“Require the SEC to open up the L3 holdings of these banks to public scrutiny, auction off a sampling of these securities, and apply those prices to the L3 portfolios of all the banks. In this way we will know which banks are insolvent.

“I try to drench each novel with enough story and action and crisp dialogue to keep people from throwing the book against the wall when I start to preach at them.

“If you give people a measure of risk, they think they can control it and will take more risk.

“Bull markets are born in despair
grow with skepticism
mature with optimism
and die in mania.

“As long as we pay CEOs with stock that they don’t have to pay for, risk and reward will be decoupled.

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

“In 1834 the naturalist Jean de Charpentier, while walking along a country road with a Swiss woodcutter, got to talking about the rocks on the roadside. The woodcutter matter-of-factly told him that the boulders had come from a zone of granite some distance away, carried by the Grimsel glacier which had extended in the past as far as the town of Bern.

Charpentier was delighted, for he had come to such a view himself; but when he raised the notion at scientific gatherings, it was dismissed.

“In Singapore, repression is highly selective. It is confined to those who take a conscious decision openly to challenge the authorities. If you do not, you enjoy freedom to travel, to live more or less as you wish, and - perhaps most important - to make money. A growing number of highly-educated and well-travelled people are willing to hand over several of their freedoms in return for prosperity or security.

“Jambu Dvipa—the ancient name for the Indian subcontinent—literally means ‘the island of the Jamun fruit’.

“Performance should be close to optimal so as not to tempt people to make the code messy with unprincipled optimizations.