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Wall Street Quotes

Browse 65 quotes about Wall Street.

Wall Street Quotes

“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.”

BusinessDisappointmentMentorMentorsWall Street
Book:The Bonfire of the Vanities
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“If your portfolio is made up of the investments that you have made in the lives of people, you will have amassed a wealth so vast that all the portfolios that will ever float the trading floor on Wall Street would, by comparison, be reckoned as nothing. And if by chance we dared to live by this truth, we would in fact would love like none other.”

GivingMoneyCallingCaringGoalsNurturingWall StreetInvestmentsPortfolioPeople Sacrifice
Author:Craig D. Lounsbrough
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“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.”

MoneyMagicIllusionInvestmentFinanceDeceptionMagicianMoney ManagementWall StreetTrick
Book:Outsmart the Money Magicians: Maximize Your Net Worth by Seeing Through the Most Powerful Illusions Performed by Wall Street and the IRS
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“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.”

MoneyMagicIllusionInvestmentFinanceDeceptionMagicianMoney ManagementWall StreetTrick
Book:Outsmart the Money Magicians: Maximize Your Net Worth by Seeing Through the Most Powerful Illusions Performed by Wall Street and the IRS
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“Brad Green, almost overnight, became the poster boy for the common Wall Street tale - proving once again that greed, most definitely, kills. Giving away about 99% of his fortune was also front page news, but Green barely blinked at having to scrape by with only $200 million. The government seized all five of his homes, his three boats, two jets, a helicopter, 14 cars, and all of his assets except the $200 million he stashed for a rainy day in an offshore bank account.”

GreedRedemptionWall Street
Book:Organic Nation
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“This is a nation of inconsistencies. The Puritans fleeing from oppression became oppressors. We fought England for our liberty and put chains on four million of blacks. We wiped out slavery and our tariff laws and national banks began a system of white wage slavery worse than the first. Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master.”

PoliticsCapitalismProgressiveIncome InequalityWall StreetProgressive Era1890sToo Big To Fail
Author:Mary Lease
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“Wall Street treats all crises the same despite the fact that people react to the threat of war very differently from other crises like disease, systemic medical incompetence, or the failure to maintain a country’s transportation infrastructure.”

CrisisFinancial CrisisInvestment PsychologyInvesting QuotesFinancial LiteracyWall StreetWall Street Mindset
Book:The Prepared Investor: How to Prevent the Next Crisis from Affecting Your Financial Independence
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“David saw the AI Revolution and online stock trading as potential solutions to the economic challenges faced by Black women and Black men. He genuinely believed that the reparations sought by Black people for the injustices of slavery and other crimes against their humanity are waiting patiently to be claimed in one place: Wall Street.”

InvestingFinancial FreedomBlack AuthorsInvesting QuotesReparationsStock MarketFinance QuotesEconomic InequalityWall StreetAi Revolution
Author:David L. Wadley
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“Buy potatoes,” he said. “Gotta hop.” Then he hung up. Of course. A cloud of fallout would threaten European food and water supplies, including the potato crop, placing a premium on uncontaminated American substitutes. Perhaps a few folks other than potato farmers think of the price of potatoes in America minutes after the explosion of a nuclear reactor in Russian, but I have never met them.”

HumorousInvestmentChernobylWall Street
Book:Liar's Poker
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“Because the lenders sold many—though not all—of the loans they made to other investors, in the form of mortgage bonds, the industry was also fraught with moral hazard. “It was a fast-buck business,” says Jacobs. “Any business where you can sell a product and make money without having to worry how the product performs is going to attract sleazy people.”

Wall StreetRecessionMortgage Bonds
Book:The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
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“Long Beach Savings was the first existing bank to adopt what was called the “originate and sell” model. This proved such a hit—Wall Street would buy your loans, even if you would not!—that a new company, called B&C mortgage, was founded to do nothing but originate and sell.”

