Quotes About Wealth

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.

Microsoft was twelve years old before people started talking about Microsoft millionaires; Netscape was one and a half.

Aldinger, collected his $100 million, Eisman was on his way to becoming the financial market's first socialist. "When you're a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off," he said. His mind was now fully

It was a measure of how much money people were making in the bond market that the magazine Institutional Investor was about to create a hot list of people who worked in it, called The 20 Rising Stars of Fixed Income. It was a measure of how much money people

The Yankees understood what New York understood, that there was no shame in buying success, and maybe because of their lack of shame they did what they did better than anyone in the business.

The people on the short side of the subprime mortgage market had gambled with the odds in their favor. The people on the other side—the entire financial system, essentially—had gambled with the odds against them. Up to this point, the story of the big short could not be simpler. What's strange and complicated about it, however, is that pretty much all the important people on both sides of the gamble left the table rich.

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they're still all wrong.

Every form of strength is also a form of weakness," he once wrote. "Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them.

How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

A year or so before he had bought and sold a million shares in @Home, and made a quick $45 million.

When, a few months later, Goldman Sachs announced it was setting aside $542,000 per employee for the 2006 bonus pool, he wrote again: "As a former gas station attendant, parking lot attendant, medical resident and current Goldman Sachs screwee, I am offended." In

The Mexican harvested strawberries; Wall Street harvested his FICO score.

New Growth Theory argued, in abstruse mathematics, that wealth came from the human imagination. Wealth wasn't chiefly having more of old things; it was having entirely new things. 'Growth is just another word for change

Engineers created the wealth. And during the 1990s Silicon Valley had created a fantastic amount of new wealth.

After Volcker's speech, bonds became objects of speculation, a means of creating wealth rather than merely storing it. Overnight the bond market was transformed from a backwater into a casino.

The more money one has, the less he values each additional increment, or, equivalently, that the utility of any additional dollar diminishes with an increase in capital.

The only one among them who wrestled a bit with their role—as the guys who had made a fortune betting against their own society—was Vincent Daniel. "Vinny, being from Queens, needs to see the dark side of everything," said Eisman. To

As yet, there is no final reckoning of the wealth the Valley has created. Hundreds of billions of dollars, certainly; perhaps even trillions. In any case, 'The greatest legal creation of wealth in the history of the planet,' as one local capitalist puts it. The

Clark couldn't stand the idea of anyone's working for him without having the chance to accumulate a bit of wealth.

You Can Be a Stock Market Genius

it was the only time he'd done something just for the money, and that he'd never do something just for the money ever again.

The change in the kind of person who got rich enough to buy a professional sports franchise also had helped. "The owners often made their money from disrupting fields where most of the conventional wisdom is bullshit," said Morey. These people tended to be keenly aware of the value of even slight informational advantages, and open to the idea of using data to gain those advantages.

The Valley was a little experiment of capitalism with too much capital.

There is an ancient rule of financial life—if you owe the bank 5 million bucks, the bank owns you, but if you owe the bank 5 billion bucks, you own the bank—that