Wall Street Quotes

“In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“Millionaires don't use Astrology, billionaires do.”
― J.P. Morgan

“I will tell you the secret to getting rich on Wall Street. You try to be greedy when others are fearful. And you try to be fearful when others are greedy.”
― Warren Buffett

“The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“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.”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“Sir Gerald Moore: I was at dinner last evening, and halfway through the pudding, this four-year-old child came alone, dragging a little toy cart. And on the cart was a fresh turd. Her own, I suppose. The parents just shook their heads and smiled. I've made a big investment in you, Peter. Time and money, and it's not working. Now, I could just shake my head and smile. But in my house, when a turd appears, we throw it out. We dispose of it. We flush it away. We don't put it on the table and call it caviar.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

“I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

“The mistake our politicians so often make with these industry leaders is in thinking they are interested in, or respectful of, the power of government. All they want is to keep stealing. If you can offer them the government’s seal of approval on that, they’ll take it. But if you can’t, well, they’ll take that too.”
― Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

“While the financial crisis destroyed careers and reputations, and left many more bruised and battered, it also left the survivors with a genuine sense of invulnerability at having made it back from the brink. Still missing in the current environment is a genuine sense of humility.”
― Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis — and Themselves

“But land is land, and it's safer than the stocks and bonds of Wall Street swindlers.”
― Eugene O'Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night

“Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929

“I spent 33 years and 4 months in active military service . . . And during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

Thus, I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.

Our boys were sent off to die with beautiful ideals painted in front of them. No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason they were marching off to kill and die.”
― General Smedley Butler

“A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn’t really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term. For instance, you might pay $200,000 a year to buy a ten-year credit default swap on $100 million in General Electric bonds. The most you could lose was $2 million: $200,000 a year for ten years. The most you could make was $100 million, if General Electric defaulted on its debt any time in the next ten years and bondholders recovered nothing. It was a zero-sum bet: If you made $100 million, the guy who had sold you the credit default swap lost $100 million. It was also an asymmetric bet, like laying down money on a number in roulette. The most you could lose were the chips you put on the table; but if your number came up you made thirty, forty, even fifty times your money.”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

“We were taking out mortgages we couldn’t afford because they were camouflaged to look as if we had a reasonable chance of paying them back. Banks then changed the bankruptcy laws so that we could not get out of our obligations once the rates changed. Lastly, they sold us back our own mortgages, shifting back to us any of the risk through our money-market accounts and pension funds.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back

“For economy is not just numbers and charts, But the beating heart of human hearts, A chance for progress, a chance for all, To rise and flourish, standing tall.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“Economy is a living project, And with cooperation and determination, We'll build a better future for every nation.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“Notice the irony: in a world ideologically dominated by monetary conservatism, and ringing with long sermons about the perils of printing money, the effective money supply had been turned over to privateers [private banks] bent on flooding the markets with money of their own making [ex. CDOs, which act as stores of value + means of exchange]. How did this differ, really, from handing the Fed’s printing presses over to the mafia? There is not much difference, is the honest answer.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“The CDOs that sliced up and then spliced together disparate debts belonging to a heterogeneous multitude of families and businesses were put together on the basis of certain formulae, whose purpose was, supposedly, to calculate their value and their riskiness. These formulae were developed by financial engineers working for Wall Street (e.g. for J. P. Morgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, etc.). To render the formulae solvable, certain assumptions had to be made. First and foremost was the assumption that the probability that one slice of debt within a CDO would go bad was largely unrelated to the probability of a similar default by the other slices in the same CDO. That is, it was assumed that what happened in 2007–08 was…impossible! That it was unnecessary to factor in the possibility of some crisis, during which Bob lost his house for reasons that increased the chances that Jane would lose her job and eventually also default on her mortgage.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“Give a poor person $2,000, and it's instantly recirculated into the economy when they need to buy necessities.

Give a large company $2,000, and they'll store it offshore, say they have no more money, and ask for another $2,000.”
― Stephen Punwasi

“A country which pays even five per cent. interest, to say nothing of the rates of Wall Street, must from time to time commit bankruptcy.”
― Charles A. Dana, Proudhon and His Bank of the People

“Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”
― Andrew Mellon

“Walking around Wall Street during the weekend, one gets the impression that the world’s affairs have been settled once and for all, that the age of work is finally over and that humanity has moved on to its next stage.”
― Hernan Diaz, Trust

“Mientras Wall Street tiene intereses más o menos en conflicto en los Estados Unidos, es única en la explotación de México.”
― John Kenneth Turner, México Bárbaro

“There are specific ways the system actually is rigged and distorted so that our perception of our money is manipulated, very similar to how a stage magician does illusions. And also, like those stage tricks, these
financial manipulations are easy to see through with just a little bit of education and focus.”
― Christopher Manske, Outsmart the Money Magicians: Maximize Your Net Worth by Seeing Through the Most Powerful Illusions Performed by Wall Street and the IRS

“If you’ve ever thought that it shouldn’t be so hard to examine your investment portfolio or hold your financial advisor accountable, you’re right. The system distorts your view of your money in the same way that a magician stacks the deck against the audience. It’s not evil or bad, but once you know how the magician does the illusion, you simply cannot be tricked so easily anymore. And once we all are in on the trick, the
financial industry will need to improve, because the old, tired illusions won’t work anymore.”
― Christopher Manske, Outsmart the Money Magicians: Maximize Your Net Worth by Seeing Through the Most Powerful Illusions Performed by Wall Street and the IRS

“Deception and misdirection are acceptable in a magic show, but they are not at all appropriate in the arena of finance. The way we look at our investments and what we see when we examine our portfolios are both important because our view determines how well we
navigate toward our financial goals.”
― Christopher Manske, Outsmart the Money Magicians: Maximize Your Net Worth by Seeing Through the Most Powerful Illusions Performed by Wall Street and the IRS

“Once you know how an illusion is performed, you cannot go back to being tricked by it.”
― Christopher Manske, Outsmart the Money Magicians: Maximize Your Net Worth by Seeing Through the Most Powerful Illusions Performed by Wall Street and the IRS

“Wall Street works hard to make sure we focus on growing our net worth, but is that truly our goal? Is “more and more” really the answer, or are you being tricked into being a consumer who asks the wrong questions?”
― Christopher Manske, Outsmart the Money Magicians: Maximize Your Net Worth by Seeing Through the Most Powerful Illusions Performed by Wall Street and the IRS

“Magicians the world over love to make people’s money disappear because it’s an easy way to raise tension and arouse curiosity”
― Christopher Manske, Outsmart the Money Magicians: Maximize Your Net Worth by Seeing Through the Most Powerful Illusions Performed by Wall Street and the IRS

“Se è corretta la mia ipotesi che il capitale cloud sta prevalendo sul capitale terrestre, risucchiando sempre più rendita cloud dalla catena del valore globale, allora l'Europa è in grossi guai. Perché non è la Cina. Non ha una sola azienda Big Tech che possa competere con quelle della Silicon Valley e i suoi sistemi finanziari sono in tutto e per tutto dipendenti da Wall Street.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Tecnofeudalesimo: Cosa ha ucciso il capitalismo