In cheap action films the bad guy is taken out by force. In the better sort, he falls victim to his own hubris. The great risk, though, is that Europe and Russia find themselves in a film noir, where the villain's plot fails but takes everyone down with it.
You make your money working in active management but invest the proceeds passively.
Being in the chemicals business is like swimming in a vat of sulphuric acid.
In trade as elsewhere, the new administration seems prone to using statistics as a drunk uses a lamppost – for support rather than illumination.
Like an errant husband, investors may proclaim their fidelity to democracy but are not averse to seeing someone else on the side.
There are many ways to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Malls were conceived in the 1950s by Victor Gruen, an Austrian immigrant, as a new enclosed version of a town square.
China has a history of hilariously inappropriate export brand-names, including Front Gate men's underwear, Long March luggage and, guaranteed to raise a laugh, Great Leap Forward floor polish.
It is impossible to know if a television viewer has gone to the bathroom during the commercials. Fraud is a peskier problem. Bad actors hide within advertising's supply chain, unleashing robots to "see" ads and suck money from advertisers.
In 2014 the International Energy Agency (IEA), a semi-official forecaster, predicted that decarbonising the global electricity grid will require almost $20trn in investment in the 20 years to 2035, at which point the process will still be far from finished.
Mr Xi is China's "COE", or chairman of everything.
The prices of good and bad tulips soared alike in 17th-century Holland, and in 2008 subprime debt was almost as valuable as Treasury bonds.
For investors the most dangerous words in the English language are "this time it's different".
Why don't fund managers look out of the window in the mornings? Because then they'd have nothing to do in the afternoons.
If all the nation's economists were laid end to end, they would point in all different directions.
The use of tractors in agriculture rose sharply from the 1910s to the 1950s, and horses were displaced in vast numbers. As demand for traditional horse-work fell, so did horse prices, by about 80 % between 1910 and 1950. As the numbers of working horses and mules in America fell from about 21m in 1918 to only 3m or so in 1960, the decline was mirrored in the overall horse population.