Quotes About Transparency

The system didn't screw you. The system revealed you.

Once again, vague terminology helped conceal what was really going on.

Therefore, the full SOTU address of 2018 follows shortly.

Dark pools were another rogue spawn of the new financial marketplace. Private stock exchanges, run by the big brokers, they were not required to reveal to the public what happened inside them. They reported any trade they executed, but they did so with sufficient delay that it was impossible to know exactly what was happening in the broader market at the moment the trade occurred.

The U.S. stock market now trades inside black boxes, in heavily guarded buildings in New Jersey and Chicago.

The entire health industry lies about what things cost to make," she said. "I know what things cost because I made them.

Liquidity. When an executive said his bank had plenty of liquidity it always meant that it didn't. At

unpleasant odor wafting from the subprime mortgage industry that Eisman had detected. These companies disclosed their ever-growing earnings, but not much else. One of the many items they failed to disclose was the delinquency rate of the home loans they were making.

The fact that it is such an opaque industry should be alarming," Brad said. "The fact that the people who make the most money want the least clarity possible—that should be alarming, too.

It's the places in our government where the cameras never roll that you have to worry about most.

He concluded that there was effectively no way for an accountant assigned to audit a giant Wall Street firm to figure out whether it was making money or losing money.

the Wall Street firm became a black box. The shareholders who financed the risk taking had no real understanding of what the risk takers were doing, and, as the risk taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished.

We always asked the same question," says Eisman. "'Where are the ratings agencies in all this?' And I'd always get the same reaction. It was a physical reaction because they didn't want to say it. It was a smirk.

After Trump took office, DJ Patil watched with wonder as the data disappeared across the federal government. Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior removed from their websites the links to climate change data.

The new acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney, said he wanted to end public access to records of consumer complaints against financial institutions. Two weeks after Hurricane Maria, statistics that detailed access to drinking water and electricity in Puerto Rico were deleted from the FEMA website.

The U.S. stock market now trades inside black boxes, in heavily guarded buildings in New Jersey and Chicago. What goes on inside those black boxes is hard to say—the ticker tape that runs across the bottom of cable TV screens captures only the tiniest fraction of what occurs in the stock markets. The public reports of what happens inside the black boxes are fuzzy and unreliable—even an expert cannot say what exactly happens inside them, or when it happens, or why.

The entire health industry lies about what things cost to make

His willingness to throw open a window on the American financial world, and to show people what it has become, still takes my breath away.

The food never tastes so good as when everybody at the table worked on it and everybody knows what went into it. (Interview in Lucky Peach 6)

But imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost.

I prized, too, the almost perfect transparency of this meal, the brevity and simplicity of the food chain that linked it to the wider world.

How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?

People can see it when you're honest and sincere.

I'm a big fan of saying the thing that is not necessarily sincere or earnest, but definitely honest.