Stephen A. Schwarzman Quotes

Financial institutions like to call what they do trading. Let's be honest. It's not trading; it's betting.

'Prop trading' is just a fancy term for banks gambling in the market for their own profit.

Some hedge fund managers have made big bucks trading oil futures - George Soros is one.

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.

Wall Street has become a veritable casino.

You know what term you don't hear anymore? Arbitrage. The markets have gotten too efficient.

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.

Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, 'toxic' financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.

But Wall Street people are in fact very smart; they're funny, they're not company men who work their way up the chain.

If you think Wall Street has a short memory, you're dead wrong. No, the folks who work on Wall Street, regulate Wall Street - and, above all, invest in its wares, notably its hedge funds - don't have a bad memory. They don't have any memory at all.

The best way to make money on Wall Street is to sell the most sophisticated [and complex] products to the most unsophisticated clients.

There’s a lot of money in making financial products whose risk few understand. Simplicity might be good for economics, but it’s lousy for Wall Street bonuses.

Financial firms believed that if a crisis developed, the insatiable demand for exotic [financial] products would dissipate only slowly. They were mistaken.

I don't see any magic in hedge funds.

In reality, no one on Wall Street cares about anything except performance.

Once in a blue moon, an entire industry is a good short.

We've used derivatives for many, many years. I don't think derivatives are evil, per se, I think they are dangerous.

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.

What Wall Street is, they're market makers. Wall Street's business model is making money on velocity of money. They're a click industry. That's what Wall Street is. They make a lot of money when there's a lot of turnover. And they make a lot of money when that velocity is fast.

The year 1983 was crazy. People wanted to sell not only their investments... but also their companies.

Overwinding happens when hedge funds destroy companies by attempting to leverage derivatives against otherwise productive long-term assets.

There's still a lot of investors wondering what to invest in. And, of course, I think entertainment looks attractive when you read the few films that make these insane amounts of money. What they don't know is they don't always do that.

Trading is very competitive and you have to be able to handle getting your butt kicked.

I do not use short selling. The fund has not shorted a stock since the 2002 to 2003 time frame. At that time I did short three stocks, on which I broke even on two and made money on one of them. The experience taught me that I was not going to be using short selling going forward for a slew of reasons.

One of the problems with hedge funds is that they are changing so rapidly. If you have the balance sheet that closed business last night, by 11 A.M. this morning, that won't tell you very much about what they're doing.