Nice Finance Quotes

I came across two nice quotes related to finance recently:

“Risk is the pollution created by the process of making money. So where you find people making one you will surely find them hiding the other. ” — David Malone (Golem XIV) (h/t Deus Ex Macchiato).

I think of this as a more forceful way of stating the “No free lunch” form of the Efficient Market Hypothesis in the post crisis world where there is no risk free asset.
“Accounting is the beginning of all economic wisdom, but not the end.” — Willem H. Buiter and Ebrahim Rahbari, Target2 Redux: The simple accountancy and slightly more complex economics of Bundesbank loss exposure through the Eurosystem.

In my experience, most finance MBAs are unwilling to accept the first half of the statement, while most accountants ignore the second half of the statement.

Posted at 3:10 pm IST on Fri, 30 Nov 2012 permanent link