Mervyn King famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

When I was a graduate student at Harvard, I learned about showers and central heating. Ten years later, I learned about breakfast meetings. These are America's three great contributions to civilization.
-- Mervyn King

#Learning #Years #Civilization
Global market forces will sort out those companies that do not have sound corporate governance.
-- Mervyn King

#Sound #Force #Company
Of all the many ways of organising banking, the worst is the one we have today.
-- Mervyn King

#Banking #Today #Way
There is no reason products and services could not be swapped directly by consumers and producers through a system of direct exchange – essentially a massive barter economy. All it requires is some commonly used unit of account and adequate computing power to make sure all transactions could be settled immediately. People would pay each other electronically, without the payment being routed through anything that we would currently recognize as a bank. Central banks in their present form would no longer exist – nor would money.
-- Mervyn King

#People #Adequate #Pay
To set aside one’s prejudices, one’s present needs, and one’s own self interest in making a decision as a director for a company is an intellectual exercise that takes constant practice. In short, intellectual honesty is a journey and not a destination.
-- Mervyn King

#Honesty #Exercise #Journey
When banks extend loans to their customers, they create money by crediting their customers’ accounts.
-- Mervyn King

#Loan #Accounts #Customers
Banks have come to realize in the recent crisis that they are paying the price for having designed compensation packages which provide incentives that are not, in the long run, in the interests of the banks themselves, and I would like to think that would change.
-- Mervyn King

#Running #Thinking #Long
The underlying intellectual argument for seeking to tax economic rents retains its force.
-- Mervyn King

#Intellectual #Argument #Economic

No matter how much we learn, there is always more knowledge to be gained. In this connection I am reminded of a short poem that has been in my mind over the years. It reads as follow: I used to think I knew I knew. But now I must confess. The more I know I know I know I know I know the less.
Collect as precious pearls the words of the wise and virtuous.
Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and diligence.
You will either step forward into growth or you will step back into safety.
Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has any time to learn.
Learning (Shakespeare's plays) ...in school was a bit of a bore.
The year showed me beyond a doubt that everyone practices cafeteria religion... But the important lesson was this: there's nothing wrong with choosing. Cafeterias aren't bad per se... the key is in choosing the right dishes. You need to pick the nurturing ones (compassion), the healthy ones (love thy neighbor), not the bitter ones.
One of the penalties of being president of the United States is that you must subsist for four years without drinking anything except Californian wine.
If the lives of men can be measured in terms of years, ideologies in decades, and nations in centuries, then the unit measuring civilizations, born of the interaction among peoples, would be the millennium.
The human race has improved everything, but the human race.

Mervyn King famous quotes

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