Quotes About Business

But as revenues subsided, costs all of a sudden mattered, too.

We quickly figured out that some companies actually have a moral compass and some of them don't," said Joe.

If the highly paid, publicly scrutinized employees of a business that had existed since the 1860s could be misunderstood by their market, who couldn't be? If the market for baseball players was inefficient, what market couldn't be? If a fresh analytical approach had led to the discovery of new knowledge in baseball, was there any sphere of human activity in which it might not do the same?

We kept saying, 'These banks are out of business.' But the government kept saving the banks," he said. "And right in the midst of this Iceland went broke.

It went that way with much of what they needed to buy: some companies sought to exploit the moment; others sought to help. "We quickly figured out that some companies actually have a moral compass and some of them don't," said Joe.

I didn't recognize but now know to be Liar's Poker.

A big Wall Street bank's biggest advantage was its access to vast amounts of cheap risk capital and, with that, its ability to survive the ups and downs of a risky business. That meant little when the business wasn't risky and didn't require much capital. High-frequency traders went home every night with no position in the stock market. They traded in the market the way card counters in a casino played blackjack: They played only

American cities that caved to pressure from business interests to relax their social distancing rules experienced big second waves of disease.

Instead of focusing on profits, trading managers focused on revenues.

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

Who do you work for? That question haunted salesmen. Whenever a trader screwed a customer and the salesman became upset, the trader would ask the salesman, "Who do you work for anyway?" The message was clear: You work for Salomon Brothers. You work for me. I pay your bonus at the end of the year. So just shut up, you geek.

One piece of bad luck was rapid technical change, which was a weapon that oddball upstarts could use against the enormous gray corporations.

he needed them to translate his extraordinary ambition into the ordinary language understood by corporate America.

like so many United States government agencies, the Department of Commerce is seriously misnamed. It has almost nothing to do with commerce directly and is actually forbidden by law from engaging in business. But it runs the United States Census, the only real picture of who Americans are as a nation.

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

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.

The markets were now run by technology, but the technologists were still treated like tools. Nobody bothered to explain the business to them, but they were forced to adapt to its demands and exposed to its failures—which

Page 199: According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Statistics, more than 20 percent of all imports to the United States come from foreign subsidiaries or affiliates of U.S. multinational corporations. … This is why American business is so adamantly opposed to tariffs—not fear of foreign retaliation, but fear of tariffs on products from American-owned industrial plantations.

Business should not be like war. It should be like love. And not a steamy, one night stand, but a mutually beneficial, steadily improving romance that lasts a lifetime.

We need to keep government small, but we also need to keep the influence of big business small, and we need to keep the power in the hands of the people, where it belongs. Big government and big business aren't the only two alternatives.

In sum, the myth of a self-reliant, free-market, trickle-down economy is just that, a myth. In almost every enterprise, government provides business with supports, protections, and opportunities for private gain at public expense.

Again — it cannot be said too often — profits are what you make when not working. This explains why, in most instances, the secret to getting rich is not to work hard but to get others to work hard for you.

if the therapy works as it's supposed to, there won't be a lot of repeat business.

The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a firm's... the demand for food isn't elastic; people don't eat more just because food is cheap. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.