Quotes About Ethics

His experience with Household Finance had disabused him of any hope that the government would intercede to prevent rich corporations from doing bad things to poor people.

But the more we looked at what a CDO really was, the more we were like, Holy shit, that's just fucking crazy. That's fraud. Maybe you can't prove it in a court of law. But it's fraud." It

Aldinger, collected his $100 million, Eisman was on his way to becoming the financial market's first socialist. "When you're a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off," he said. His mind was now fully

When you're a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off," he said. His mind was now fully open to the possibility. "I now realized there was an entire industry, called consumer finance, that basically existed to rip people off." Denied

If mere scandal could have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they would have vanished long ago. This woman wasn't saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying that they were stupid.

This wasn't just another company—this was the biggest company by far making subprime loans. And it was engaged in just blatant fraud. They should have taken the CEO out and hung him up by his fucking testicles.

To Danny and Vinny, Greg Lippmann was a walking embodiment of the bond market, which is to say he was put on earth to screw the customer. Three

It took us weeks to really grasp it because it was so weird," said Charlie. "But the more we looked at what a CDO really was, the more we were like, Holy shit, that's just fucking crazy. That's fraud. Maybe you can't prove it in a court of law. But it's fraud." It

He explained that the rating agencies were morally bankrupt and living in fear of becoming actually bankrupt.

When, a few months later, Goldman Sachs announced it was setting aside $542,000 per employee for the 2006 bonus pool, he wrote again: "As a former gas station attendant, parking lot attendant, medical resident and current Goldman Sachs screwee, I am offended." In

been charged with any sort of crime was the employee who had taken something from Goldman Sachs. I'd

When he began to grasp, along with the rest of the world, what big American firms had done—rigged credit ratings to make bad loans seem like good loans, created subprime bonds designed to fail, sold them to their customers and then bet against them, and so on—his mind hit some kind of wall. For

Really, it's brilliant what they have done within the bounds of the regulation. They are much less of a villain than I thought. The system has let down the investor.

I'm now convinced that the worst thing a man can do with a telephone, without breaking the law, is to call someone he doesn't know and try to sell that person something he doesn't want.

His father had turned away from an early career in medicine, Amos explained to friends, because "he thought animals had more real pain than people and complained a lot less." Yosef Tversky was a serious man.

Even the fairest coin, however, given the limitations of its memory and moral sense, cannot be as fair as the gambler expects it to be," they wrote. In an academic journal that line counted as a splendid

It was not that he lacked values, but he had a keen sense that at times the ends justified the means, and an equally keen sense of his own interests. There

Did I think I was doing God's work?" he said later. "No. But I did think market efficiency was something important for the economy.

They do not share the sentiment about one another: the hardest thing to do in Greece is to get one Greek to compliment another behind his back. No success of any kind is regarded without suspicion. Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate. And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating

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

the utilitarians. They were interested only in the computer's crude and brutish ability to impose its will on the world around it.

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.

The company tied white and yellow and red ribbons to the prostitutes to indicate which ones were available to which men. After each sexual encounter the prostitute received a stamp on her arm to indicate how often she had been used. The Germans didn't just want hookers: they wanted hookers with rules. Perhaps

The RBC trading floor had what the staff liked to refer to as a "no-asshole rule"; if someone came in the door looking for a job and sounding like a typical Wall Street asshole, they wouldn't hire him, no matter how much money he said he could make the firm. There was even an expression used to describe the culture: "RBC nice.