Benjamin Graham (1894 – 1976)
Influential economist and professional investor.
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. ”
The world has not learned the technique of balanced expansion without the resultant commercial and financial congestion.
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.