In The Absence Of The Gold Standard,

This Decade Is Strewn With Examples Of Bright People Who Thought They Built A Better Mousetrap That Could Consistently Extract Abnormal Returns From The Financial Markets. Some Succeed For A Time. But While There May Occasionally Be Mis-configurations Among Market Prices That Allow Abnormal Returns, They Do Not Persist.

It Seems Superfluous To Constrain Trading In Some Of The Newer Derivatives And Other Innovative Financial Contracts Of The Past Decade. The Worst Have Failed; Investors No Longer Fund Them And Are Not Likely To In The Future.

The Very Nature Of Finance Is That It Cannot Be Profitable Unless It Is Significantly Leveraged... And As Long As There Is Debt, There Can Be Failure And Contagion.

The More Flexible An Economy, The Greater Its Ability To Self-correct In Response To Inevitable, Often Unanticipated, Disturbances And Thus To Contain The Size And Consequences Of Cyclical Imbalances.

It Has Been My Experience That Competency In Mathematics, Both In Numerical Manipulations And In Understanding Its Conceptual Foundations, Enhances A Person's Ability To Handle The More Ambiguous And Qualitative Relationships That Dominate Our Day-to-day Financial Decision-making