If you owe $50, you're a delinquent account. If you owe $50,000, you're a small businessmen. If you owe $50 million, you're a corporation. If you owe $50 billion, you're the government.
Interpretation
The perception of debt changes based on the amount owed and the entity involved.
This quote highlights the varying societal attitudes towards debt based on its scale and the debtor's identity. It reflects how individuals, businesses, and governments are viewed differently when in debt, illustrating a kind of hierarchy in financial obligations that reveals broader truths about power, status, and economic systems.
In practice
During a financial seminar discussing the implications of debt on personal finances.
Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny.
This message (that attempting to beat the market is futile) can never be sold on Wall Street because it is in effect telling stock analysts to drop dead.
Gold is money and nothing else.
When somebody asserts that a stock has an earning power of so much, I am sure that the person who hears him doesn't know what he means, and there is a good chance that the man who uses it doesn't know what it means.
Not yet have I found any better method to prosper during the future financial chaos, which is likely to last many years, than to keep your net worth in shares of those corporations that have proven to have the widest profit margins and the most rapidly increasing profits. Earning power is likely to continue to be valuable, especially if diversified among many nations.
How did you go bankrupt?" Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.
The propensity to swindle grows parallel with the propensity to speculate during a boom the implosion of an asset price bubble always leads to the discovery of frauds and swindles
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