Martin Wolf Quotes

People who think they know what is going to happen next are fools. Surprises - or what the brilliant author Nassim Taleb calls 'Black Swans' - are inevitable. Some are likely to be desperately unpleasant too

In order to change the system, we need to change our ideas.

The essence of the contemporary monetary system is creation of money, out of nothing, by private banks’ often foolish lending.

Cultural diversity and cultural change are desirable and inevitable. We are cultural animals, someone without a culture is not human. But the cultures we possess vary enormously. Indeed, the variability, over time and space is the great evolutionary advantage of humanity. Instead of changing biologically over millennia, human beings can change culturally over decades

There is no room for being creative in today’s business... Except for finding creative ways to be inefficient.

Those who condemn the immorality of liberal capitalism do so in comparison with a society of saints that has never existed—and never will

The four most dangerous words in finance are 'this time is different.' Thanks to this masterpiece by Carmen Reinhart at the University of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard, no one can doubt this again. . . . The authors have put an immense amount of work into collecting the data financial institutions needed if they were to have any chance of making quantitative risk management work.

The notion of the competitiveness of countries, on the model of the competitiveness of companies, is nonsense.

Sustaining growth is the century's big challenge.