post-revolutionary France

Michael Rivero on the psychological underpinnings of faith in government

Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because most people do not want to admit they do not have the courage to do anything about it. Most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker, but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.

~Michael Rivero, political investigator and social commentator

Jim Chanos on the unseen participants of speculative bank bubble bets

We were short IKB in 2007 because we looked at what they were doing and it was madness. It was absolute madness. They were basically taking a German bank balance sheet and leveraging it up and going long all this toxic stuff to make an infinitesimal spread.

There is one unstated aspect that is vitally important to this whole thing. There was a participant at the table in these deals who didn't know he was there. In this case, it was the German taxpayer. But in many cases it was the US taxpayer, who was on the hook for banks making dumb deals. At the end of the day you can't put the taxpayer, who doesn't know that he or she is at the table in these speculative trades, at risk.

~James Chanos, president and founder, Kynikos Associates, CNBC's Squawk Box, April 27th, 2010

Bill Ackman on the role of shorts in preventing bubbles

What caused the housing industry to become one of the great bubbles of all time? The answer is that there really was no way to short the housing industry until really in the last several years when development of synthetic CDOs and other structures allowed people like Paulson to make big bets against housing. Had there been a mechanism to short housing earlier, there probably wouldn't have been a bubble. If you didn't have shorts, if you couldn't short stocks, the probability of stock market bubbles would be much greater.

~William Ackman, managing partner, Pershing Square Capital Management, CNBC's Squawk Box, April 27th, 2010