James Comey Quotes

At the height of the Enron mania, the company's market value was $65 billion. Once the dust cleared, the final value was $0.

If people are going to be cooking the books, you're in trouble.

Some American companies operate in the gray area between legitimacy and outright fraud … where the accounting is being perverted.

During the dot-com days, one could take just about any company public and reap fortunes. All you had to do was to make sky-high projections for growth, say you were in the Internet space, and go along with unscrupulous investment bankers and their analysts.

The company accountant is shy and retiring. He's shy a quarter of a million dollars. That's why he's retiring.

Yeah, we shot ourselves in the foot right out of the gate. The guy who ran it at first misled pretty much everybody about how much capital we had. He said we had enough to go three years without making money, and we had enough to go three weeks.

I have accused L.B. Management of failing to report to me, and I've told L.B. Management the money is missing, and it could very well be embezzled.

Before Enron, I think people were a bit more naive about the way things worked, and I think Enron pulled the curtain back on unsavoury practices that turned out to be a lot more widespread.

It's mostly the financial chicanery that's going on. People are saying 'What kind of trust can we put in this market?'

You know if you let me write $200 billion worth of hot checks, I could also give you the illusion of prosperity.

I operated a business where I let someone steal three-quarters of a million dollars.

As alleged, the most senior executives at Brixmor engaged in a years-long scheme to cook the books and deceive the investing public.

Unfortunately, WorldCom is not the only company caught up in this kind of accounting scandal. The impact this will have on the general public is yet to be seen.

In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety.

Earnings can be pliable as putty when a charlatan heads the company reporting them.

Gox is the worst-run business in the history of the world.

What I found in my research on Trump's charitable giving was that often he would promise something and then never deliver, but sort of go around with people believing he'd done this thing he's promised.

We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.

There's certain classes you have to take, certain things you have to do, certain money you must have. Then, if you listen to the counselors and social workers and everybody else talking at you, you would think that once you got out of high school and college, life would be beautiful. But it's not.

Whole new theories of money were growing here like mushrooms: in the dark and based on bullshit.

Life is never quite like the brochure.

The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner.

With so much money riding on reported numbers, human nature is to manipulate them. And with so many doing it, you get Serpico effects, where everyone rationalizes that it's okay because everyone else is doing it. It is always thus.

My take on the whole dot-com bubble was that a lot of people who wanted to make a lot of money got too excited and hyped up the commercial aspects of the Internet prematurely. I think the vision of the Internet as a democratizing medium - as everyone's printing press - is real. We got distracted from that by the mass hallucinations of the bubble.

Surely I'm not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff's tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?