Myron Scholes Quotations

My career in academic research has not been involved with active management of securities. I've tried to understand risk-and-return relationships; also the pricing of derivative securities.

A bank needs models to measure risk. The problem, however, is that any one bank can measure its risk, but it also has to know what the risk taken by other banks in the system happens to be at any particular moment.

I was involved with Wells Fargo Bank as a consultant in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I suggested to them that they develop a product that has become known as index funds.

If someone says to you, Go to an old-folks home, thats kind of ridiculous, because a lot of old people are doing terrific things for society.

If we internationalize everything, we end up with rules that stifle freedom and innovation.

Sometimes the early bird gets the worm, but sometimes the early bird gets frozen to death.

I'm a theorist, not an institutionalist.

Innovation must lead infrastructure for a simple but compelling reason: Innovation produces new types of products and markets, and it is virtually impossible to know how to run those markets efficiently before they are created.

Most of the time, your risk management works. With a systemic event such as the recent shocks following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, obviously the risk-management system of any one bank appears, after the fact, to be incomplete. We ended up where banks couldn't liquidate their risk, and the system tended to freeze up.

Tax incentives might spur hiring in the short run, but how lasting are those gains if the jobs expire with the tax credits and they come at the expense of investing in the new technologies of the future?