Wall StreetRecessionSubprime Mortgage LoansB C MortgageLong Beach SavingsOriginate And Sell
Book:The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
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“By early 2005 all the big Wall Street investment banks were deep into the subprime game. Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley all had what they termed “shelves” for their subprime wares, with strange names like HEAT and SAIL and GSAMP, that made it a bit more difficult for the general audience to see that these subprime bonds were being underwritten by Wall Street’s biggest names.”

Wall StreetRecessionGoldman SachsSubprime Mortgage LoansSubprime Mortgage CrisisBear StearnsMerrill LynchMorgan StanleySubprime Bonds
Book:The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
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“Back in July 2003, he’d written them a long essay on the causes and consequences of what he took to be a likely housing crash: “Alan Greenspan assures us that home prices are not prone to bubbles—or major deflations—on any national scale,” he’d said. “This is ridiculous, of course…. In 1933, during the fourth year of the Great Depression, the United States found itself in the midst of a housing crisis that put housing starts at 10% of the level of 1925. Roughly half of all mortgage debt was in default. During the 1930s, housing prices collapsed nationwide by roughly 80%.”

Wall StreetRecessionSubprime Mortgage LoansAlan GreenspanAsset Bubble
Book:The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
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“There was more than one way to think about Mike Burry’s purchase of a billion dollars in credit default swaps. The first was as a simple, even innocent, insurance contract. Burry made his semiannual premium payments and, in return, received protection against the default of a billion dollars’ worth of bonds. He’d either be paid zero, if the triple-B-rated bonds he’d insured proved good, or a billion dollars, if those triple-B-rated bonds went bad. But of course Mike Burry didn’t own any triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, or anything like them. He had no property to “insure” it was as if he had bought fire insurance on some slum with a history of burning down. To him, as to Steve Eisman, a credit default swap wasn’t insurance at all but an outright speculative bet against the market—and this was the second way to think about it.”

Wall StreetRecessionGoldman SachsCredit Default SwapSubprime Mortgage BondsMike BurrySteve EismanAig
Book:The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
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“That City of yours is a morbid excrescence. Wall Street is a morbid excrescence. Plainly it's a thing that has grown out upon the social body rather like -- what do you call it? -- an embolism, thrombosis, something of that sort. A sort of heart in the wrong place, isn't it? Anyhow -- there it is. Everything seems obliged to go through it now; it can hold up things, stimulate things, give the world fever or pain, and yet all the same -- is it necessary, Irwell? Is it inevitable? Couldn't we function economically quite as well without it? Has the world got to carry that kind of thing for ever? "What real strength is there in a secondary system of that sort? It's secondary, it's parasitic. It's only a sort of hypertrophied, uncontrolled counting-house which has become dominant by falsifying the entries and intercepting payment. It's a growth that eats us up and rots everything like cancer. Financiers make nothing, they are not a productive department. They control nothing. They might do so, but they don't. They don't even control Westminster and Washington. They just watch things in order to make speculative anticipations. They've got minds that lie in wait like spiders, until the fly flies wrong. Then comes the debt entanglement. Which you can break, like the cobweb it is, if only you insist on playing the wasp. I ask you again what real strength has Finance if you tackle Finance? You can tax it, regulate its operations, print money over it without limit, cancel its claims. You can make moratoriums and jubilees. The little chaps will dodge and cheat and run about, but they won't fight. It is an artificial system upheld by the law and those who make the laws. It's an aristocracy of pickpocket area-sneaks. The Money Power isn't a Power. It's respectable as long as you respect it, and not a moment longer. If it struggles you can strangle it if you have the grip...You and I worked that out long ago, Chiffan... "When we're through with our revolution, there will be no money in the world but pay. Obviously. We'll pay the young to learn, the grown-ups to function, everybody for holidays, and the old to make remarks, and we'll have a deuce of a lot to pay them with. We'll own every real thing; we, the common men. We'll have the whole of the human output in the market. Earn what you will and buy what you like, we'll say, but don't try to use money to get power over your fellow-creatures. No squeeze. The better the economic machine, the less finance it will need. Profit and interest are nasty ideas, artificial ideas, perversions, all mixed up with betting and playing games for money. We'll clean all that up..." "It's been going on a long time," said Irwell. "All the more reason for a change," said Rud.”

