Markets Quotes

“In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else's mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one's own place and economy.
In such a society, also, our private economies will depend less and less upon the private ownership of real, usable property, and more and more upon property that is institutional and abstract, beyond individual control, such as money, insurance policies, certificates of deposit, stocks, and shares. And as our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced or placeless citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers...
Thus, although we are not slaves in name, and cannot be carried to market and sold as somebody else's legal chattels, we are free only within narrow limits. For all our talk about liberation and personal autonomy, there are few choices that we are free to make. What would be the point, for example, if a majority of our people decided to be self-employed?
The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself… is that it’s purpose? No it’s not. It’s to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. And these same institutions run political campaigns. It’s pretty much the same: you have to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices.”
― Noam Chomsky, The Kind of Anarchism I Believe in, and What's Wrong with Libertarians

“A market economy is to economics what democracy is to government: a decent, if flawed, choice among many bad alternatives.”
― Charles Wheelan, Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science

“It is the job of the market to turn the base material of our emotions into gold.”
― Andrei Codrescu, Zombification: Stories from National Public Radio

“North Carolina and Virginia are probably two of the most business friendly states in the USA.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Markets fluctuate and markets can be unpredictable at times. This is why having a resilient portfolio is critical. Growth without resilience only ends in extreme loss. But resilience protects assets from loss.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“At Mayflower-Plymouth, we prioritize time in the market and not timing the market. We prioritize total return and not quick short term gains.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Capital is a living substance and it is expected to grow and to multiply and to compound. And the more capital we have, the more of it we can get, and the more income we can command.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, Investing, The Permaculture Way: Mayflower-Plymouth's 12 Principles of Permaculture Investing

“People are really buying the value created by the product or service, as opposed to the product or service itself.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, Business for Beginners: Getting Started

“We must be good consumers of capital – using it to create maximum value for ourselves, our family, our customers – that’s productivity.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, Business for Beginners: Getting Started

“A newly defined market will require either new capabilities or a new focus applied to current capabilities.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., Business Paradigm Shifting: A Quick 6-Step Guide to Remaining Relevant as Markets Change

“The primary purpose of the business’ capabilities is to provide superior value to the target market in exchange for money.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., Business Paradigm Shifting: A Quick 6-Step Guide to Remaining Relevant as Markets Change

“Business Paradigm Shifting helps companies stay agile in a rapidly changing market landscape.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., Business Paradigm Shifting: A Quick 6-Step Guide to Remaining Relevant as Markets Change

“Data Analytics is critical to wise investing, but so is good old fashioned understanding of business and markets.”
― Hendrith Smith

“The fundamental priority of every business is to create value for its customers or clients — to improve their lives in some way through the products or services being sold by the business.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, 4 Business Lessons From Jesus: A businessmans interpretation of Jesus' teachings, applied in a business context.

“Think of any product or service and beneath the surface, you’ll see it’s just a value exchange.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, Business for Beginners: Getting Started

“As we think about business, it’s important that we think from a value adding perspective.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, Business for Beginners: Getting Started

“People have to be able to access your businesses product or service. They have to notice your product or service among alternatives. And they have to feel an authentic connection.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, Business for Beginners: Getting Started

“In nature, adaptation is key to survival. Businesses must also adapt to changing market conditions to thrive.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.

“We are approaching a soft data catastrophe. Entire lives, from tastes in music and clothes to deepest personal convictions - all produced by networks of feedback between datamining and content recommendation algorithms.

The 'catastrophe' is when these algorithms unconsciously (or maybe, consciously?) lead people down presupposed paths for modern and emerging markets.

Algorithms could right now be helping make people convert to a religion, drug addicts, vegan, LGBTQ, ethnonarcissists, fat, cult members, suicidal, narcissists, atheist, poly, mass shooters...”
― stained hanes, 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat

“Below us was a frozen lake. It was perfectly round, a great gleaming eye in which the moon and stars were mirrored. Lanterns glowing the same cold white as the aurora dangled from the lake's edge to a scattering of benches and merchant-stands, draped in bright awnings of opal and blue. Delicious smells floated on the wind---smoked fish; fire-roasted nuts and candies; spiced cakes. A winter fair.*


