Christopher Leonard Quotes

“At Charles Koch’s direction, the company had filled whole rooms of its basement with computers and processing power, the ability to churn and analyze mountains of information. Koch built a company around learning.

Charles believed there were quantifiable laws that drove the world, unbreakable laws that were true whether a person believed in them or not. These laws were the principles by which he tried to live and run his business. He never doubted these principles, even in the darkest days of the late 1990s.

The principles had been correct. He had simply made mistakes in carrying them out. So he would do better. His solution was simple: I just work harder.”

“He was also the father of four rowdy and brilliant boys, boys in whom he’d worked to instill the values that mattered most to him: intelligence, a hard work ethic, integrity, and drive.”

“Most poisonous of all was the feeling of dashed expectations.”

“One of the key lessons that Charles Koch took from the Austrian economists von Mises and Hayek was that markets never stood still. The status quo never survived.

Markets always build up and then tear down. It was an evolutionary process that never ended, and companies that tried to fight the process would only be devoured by the forces of change in the end.”

“The whale that comes above sea level gets harpooned.”

“Asset inflation, however, was out of control by 1998. But this didn’t raise much public concern. When asset inflation gets out of hand, people don’t call it inflation. They call it a boom.”

“Central banks cause inflation when they keep interest rates too low for too long.”

“In 1998, it was undeniable that the stock market boom was closely tied to the Fed’s policies. In July, Greenspan warned that stock prices might be unsustainably high, which made traders panic at the thought that the Fed would raise rates and tighten the money supply.

Between July and August, stock market prices fell by about 18 percent. In response, the Fed cut rates again from 5.5 percent to about 4.8 percent in just a couple of months. The stock market bounced back.”

“Quantitative easing was designed and initiated with the specific goal of inflating stock market prices.”

“The bailout of 2020 — the largest expenditure of American public resources since World War II — solidified and entrenched an economic regime that had been quietly and steadily constructed, largely by the Federal Reserve, during the previous decade.

The resources from this bailout went largely to the entities that were strengthened by the policies of ZIRP and QE. It went to large corporations that used borrowed money to buy out their competitors; it went to the very richest of Americans.”

“The Federal Reserve system is unlike any other in the world; it is a crazy genetic mashup of different animals, part private bank and part government agency.”