“Subprime mortgages were just fraudulent,” he declares. “There was no there there. Nothing today compares to that.” This said, corporate credit is rising and there is more leveraged debt, as there was in 2007.

One overriding insight an interviewer takes away from reading and talking to Marks is his dispassionate analytical framework driven by an ability to anticipate several chess moves beyond the current configuration of the chessboard. “Every positive has a negative and every negative has a positive,” he says.

At 17 times earnings, the S&P 500 doesn’t look highly overvalued with 6% earnings when contrasted against 10-year Treasurys paying 3%. But if interest rates keep rising, that could change.

Indeed, one of the strongest statements Marks makes in his book is that nothing is permanent. Take the Shiller CAPE (cyclically adjusted price-earnings) ratio, a long-term, 10-year averaging technique that won Yale University’s Robert Shiller a Nobel prize. Some noted investors cite it as evidence equity prices have moved to bubble levels. Marks believes that come 2020 when the outlier multiples seen during the financial crisis fall out of the formula, the CAPE ratio will go down.

As a distressed debt investor, Marks is dealing with a drought in that asset class. Simply put, yet another sign of today’s economic health is the scarcity of defaults, though many are starting to question the heavy issuance of corporate debt to buy back stocks.

“The market is not an accommodating machine; it won’t give you returns because you need them,” he says, noting patience is part of his firm’s DNA. “The market won’t give you defaults because you want them.”

Nonetheless, he believes there will be another wave of high defaults at some point. “When people think the world is safe, the very things they do make it risky.”

When opportunity presents itself, an investor needs to act. In 2009, Oaktree made what Marks calls its best investment ever. Some old colleagues, Jeffrey Gundlach and Phil Barach, were looking to set up DoubleLine, and Oaktree bought a 20% equity stake in the nascent business.

“We knew Jeff and Phil Barach,” he says. Marks, Gundlach, Barach and many others at both Oaktree and DoubleLine worked in the 1980s and early 1990s at TCW. The decision wasn’t difficult.

When it comes to the future, Marks likes Albert Einstein’s observation. “I don’t worry too much about the future. It will happen soon enough.”