* Outside of Russia, almost all known species of courtly fae, and many common fae also, are fond of fairs and markets; indeed, such gatherings appear in stories as the interstitial spaces between their worlds and ours, and thus it is not particularly surprising that they feature in so many encounters with the Folk. The character of such markets, however, varies widely, from sinister to benign. The following features are universal: 1) Dancing, which the mortal visitor may be invited to partake in; 2) A variety of vendors selling foods and goods which the visitor is unable to recall afterwards. More often than not, the markets take place at night. Numerous scholars have attempted to document these gatherings; the most widely referenced accounts are by Baltasar Lenz, who successfully visited two fairs in Bavaria before his disappearance in 1899.”
― Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries

“Capital must be stewarded — it must be acted upon with a spirit of responsibility.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, Business for Beginners: Getting Started

“There is discrimination, and the opportunities are not equal to everyone. Most countries are blocked from using several crucial features on Google, Amazon, Shopify, AliExpress, and many more platforms that the" internet millionaires "use to get all of their wealth. They are not smarter than you! They simply have access to markets that are blocked to you! When you try to compete inside their markets, the domain owners alter the algorithms to favor people in that geolocation and put them and their products in front of your. I have been stopped from uploading books for no other reason than being in east Europe. People don't believe these stories are true because they don't want to believe they are living in such a world. It's like the story of the Native Americans, who were offered blankets contaminated with diseases to kill them. Now you are being offered a blanket of illusions that gives you lies. And when you say the truth, they call it a conspiracy and hate speech.”
― Dan Desmarques

“Like any ecosystem, a modern economy cannot survive without recycling. Just as animals and plants are continually recycling the oxygen and carbon dioxide that the other provides, so too must workers recycle their wages by spending them in shops and businesses recycle their revenues by spending them on salaries if both are to survive. And just as in our ecosystems, in which a failure of recycling leads to desertification, so when recycling breaks down in the economy we end up with a crisis that results in devastating poverty and deprivation.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails

“Surely little remained of the Puritan legacy of prudish rectitude, he thought: surely this was now a country of excess, gluttony, lust, and sloth; surely this had grown into a land where obesity reigned and even the poor moved ponderously down the street on big thighs that rubbed fatly together. What had become of the pilgrims' gaunt and stingy oversight? He knew in part it was the visionary genius of enterprising men, but such entrepreneurs were only the tools of a hungry culture. For the descendants of those gray, upright pioneers had cherished cravings for beef patties with ketchup, deep-fried chicken and vats of ice cream, chemically scented and dyed all the colors of the rainbow, and billions upon billions of gallons of soda. Their thirst had never been quite slaked and so they never finished drinking; and this was the market in all its streamlined functionality—which, precisely where the supply and the demand curves crossed, had swiftly produced a nation of paralyzed giants, fallen across their couches much as soldiers on the field of battle, their arteries hard, their softened hearts failing.

The market made a fool of you by giving you what you wanted. But this did not make him resent it; it merely earned his respect. From the day you were born you were called upon to discern what to choose.”
― Lydia Millet, How the Dead Dream

“Stella daydreamed about Continental delicatessen stores and the scent of ripe tomatoes. She and Michael had liked to go to Covent Garden and Billingsgate together, to Fortnum & Mason, and to the little foreign grocers' shops around Golders Green, Soho and Camden Town. She'd loved to see the sacks of pistachio nuts and the jars of crystallized ginger, the bottles of orange-flower water and distillations of rose petals, suggestive of the flavors of dishes fromThe Arabian Nights,the barrels of pickled herrings and the sides of salt beef. Together they enjoyed talking about what they might do with the star anise and the brined green peppercorns, the tarragon vinegar and the bottled bilberries. People had sometimes given Stella questioning looks when she took her sketchpad to the markets, but there was a pleasure in trying to capture the textures of the piled oranges and peaches and the glimmer of mackerel scales.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“The corporation is supposed to take us outside ourselves. We design these organized bodies to respond to the market, face foursquare into the world. But things tend to drift dimly inward. Gossip, rumor, promotions, personalities, it’s only natural, isn’t it—all the human lapses that take up space in the company soul. But the world persists, the world heals in a way. You feel the contact points around you, the caress of linked grids that give you a sense of order and command.”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that’s electronic and sex that’s cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire—not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“Any system that reduces the world to numbers
can only be held in place by weapons, whether these are swords and
clubs, or nowadays, "smart bombs" from unmanned drones.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years