Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

Build a better mousetrap, the saying goes, and the world will beat a path to your door. Find a way to beat the stockmarket and they will construct a high-speed railway.

Executives justify flying private on the grounds that they may need to get back to the office quickly in an emergency, and that confidential documents or company devices may be lost or stolen on a commercial flight. But when they enjoy that extra security, they are exposing them­selves to another risk: private-plane crashes are a leading cause of death for CEOs, behind only heart attacks, cancer and strokes.

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.

Acquirers only want the family silver, not the dross.

You can display your yacht in a way that you can't show off your house or hotel suite, because there is always the option of weighing anchor and taking it into the middle of the ocean where you don't have to socia­lise with anybody except the glitterati. Superyacht owners are always dropping in on each other as they criss-cross the seas, to compare not just their vessels but also their guest lists. When the Monaco Yacht Show started in 1991 there were just 1,147 superyachts (that is, yachts longer than 30 metres) in the global superyacht fleet. Today there are 4,473, with another 473 under construction.

To make or to buy is perhaps the most basic question in business.

It is hard to when bubbles will pop, in particular when they are nested within each other predict.

Politician + pump prices + poll = panic.

America's dynamic economy creates and destroys around 5m jobs each month.

Returns on rare coins over ten years to the end of 2016 were 195%, easily beating art (139%), stamps (133%), furniture (-31%) and the S&P 500 index (58%). Coins are more portable than paintings or furniture, and boast a higher value-to-volume ratio. Stamps may be lighter, but, come doomsday, cannot be melted down. Today, global sales of rare coins are estimated at $5bn-8bn a year, with 85% of the market in America.

An authoritarian government can provide certainty, at least in the short term. In 1922, when Mussolini took power in Italy, its equity market re­turned 29% and its government bonds 18%, according to Mike Staunton of the London Business School. Hitler's accession in 1933 saw German shares return 14% and bonds 15%.

If you want to get rich, goes a Chinese saying, first build a road.

The bond market looks about as intimidating as a chihuahua in a handbag.

One calls him the best possible pilot of the worst possible aircraft.