Quotes About Finance

The U.S. financial markets had always been either corrupt or about to be corrupted.

Investment bankers make money for a living.

Charlie Ledley—curiously uncertain Charlie Ledley—was odd in his belief that the best way to make money on Wall Street was to seek out whatever it was that Wall Street believed was least likely to happen, and bet on its happening.

If there was a single lesson I took away from Salomon Brothers, it is that rarely do all parties win. The nature of the game is zero sum. A dollar out of my customer's pocket was a dollar in ours, and vice versa.

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

Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself.

People no longer are responsible for what happens in the market, because computers make all the decisions.

He gave a talk in which he argued that the way they measured risk was completely idiotic. They measured risk by volatility: how much a stock or bond happened to have jumped around in the past few years. Real risk was not volatility; real risk was stupid investment decisions.

How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation?

One of the reasons Wall Street had cooked up this new industry called structured finance was that its old-fashioned business was every day less profitable. The profits in stockbroking, along with those in the more conventional sorts of bond broking, had been squashed by Internet competition.

Donnie Green himself had been a trader at Salomon Brothers in the dark ages, when traders had more hair on their chests than on their heads.

There was one sure way, and only one sure way, to get ahead, and everyone with eyes in 1982 saw it: Major in economics; use your economics degree to get an analyst job on Wall Street; use your analyst job to get into the Harvard or Stanford Business School; and worry about the rest of your life later. So

Who takes out a home loan and doesn't make the first payment?" asked Danny Moses, putting the matter one way. "Who the fuck lends money to people who can't make the first payment?" asked Eisman, putting it another.

Only someone who has Asperger's would read a subprime mortgage bond prospectus

The creation of the mortgage bond market, a decade earlier, had extended Wall Street into a place it had never before been: the debts of ordinary Americans.

Corporate finance, which services the corporations and governments that borrow money, and that are known as "clients," is, by comparison, a refined and unworldly place. Because they don't risk money, corporate financiers are considered wimps by traders.

Making profits on Wall Street is a bit like eating the stuffing from a turkey. Some higher authority must first put the stuffing into the turkey. The turkey was stuffed more generously in the 1980s than ever before.

On Wall Street, the lawyers play the same role as medics in war: They come in after the shooting is over to clean up the mess.

That was somewhere near the middle of a modern gold rush. Never before have so many unskilled twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time as we did this decade in New York and London.

Writing a check separates a commitment from a conversation. —Warren Buffett

These folks don't know what they're talking about. If losses go to ten percent there will be, like, a million homeless people." (Losses in the pools Hubler's group had bet on would eventually reach 40 percent.)

some broker somewhere took out a handsome fee for himself, without necessarily doing much work.

The difference between Strauss and Ranieri?" says one trader still at Salomon. "That's easy. Strauss wouldn't stoop to use the men's room on the trading floor. He'd go upstairs. Lewie would piss on your desk.

The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin. The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all of your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest speculation has the salient characteristic of an investment (you might get your money back with interest).