If you owe $50, you're a delinquent account. If you owe $50,000, you're a small businessmen. If you owe $50 million, you're a corporation. If you owe $50 billion, you're the government.
Interpretation
The perception of debt changes based on the amount owed and the entity involved.
This quote highlights the varying societal attitudes towards debt based on its scale and the debtor's identity. It reflects how individuals, businesses, and governments are viewed differently when in debt, illustrating a kind of hierarchy in financial obligations that reveals broader truths about power, status, and economic systems.
In practice
During a financial seminar discussing the implications of debt on personal finances.
Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny.
A stock certificate is not a tool, like a shovel, or a commodity, like a pound of cheese. What we sell a customer is not a share in a business, but a view of the Elysian Fields. A financier is a creative artist. Our function is to stimulate the imagination. We are poets!
If I was counselling an individual, and my purpose was to help that individual, the most important thing would be that you should save more. Because don't expect that your retirement will follow those trajectories that some advisers are telling you.
Ben's Mr. Market allegory may seem out-of-date in today's investment world, in which most professionals and academicians talk of efficient markets, dynamic hedging and betas. Their interest in such matters is understandable, since techniques shrouded in mystery clearly have value to the purveyor of investment advice. After all, what witch doctor has ever achieved fame and fortune by simply advising 'Take two aspirins'?
We've used derivatives for many, many years. I don't think derivatives are evil, per se, I think they are dangerous.
The price of a commodity will never go to zero. When you invest in commodities futures, you're not buying a piece of paper that says you own an intangible piece of company that can go bankrupt.
The stock market really isn't a gamble, as long as you pick good companies that you think will do well, and not just because of the stock price.
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