Quotes About Wall Street

Hating Wall Street is an American tradition that dates back even to the days when Thomas Jefferson cursed that money lover Alexander Hamilton. And for centuries, the complaints about it have largely stayed the same: 'It does nothing! It creates chaos! It's a parasite that sucks hardworking Americans dry!'

Individual participation in the stock market through 401(k)s helped fuel the go-go days of Wall Street in the 1980s and birthed asset management juggernauts like Fidelity, Vanguard, Pimco, BlackRock, and dozens of others.

Wall Street apparently takes and then forgets, and then comes after the guns of law-abiding American citizens and small businesses.

It is a truth universally acknowledged on Wall Street that original research is on life support. Serious research can be bad for business, as well as expensive.

There are a lot of ethical firms on Wall Street.

I went to work on Wall Street for about three or four years with an investment bank, got certified: series 3, series 7, and all this stuff.

The economy may be complex, but Americans understand that the Wall Street banks control an outsized portion of the economy and that they have an outsized interest in their own profits.

The issue is the Republican Party has been paying too much attention to Wall Street and not enough attention to Main Street.

For CNBC, and for Wall Street, billion-dollar fines for violations of the law are just part of the price of doing business, along with litigation costs and 'compliance.'

People are rightfully upset about Wall Street abuses and excess.

Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I've been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.

In reality, no one on Wall Street cares about anything except performance.

In truth, Wall Street is in for a radical makeover. Fewer people, lower margins, lower risk, lower compensation - and ultimately, fewer talented people. It is likely to change the culture of an industry that for nearly a century has been the money center of the world.

I can see this on Wall Street today - I can see this with the securitization of everything is that, everything is looked at as a securitization opportunity. People are looked at as commodities. I don't believe that our forefathers had that same belief.

I never realized that growing up in Brooklyn, flying jets, working on Wall Street and starring in a sci-fi series was the prerequisite for the fast-paced demands of talk radio. But, if that's what it takes to succeed, I'm glad I did it all.

Wall Street, in the main, hates uncertainty, which manifests itself in depressed share prices of companies whose prospects lack 'visibility.' But where the market can err is in confusing uncertainty with risk.

When I was 15 years old, I read an article about Ivan Boesky, the well-known takeover trader - turned out years later it was all on inside information! But before that came to light, he was very successful, very flamboyant. And I thought, 'This is what I want to do.' So I'm 15 years old, I decide I'm going to Wall Street.

What Wall Street is, they're market makers. Wall Street's business model is making money on velocity of money. They're a click industry. That's what Wall Street is. They make a lot of money when there's a lot of turnover. And they make a lot of money when that velocity is fast.

If you really think that ambition, power, lust, desire are not as applicable in the media as in politics or on Wall Street or anywhere else, you're deluding yourself.

I think that rather than saying that Occupy Wall Street has died, we can say that they're in the process of understanding what the long march through alternative institutions might mean.

If we take care of the customers and associates and grow the business, Wall Street will be pleased.

There are those on Wall Street and in the plutocracy who feel that Geithner is a hero who deftly steered the country from economic ruin. To many ordinary Americans, however, he is considered a Wall Street puppet and a servant of the so-called banksters.

What I immediately recognized about Wall Street in 1983 was that it was a continuation of my career in theater. Wall Street is a big theater, and it's all illusions.

I think very few people still understand the distinction between CEOs on Wall Street and the hedge-fund billionaires operating separately.