Financial Industry Quotes

A banker is somebody who lends you an umbrella & takes it away as soon as it starts raining.

I loved Internet businesses, having built and sold one. And I loved the financial business, despite the fact that it was almost all a scam.

There is one thing Anthony Weiner and I agree on: there are a lot of smart, hard-working people in the financial industry.

My dad was a banker, and I've always had an interest in it.

I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.

Although the Fed has subjected banks’ portfolios to stress tests to measure the effect of rising interest rates and investment losses, the results might not have shown the whole picture: U.S. banks, particularly small and medium-sized ones, may not have enough capital to maintain solvency and liquidity should their risky loans and investments fail in large numbers. The same is true of the stress tests that the ECB has performed in Europe,

Bankers are just like everybody else, except richer.

I think it's a mistake for the American public to constantly be told that if you work for an oil company or you work for a bank, that automatically makes you bad. I think a lot of these people are very qualified people who are patriots. They're going to want to help the country.

I have been in Wall Street all of my life. I love it. It has been good to me. I know many wonderful, decent, honorable, ethical, hard-working people that were in Wall Street with me.

I've had a terrific life, from building one company to be the second largest company in the securities industry and merging that into American Express, and becoming president of that company.

In my first book, 'Ghosts Of Manhattan,' the setting was Wall Street, and I explored the predictable nature of a bond trader inside the compensation scheme at Bear Stearns and the government regulations of Wall Street. That was about money.

It's much more profitable to sell investing advice than to follow it.

Bankers are doing God’s Work!

There's definitely evidence that capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior. When you look at the worst corners of the American health insurance industry or the sub-prime banking market, it really feels like the more psychopathically someone behaves, the more it's rewarded.

I wasn't on the board of Lehman Brothers. I was a banker, and I was proud of it and I traveled the country and learned how people make jobs.

The charge that [Tim] Geithner advocated taxpayer relief for Wall Street regardless of the community’s sins, will probably follow him to his grave.

If they don't go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers.

Make the financial industry pay for its mistakes. That's the idea behind the best of the Obama administration's reform proposals: If banks issue securities backed by mortgages, say, then require them to hold some of that paper so that they will bear some of the losses.

I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.

I think the reason why we got into such idiocy in investment management is best illustrated by a story that I tell about the guy who sold fishing tackle. I asked him, "My God, they're purple and green. Do fish really take these lures?" And he said, "Mister, I don't sell to fish." Investment managers are in the position of that fishing tackle salesman.

It’s a battle in which the Wall Street lobbying and public-relations machine will have a decisive advantage…. With the regulators, you don’t have to win. You just have to gum them up. And that is exactly what Wall Street has done.

Bankers don't get to do this. For all the hours, the late nights, lack of sleep and hours of pulling your hair out from dealing with 18- and 19-year-old kids, it's a pretty cool job.

There's more honor in investment management than in investment banking.

The Treasury's plan has little for those outside of the financial industry. It is aimed at rescuing the same financial institutions that created this crisis with the sloppy underwriting and reckless disregard for the risk they were creating, taking or passing on to others.

I don't think that the financial services industry and that banking in particular are any different than any other part of the economy, any other industry outside banking.