Politics & Power Quote by Bernard Baruch

Trust, in Baruch's world, is a tradable commodity and executives are the least reliable brokers of it. "Never pay the slightest attention" isn't just cranky advice from an old Wall Street hand; it's a deliberately absolutist warning about a structural conflict. A company president talking up his stock isn't a neutral narrator. He's a salesman with asymmetric information, professional incentives, and a reputational need to project control even when the numbers are wobbling. Baruch strips away the polite fiction that corporate speech is primarily about truth-telling.

The line works because it weaponizes plain language against the era's cultivated optimism. Baruch came of age through panics, booms, and the rise of modern investor relations, when "confidence" could be manufactured as easily as it could collapse. His cynicism reads like an early diagnosis of what we'd now call signaling: executives broadcast certainty to stabilize price, attract capital, or buy time. The subtext is that markets aren't merely moved by fundamentals; they're moved by narratives, and the narrator often has skin in the game.

There's also a democratic bite to it. Baruch is speaking to the small investor, the person most likely to mistake authority for accuracy. The president's title becomes part of the con. Not because every executive lies, but because even honest executives are trapped inside a role that rewards selective disclosure. In an age of earnings calls, curated shareholder letters, and media-friendly CEOs, the quote still lands as a reminder: the most confident voice in the room is often the one with the most to gain.