Benjamin Graham (1894 – 1976)
Influential economist and professional investor.
The world has not learned the technique of balanced expansion without the resultant commercial and financial congestion.
The utility, or intrinsic value of gold as a commodity is now considerably less than in the past; its monetary status has become extraordinarily ambiguous; and its future is highly uncertain.
Instead of passing blithely over into that Promised Land, flowing almost literally with milk and honey, it may be our destiny to wander a full 40 years or more in the wilderness of doubt and divided sentiments.
Unusually rapid growth cannot keep up forever; when a company has already registered a brilliant expansion, its very increase in size makes a repetition of its achievement more difficult.
Wall Street has a few prudent principles; the trouble is that they are always forgotten when they are most needed.
"You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right."
To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realize; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks.
Cartels have spread and will spread as long as the world lacks an effective mechanism by which balanced expansion may be achieved without a resulting disruption of prices.
“The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns. ”
Why should the cotton growers suffer if there is shortage of wheat?
There is something paradoxical in the fact that by establishing an export market we subject our entire domestic production to the vagaries of that market.
Price statistics show clearly that instability in raw-material prices is a prime cause of instability of other prices.
Investment is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.
The Reservoir plan is an engineering mechanism applied to the field of economics, and in its essence it has nothing to do with democracy or any other political philosophy.
The modern world is not geared properly to the storage of goods.
"Individuals who cannot master their emotions are ill-suited to profit from the investment process."
THERE is widespread agreement among economists that abuse of credit constitutes one of the chief unwholesome elements in business booms and is mainly responsible for the ensuing crash and depression.
Both a priori reasoning and experience teach us that as as these funds grow larger the geometrical rate of growth by compound interest ultimately defeats itself.
It is a fact worth pondering that four centuries ago the evil of "an abundance or surplus" arose from its being kept off the market, while today the evil of surplus lies in its being thrown upon the market.
It must be fundamentally wrong to reduce production of food and fiber while one-third of our population is still ill fed and ill clothed.