Bill Gross

I always thought of myself as being part of a family and sharing and, yes, leading, but not forcing people to do anything.

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.

I am tough but I have a soft side.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

It's going to be difficult to stimulate the real economy in the U.S. at a faster rate than 2 percent and perhaps even less if we have that fiscal cliff in December or January 2013.

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.

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.

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