Quotes About Finance

No trader or investor wanted to poke around suburbs to find out whether the homeowner to whom he had just lent money was creditworthy. For the home mortgage to become a bond it had to be depersonalised. At

Could Morgan Stanley please wire $1.2 billion to Deutsche Bank by the end of the day?

They were combing the markets for bets whose true odds were 10:1, priced as if the odds were 100:1.

The CEOs of every major Wall Street firm were also on the wrong end of the gamble. All of them, without exception, either ran their public corporations into bankruptcy or were saved from bankruptcy by the United States government. They all got rich, too.

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.

Era como si fuéramos en un avión a diez mil metros que se hubiera averiado y Wachovia todavía tuviera unos cuantos paracaídas a la venta. Nadie más vendía ya paracaídas, pero en realidad tampoco nadie quería creer que se necesitaran. […] Después de eso, el mercado se cerró por completo.»

They were less and less able to buy and sell big chunks of stock in a gulp.

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

The big fear of the 1980s mortgage bond investor was that he would be repaid too quickly, not that he would fail to be repaid at all.

More praise for Liar's Poker Selected as one of BusinessWeek's

The U.S. stock market was now a class system, rooted in speed, of haves and have-nots. The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that nanoseconds had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all.

you could rent a million-dollar home for less than $833 a month.

They sprinkled their money around a lot of different companies and counted on the law of averages to take care of the rest. Clark took a different approach.

In Greece the banks didn't sink the country. The country sank the banks.

As the U.S. stock market had grown less comprehensible, it had also become more sensationally erratic.

And then we would go to our clients and tell them we could predict the price of oil. No one can predict the price of oil. It was basically nonsense.

Here, in 2001, entered Goldman Sachs, which engaged in a series of apparently legal but nonetheless repellent deals designed to hide the Greek government's true level of indebtedness. For these trades Goldman Sachs—which, in effect, handed Greece a $1 billion loan—carved out a reported $300 million in fees.

Morgan Stanley wanted to be able to trade for itself in a way it could not trade for its customers; it just didn't want to seem as if it wanted to.

the bond market, because Wall Street was now making even bigger money packaging and selling and shuffling around America's growing debts.

Golfing with Eisman wasn't like golfing with other Wall Street people. The round usually began with a collective discomfort on the first tee, after Eisman turned up wearing something that violated the Wall Street golfer's notion of propriety.

Financial markets are a collection of arguments.

Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin.

We had grown too fast at PayPal. Our operating expenses had grown too fast... Growth covers a lot of sin. We want to grow without sin.

Bitcoin represents the first major breakthrough in economics and finance since double-entry bookkeeping was invented in 1494, and activists need to embrace its power.