You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.

I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

Years ago, I noticed one thing about economics, and that is that economists didn't get anything right.

If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.

People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.