Derivatives Trading Quotes

To Wall Street, a firm like BP isn't just a profitable energy company with lots of assets like oil rigs and pipelines and gas stations - it's also a corporation that routinely borrows hundreds of millions of dollars to keep its business up and running.

Of course most Americans don't know how A.I.G. brought the world's financial system to near-ruin or what credit-default swaps are. They may not even know what A.I.G. stands for. But Americans do make the connection between their fears about their own jobs and their broad understanding of the A.I.G. debacle.

A.I.G. was even larger than Lehman, with a substantial presence in derivatives and debt markets, as well as in insurance markets.

I've nothing against Goldman Sachs. But Goldman Sachs isn't an investment bank. Goldman Sachs is a hedge fund. It's bigger than any hedge fund. It's more leveraged, to the power of three or five, than any hedge fund.

Over the years, the technology of trade has changed in response to advances in the ability to communicate. From its origins on the streets of Chicago, the Board of Trade moved to a building housing 'trading pits' for the open-outcry exchange by brokers representing buyers and sellers.

With respect to their safety, derivatives, for the most part, are traded among very sophisticated financial institutions and individuals who have considerable incentive to understand them and to use them properly.

I don't want to talk about the regulation of financial markets because that is not my sphere of expertise. It's a very complicated topic, and if I have written a number of books they are always on topics that I think I know something about.

In an ideal world, one populated by vegetarians and Esperanto speakers, derivatives would be used for one thing only: reducing levels of risk. The list of individual traders who have lost more than a billion dollars at a time betting on derivatives is not short.

The people who did the collateralized mortgage obligations, sold them to pension funds, then sold them short, then bought credit default swap insurance on them, are just amazing. They are a law unto themselves.

Speculation is only a word covering the making of money out of the manipulation of prices, instead of supplying goods and services.

Since JPMorgan Chase announced its surprise $2 billion-and-growing trading loss, there have been renewed calls from economists, pundits, and politicians to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that prevented commercial banks from participating in investment banking activities.

We should probably stop trading derivatives, anything more complex than regular options ... I am an options trader, and I don't understand options. How do you want a regulator to understand them?

The markets were run by mathematicians and their models but they had no business sense.

To enable large U.S. banks to support their clients better, the Volcker rule should be clarified.

Citadel's Capital Market division plays an important role in our nation's financial markets. Our broker-dealer is the largest market maker in options in the United States, executing approximately 30 percent of all equity option trades daily.

In the economy of the cuckoo people that populate central banks, everything is possible. What you have is gigantic bubbles, the NASDAQ in 2000, then the housing bubble and then commodities in 2008 when oil went from $78 to $147 before plunging to $32 within six months.

They've been fairly positive, as firm as they could be in regards to the derivatives operations in Montreal. We didn't sense that there was a hesitation about it. But things change.

That decision will in history be written as the biggest mistake that American administration ever made, because Lehmans was a world investment bank. They had testicles everywhere.

Proprietary trading does not belong in banks with FDIC insurance.

I support the Volcker rule, but there needs to be proper definitions around the Volcker rule so that banks can understand exactly what they can do and what they can't do, and that they can provide the necessary function of liquidity in customer markets.

I would drastically revise much of the Dodd-Frank financial-reform legislation, which I call the 'Bureaucrat Full Employment Act.'

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

Wall Street has become a veritable casino.

Today, even small entities that trade complex instruments or are granted sufficient leverage can threaten the global financial system.

Over the objections, where they sound like squealing pigs, over the objections of Romney and all his allies, we passed some of the toughest Wall Street regulations in history, turning Wall Street back into the allocator of capital it always has been and no longer a casino. And they want to repeal it.