Investment Philosophers & Financial Economists

Narrated by Louis Rukeyser

Hear a sample from
Swiss Gnomes and Global Investing

Investment philosophers have long debated the role of money in a life well lived.  Among their lessons are:

• Earn all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can. (John Wesley)
• Industry, Frugality, Prudence. (Benjamin Franklin)
• A part of all you earn is yours to keep. (George Clason)
• Preparation, incubation, illumination, verification. (Bennett Goodspeed)
• Work for yourself. Satisfy your customers. Be thrifty in all things. Leave the world a better place than you found it. (J. Paul Getty)
• Make it easy to save. Make it difficult to spend. Control your debt. (Mark and Jo Ann Skousen)
• Know that you are free to act and think for yourself. (Rose Wilder Lane)

Financial economists work to explain (and predict) the markets. Depending on how their theories match reality, their results are sometimes spectacular- and sometimes disastrous. Among the economists discussed are: George Soros, Harry Browne, and Gary Schilling (who successfully anticipated macroeconomic shifts, e.g. in currency exchange rates or inflation); Irving Fisher (whose theories led to astoundingly wrong predictions about the Great Depression); John Maynard Keynes (a successful long-term investor who couldn't anticipate short-term events); and Felix Somary, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek (Austrian economists whose theory of the business cycle led them to foresee the 1929 crash and the depression that followed).