Bill Gross

“People have different impressions of themselves, and where reality lies is somewhere in between.”

“Ex-Fidelity mutual fund manager Peter Lynch was certainly brilliant in one respect: he knew to get out when the gettin' was good.”

“You know those adages about smelling the roses and chasing butterflies? The markets are my butterflies and my roses.”

“Well, I, you know, I think at PIMCO we always try and be open with the press and the public. I mean, isn't that what voters want from their politicians? Mohamed El-Erian, our CEO, writes several op-eds a week.”

“Obama/Romney, Romney/Obama - the most important election of our lifetime? Fact is they're all the same - bought and paid for with the same money. Ours is a country of the SuperPAC, by the SuperPAC, and for the SuperPAC.”

“The real boss in the family is my wife. She didn't want me hanging around the house all day and said, 'You don't want to retire; you'll regret it.' So I listened to her.”

“My clients don't pay me to feel sorry; they pay me to bring them money. I am tough, but I have a soft side.”

“Companies typically borrow money at less than their return on equity and therefore compound their return at the expense of lenders.”

“Bernanke and company are trying to reflate the economy with almost stated objective of inflation at 2 percent and higher in order to provide some type of safety margin for a future recession. That's where they want to go.”

“In questioning initially whether I am a great investor, I open the door to question whether other similarly esteemed public icons like Bill Miller are as well. It seems, perhaps, that the longer and longer you keep at it in this business the more and more time you have to expose your Achilles heel - wherever and whatever that might be.”

“Accountants, machinists, medical technicians, even software writers that write the software for 'machines' are being displaced without upscaled replacement jobs. Retrain, rehire into higher paying and value-added jobs? That may be the political myth of the modern era. There aren't enough of those jobs.”

“When does money run out of time? The countdown begins when investable assets pose too much risk for too little return; when lenders desert credit markets for other alternatives such as cash or real assets.”

“If financial assets no longer work for you at a rate far and above the rate of true wealth creation, then you must work longer for your money.”

“Bonds as an asset class will always be needed, and not just by insurance companies and pension funds but by aging boomers.”

“Both from the standpoint of stocks and bonds, an investor wants to go where the growth is.”

“Human nature means that institutions at some point lose their sense of mission. That sense of vulnerability drives Pimco.”

“Whether a tops-down or bottoms-up investor in bonds, stocks, or private equity, the standard analysis tends to judge an investor or his firm on the basis of how the bullish or bearish aspects of the cycle were managed.”

“I am obsessed with delivering value to investors and winning the game from a personal standpoint.”

“It's sort of like a teeter-totter; when interest rates go down, prices go up.”

“Favouring employment versus the financial markets is a decent policy; certainly not beneficial for the currency or the gilt market, but beneficial for the people.”