Quotes About Securities

He worked for a securities firm, talking to money managers and hedge funds about how best to manage risk. He specialized, he said, in corporate equity and debt.

The chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of favorable business conditions.

The Fed is normally very profitable, since we typically earn a higher interest rate on our Treasury and mortgage-backed securities than we pay on the bank reserves that finance our holdings

But at some point a strengthening economy and rising inflation pressures would presumably force us to raise short-term interest rates. It was possible to end up temporarily paying more interest on banks' reserves than we earned on the securities we held, which in turn might lead to several years in which we had little or no profits to remit to the Treasury.

I made clear that I thought the benefits of our securities purchases had so far outweighed the risks.

a sign that investors weren't shunning the mortgage securities to the extent that they had been.

Investors were unwilling to buy securities they knew little about.

With Bear's securities as collateral, JPMorgan would then lend the Fed's cash to Bear.

The Federal Reserve, funded by earnings on our securities portfolio, remained open.

securities at a time when many investors were shying away from them.

In buying Treasury securities, our ultimate goal was to precipitate a broad reduction in the cost of credit.†

In the repo market, lenders were demanding more collateral for their loans, even when the collateral was of relatively high quality.

As doubts grew about the GSEs,

we had limited room on our balance sheet to buy more securities

Financially distressed and bankrupt securities, corporate recapitalizations, and exchange offers all fall into the category of asset conversions, in which investors' existing holdings are exchanged for one or more new securities. Distressed and bankrupt businesses are often identified in the financial press; specialized publications and research services also provide information on such companies and their securities.

Value investing by its very nature is contrarian. Out-of-favor securities may be undervalued; popular securities almost never are. What the herd is buying is, by definition, in favor. Securities in favor have already been bid up in price on the basis of optimistic expectations and are unlikely to represent good value that has been overlooked.

As we sat in the afternoon sun, he gave me a quick tutorial on the burgeoning subprime mortgage market. Whereas banks had once typically held the mortgage loans they made in their own portfolios, a huge percentage of mortgages were now bundled and sold as securities on Wall Street. Since banks could now off-load their risk that any particular borrower might default on their loan, this "securitization" of mortgages had led banks to steadily loosen their lending standards.

Bringing back something akin to Glass-Steagall would clearly help limit risk in the system. And that's a very good and worthy goal. Letting banks sell securities and insurance products and services allowed them to grow too big too fast and fueled a culture that put profit and pay over prudence.

My research interests since then have shifted strongly towards the economic and regulatory problems of the financial services industry, and especially of the securities and options exchanges.

Investigating some of the largest subprime lenders - Wells Fargo, Countrywide, Ameriquest, Household Finance - I've seen how their terrible, toxic loans were closed by any means necessary and eventually packaged, sold as securities, and bet upon until they exploded and decimated our economy.

What goes on in Europe concerns us greatly because, if Europe comes apart, the E.U. comes apart, then you're going to have enormous impact on America, that's a very big trading partner of ours, and people own securities around the world in this day and age.

Securities fraud generally and insider trading in particular should be eminently deterrable crimes.

If you're trading individual securities, you're almost certainly making a mistake. Because most professional managers can't outperform their benchmarks, and there's little reason to think that individuals can.

What indexing does is neutralize a large part of the stock market. There's no trading in those stocks, or almost none.