William D. Cohan Quotes

It is always sound business to take any obtainable net gain, at any cost and at any risk to the rest of the community.

I don't know anyone on Wall Street who goes to work every day thinking of anything but how to increase their bonus.

As the bull market goes on, people who take great risks achieve great rewards, seemingly without punishment. It's like crime without punishment or sex without sin.

There’s a lot of greed on Wall Street.

People always push the boundaries, especially when the rewards are so high financially.

'Wall Street' was the big movie of 1987, the year in which Harveys opened. It was a film about greed and self-indulgence, about hunger for success, and Michael Douglas's line, 'breakfast is for wimps,' became a mantra for anyone who wanted to get to the top.

In 'Wall Street,' Charlie Sheen carried that movie.

The people who work in Wall Street still look up to Gordon Gekko. He's sort of a guru.

When traders were able to earn a million dollars, of which base pay was $150,000 to $200,000 and the rest was bonus, they would go for it. Now if you're sitting there earning $600,000, you become less risk-seeking. And if you have less risk-seeking, the ability of the market to be incredibly volatile is increased.

Because bankers measure their self-worth in money, and pay themselves a lot of it, they think they're fine fellows and don't need to explain themselves.

Research suggests that investment bankers are more prone to commit fraud when they feel the competitor at their heels.

In the military, they give medals for people who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may survive. In business, we give bonuses to people who sacrifice others.

If we didn't have greed, market economies wouldn't be as innovative as they are. But in my view, greed has to be contained by the fear of losses, so there has to be a system where, if you take too much risk, you go into bankruptcy. You don't systematically bail out people who take excessive risks.

In very big companies, you find less entrepreneurialism than you really want to see. Success is defined as 'don't make a mistake.' And you get to be the C.E.O. by outlasting everybody else, then you're there for five or six years, and you want to get your bonus on the way out.

The people who watch a movie like 'Wolf of Wall Street' and want to work on Wall Street are exactly the kind of people who shouldn't.

Most people have an aversion to risk, my college economics professor told me. Which means they have to be rewarded to take on that risk. The higher the risk, the higher the possible payout has to be for people to jump.

You'd be a fool or a deluded idealist to think ethics would be prominent on Wall Street. That is not a statement against people in the money business, just a fact.

When you can't lend or trade - and you can't invest with the leverage that juiced returns to support seven- and eight-figure bonuses - how exactly are you going to make money?

The riskiest thing you can do is get greedy.

In baseball, you can hit 40 home runs on a single-A-league team and never get paid a thing. But in a hedge fund, you get paid on your batting average. So you go to the worst league you can find, where there's the least competition.

Players today are concerned about the money, but the large dollars only go to those players who are the best.

I've been in Vegas. That's where you get into the money thing. Boy, you get greedy in Vegas, you know. That's the only place that you can bet $25, get it up to $500 and refuse to quit.

Greed has increasingly become a virtue among Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs in the U.S. Nowhere else in the world do CEOs insist on receiving compensation as high compared to what their employees earn.

Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything.

People talk about Wall Street greed, but one of the things many people don't understand is that there are a lot of organizations that have been the recipient of largess from the same Wall Street.