MoneyPowerCorruptionFinanceRegulationWall StreetThe City
Book:The Holy Terror
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“The widely mis-interpreted 1998 'meltdown' of East Asia was a financial symptom of the renewed reality: In fact, it was the first round the world recession again to begin in East Asia and spread from there to the West, instead of vice versa. That marked the beginnings of the return back 360 degrees around the world of the world economic center to Asia where it had always been before those two eighty-year period of temporary Western ascendance. The stock market crash in Hong Kong and the devaluation of the Thai baht and the Indonesian rupia took only 80 seconds to make themselves felt in the London City and on New York's Wall Street. How much of a cultural lag do we still need for popular perception and social theory to catch up with global reality?”

IndonesiaThailandWall StreetEast AsiaSocial TheoryLondon CityGlobal Economic CrisisPopular Perception
Author:André Gunder Frank
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“People aren't pissed just to be pissed. They're mad because a tiny group of crooks on Wall Street built themselves beach houses in the Hamptons through a crude fraud scheme that decimated their retirement funds, caused property values in their neighborhoods to collapse and caused over four million people to be put in foreclosure.”

AngryFraudCriminalBanksWall StreetGoldman SachsWhite Collar CrimeAngry PeopleBankstersMortgage CrisisBailoutSubprime Mortgage LoansSubprime Mortgage CrisisBanksterVampire SquidWhite Collar Criminal2008 Economic ImplosionLloyd BlankfeinRolling Stone MagazineWall Street Bailout
Author:Matt Taibbi
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“Listen in close, Wall Street Conquistadors, you’re spreading like vapor up through people’s floors, you’re moving en masse under the cracks of our doors and grabbing our children to work in your stores, feeding the needy to make them your whores, but you need to remember the grave you’re digging is yours.”

MoneyGreedSong LyricsWall StreetOccupyConquistadorMark Of The BeastLee Vagabond
Book:Dystopia Boy: The Unauthorized Files
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“For that purpose, partly as the result of Ranieri’s persistent lobbying, two new facilities had sprung up in the federal government alongside Ginnie Mae. They guaranteed the mortgages that did not qualify for the Ginnie Mae stamp. The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (called Freddie Mac) and the Federal National Mortgage Association (called Fannie Mae) between them, by giving their guarantees, were able to transform most home mortgages into government-backed bonds.”

SneakyWall StreetSalomon BrothersCreation Of Mortgage BondsFannie MaeFreddie MacGinnie MaeLewis Ranieri
Book:Liar's Poker
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“The warning signs had been there since the crash of 2008, but after the initial shock, nothing had been done to correct the problem. Banks had been trading over $7 trillion in risky derivatives daily, as well as fixing interest rates and making bets on the rigged games. There was an ever-growing gap between the elite and all the rest of the people which had continued to develop even after the 2008 crash.”

EconomyFinancial CrisisEconomic CrisisWall Street
Book:Terror on Wall Street, a Financial Metafiction Novel
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“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.”

HubrisWall StreetFinancial Crisis Of 2007 2011
Book:Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis — and Themselves
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“Many thrifts layered a billion dollars of brand-new loans on top of their existing, disastrous hundred million dollars of old loss-making loans, in a hope that the new would offset the old. Each new purchase of mortgage bonds (which was identical to making a loan) was like the last act of a desperate man. The strategy was wildly irresponsible, for the fundamental problem (borrowing short term and lending long term) hadn’t been remedied. The hypergrowth only meant that the next thrift crisis would be larger. But the thrift managers were not thinking that far in advance. They were simply trying to keep the door to the shop open. That explains why thrifts continued to buy mortgage bonds even as they sold their loans.”

LendingWall StreetMortgage CrisisMortgage Bonds1980 SThriftsPaul Volcker
Book:Liar's Poker
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“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.”

Wall StreetCorporate BondsCredit Default Swap
Book:The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
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“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.”

Wall StreetNeoclassical Economics2008 Financial CrisisCdo
Book:The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
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