Quotes About Wall Street

Although not well known outside Wall Street, Freddie Mac and its corporate cousin, Fannie Mae, are two of the world's largest financial institutions and play a crucial role in the housing market.

Wall Street's shenanigans have convinced a large portion of America that the economic game is rigged. Yet capitalism depends on trust. Without trust, people avoid even sensible economic risks. They also begin trading in gray markets and black markets. They think that if the big guys cheat in big ways, they may as well begin cheating in small ways. And when they think the game is rigged, they're easy prey for political demagogues with fast tongues and dumb ideas. Wall

Wall Street has blanketed America in a miasma of cynicism, and much of it is directed against Wall Street. The Street has only itself to blame.

If you took the greed out of Wall Street, all you'd have left is pavement.

How else can you explain why the Street was bailed out with no strings attached? Or why taxpayers didn't get equity in the banks we bailed out—as Warren Buffett got when he bailed out Goldman Sachs—so when the banks became profitable again, we didn't get any of the upside gains?

And behavior is altered by "situational labels"—call the game the "Wall Street Game," and people become less cooperative. Calling it the "Community Game" does the opposite.

O'Shaughnessy's best-selling book is titled What Works On Wall Street: The Classic Guide to the Best-Performing Investment Strategies of All Time.

Why did so many smart people believe these laissez-fairey tales? It's a good question. Some of the blame surely goes to the excessive faith in free markets that was the elixir of the day. Some goes to economists who believed and extolled the efficient markets hypothesis—and taught it to their students, many of whom wound up as financial engineers on Wall Street.

A few stalwart fiscal conservatives in Congress also bravely stepped up and stood against the plan to socialize major Wall Street investment banks, led by Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana. Pence had come out against the plan early, arguing that "economic freedom means the freedom to succeed26 and the freedom to fail.

For a man to take it at thirty-four as a guide-book to what life holds is about as safe as it would be for a man of the same age to enter Wall Street direct from a French convent, equipped with a complete set of the more practical Alger books.

But land is land, and it's safer than the stocks and bonds of Wall Street swindlers.

Madoff received so many death threats that he started wearing a bulletproof vest to his court appearances. Protestors sometimes gathered outside his apartment building, including an angry Wall Street trader who arrived on January 14 with a huge sign reading, "Bernie, it's not too late to do the right thing: JUMP!

My actual statement during the campaign was I want to be the sheriff of Wall Street, Albany and Main Street. I'm going to go after crime and corruption, wherever it is.

But the presidential Democratic Party, whipsawed between a liberal/labor wing and a Wall Street/New Democrat wing, has not been willing to make it a priority to help working people exercise their rights under the Wagner Act. Even when Democrats had a working majority in Congress, as they did for four years under President Carter, two under Clinton, and two under Obama, the White House refused to spend serious political capital on labor reform.

The financial turmoil on Wall Street and the William Duer debacle pointed up a glaring defect in Hamilton's political theory: the rich could put their own interests above the national interest.

A group of Wall Street admirers created for Grant a $250,000 Presidential Retiring Fund, which would not only yield $15,000 in annual interest but reinforce his image as overly beholden to the rich. To supplement his income, Grant returned to his

On September 20, the New York Stock Exchange halted trading for ten days. Grant received emergency pleas for purchases of Treasury bonds to add liquidity to national banks, while Thomas Murphy, the former New York customs collector, wired: "Relief must come immediately or hundreds if not thousands of our best men will be ruined." Not since 1837 had such a spasm of fear flashed through Wall Street.

To maximize its leverage over Wall Street, it scattered its gigantic balances among many banks;

Like the London merchant bankers, the early Jewish bankers on Wall Street had started out as dry-goods merchants: the Lehmans began as Alabama cotton brokers; Goldman, as the owner of a Pennsylvania clothing store, Kuhn and Loeb, as Cincinnati clothiers; and Lazard, in a New Orleans dry-goods business.

By 1900, the nation's railroads were consolidated into six huge systems controlled by Wall Street bankers, principally J. P. Morgan

Had the action not been taken, more than half the brokerage houses on Wall Street might have gone belly-up.

reinforced the view that the public was being held hostage by the stock manipulations of a few Wall Street moguls.

As a result of John's foresight in assigning him to New York, William's career became closely intertwined with that of Wall Street—to an uncomfortable extent, from John's later perspective.

Rockefellers and other Wall Street capitalists such as Jacob Schiff, Elihu Root, J. P. Morgan, and the Harriman family