George Goodman

George Jerome Waldo Goodman (born August 10, 1930, in St. Louis, Missouri) is an American author and economics broadcast commentator, best known by his pseudonym Adam Smith (which was assigned by Clay Felker at New York Magazine in order to keep his published articles about Wall Street anonymous). He also writes fiction under the name "George Goodman."

The world is not the way they tell you it is.

Sourced

The Money Game (1968)

• The world is not the way they tell you it is.
  • Chapter 1, Why Did The master Say "Game"?, p. 3

• It is amazing how stupid one can be in graduate school, because while I was puzzling through L1(Y) = Y/V = M1, the income velocity of money, I missed all the fun.
  • Chapter 1, Why Did The master Say "Game"?, p. 8

• In fact, a crowd of men acts like a single woman.
  • Chapter 2, Mister Johnson's Reading List, p. 23

• All you need is a hell of an aperceptive mass, an IQ of 150, and a dollop of ESP, and you can ignore the headlines, because you anticipated them months ago.
  • Chapter 3, Can Ink Blots Tell You..., p. 40

anyone who has ever sold IBM has regretted it.

• In Freud's crowd, the individuals fasten on an object, substitute it for their ego ideal, and all those with the same ego ideal identify themselves with each other in their ego. Remove the object and you get anxiety.
  • Chapter 4, Is the Market Really A Crowd?, p. 49

• But the investors who really follow the market, the ones who call up all the time, ninety percent of them really don't care whether they make money or not.
  • Chapter 5, You Mean That's What Money Really Is?, p. 53

• It is a parable of pure capitalism, never jam today and a case of jam tomorrow; but as any of the Smiths will tell you, anyone who has ever sold IBM has regretted it.
  • Chapter 6, What Are They In It For?, p. 68

• The strongest emotions in the marketplace are greed and fear.
  • Chapter 7, Identity And Anxiety, p. 79

• You can be in love with that piece of paper if you want to, but that piece of paper doesn't love you,...
  • Chapter 7, Identity And Anxiety, p. 81

• You have to go for the quantum jumps.
  • Chapter 7, Identity And Anxiety, p. 89

• This is the way things are, and the Game has been so successful that, like everything, it will get more and more successful until it stops being successful.
  • Chapter 8, Where The Money Is, p. 102

• Nothing works all the time and in all kinds of markets.
  • Chapter 9, Mr Smith Admits His Biases, p. 104

• Wall Street, as you already know, is part of Marshall McLuhan's vision of the world in the Electric Age, that is, a global village dependent on oral-aural communication.
  • Chapter 10, Can Footprints Predict The Future?, p. 128

• Prices have no memory, and yesterday has nothing to do with tomorrow.
  • Chapter 11, What The Hell Is A Random Walk?, p. 148

• The reason everybody signed up for a computer was that everybody else was signing up for a computer.
  • Chapter 12, Computers And Computeers, p. 169

• Most accountants are honorable men, trying to do a job. But they are hired by corporations, not by investors.
  • Chapter 13, But What Do The Numbers Mean?, p. 185

• Somebody has to be on the other side.
  • Chapter 14, Why Are The Little People Always Wrong?, p. 200

Currencies do not vote.

• All the funds simply can't get through the exit door at the same time.
  • Chapter 15, The Cult of Performance, p. 215

• When the Rothchilds got the word about the battle of Waterloo - in the movie it was by carrier pigeon - they didn't rush down and buy British consols, the government bonds. They rushed in and sold, and then, in the panic, they bought.
  • Chapter 16, Lunch At Scarsdale Fats', p. 227

• " what moves is what is already moving. Sort of Newtonian."
  • Chapter 17, Losers And Winners,

• When there is no game, don't play,...
  • Chapter 18, Timing And A Diversion: The Cocoa Game, p. 253

• The phrase " the Gnomes of Zurich" was coined by George Brown, the Deputy Prime Minister of Great Britain.
  • Chapter 19, My Friend The Gnome of Zurich, p. 272

• Currencies do not vote.
  • Chapter 20, If All The Half Dollars Have Disappeared...?, p. 282

• Godliness is in league with riches.
  • Chapter 21, The Purposive Investor, p. 298