Jo Nesbo Quotes

I don't plan on going back to legal work. I wanted an international career, and finance seemed to be where some interesting career opportunities were.

I was a judo athlete, while taking modeling as my side job, before I eventually quit my professional sports career over a knee injury.

Am I ever going to be able to play football again? What's going on with my career? I was just thinking things like that. You've got tears going down your eyes. You've got your trainers right there and my parents right there. I was just thinking, "Is this it?" I didn't know what a knee injury was. I'd never felt pain like that.

I loved working on Wall Street. I loved the meritocracy of it and the camaraderie of the trading floor.

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.

If you look at Citadel today, that's really - the founding principle of the firm is a real pursuit of talent, a pursuit of people who have a passion for finance, and a pursuit of individuals who make good decisions day in and day out.

I hated being a junior investment banker. I loved the research business, the wealth management business.

I studied economics and thought I wanted to play with the stock market - my dad was a financial adviser - and I was going to go down that path. I was an intern at Smith Barney.

There was a time when I was wondering about this business of going public, so I visited about a half-dozen companies in the Boston area, all of them formed by MIT faculty and all had gone public.

And at a relatively early age, ten or so, I invested my first share of stock. And I used to follow, look at companies and so forth. But throughout the whole period, and indeed right through my college years, while I was involved in the stock market, always interested in finance, I never thought of it as a full-time job.

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

My own basketball background was ripping up my ACL in a lawyer's league.

Underwriting is probably the smallest part of our business.

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.

After I dropped out of college at the age of 19, I became a mortgage broker, and when I went back to school I thought about going into real estate law.

I am not embarrassed to be a banker. I am not embarrassed to be in business.

When I started in the business in 1999 and 2000, we had companies that were going public in two, three or four years.

During my undergraduate training at UCLA, I was studying finance and securities; my particular interest was with mutual funds. Wanting to get into a high position at some of the companies that were doing that, I knew that law would be useful.

Most of those people who saw themselves as literary types at university became bank managers.

I went to Dartmouth College, graduated, and had the opportunity to play two professional sports - I played for the New England Patriots in the NFL and professional lacrosse for the Boston Blazers. I had an injury, so I had to stop so I could heal. But when I was playing football, I wasn't making a lot of money; I wasn't a superstar.

As for the financial world - I've been working in the Forbes building for eight years. You soak up a little bit of ambient stuff about all this - I know what a gold straddle is, what the Lombard rate is.

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

Credit default swaps were nothing more than souped up versions of things that have been around for a long time like soy bean futures

Securitization was one of the most brilliant financial innovations of the 20th century. It freed up a lot of capital. If it had been done responsibly, it would have been a wondrous thing because nothing is more stable, there’s nothing safer, than the American mortgage market.... It worked for years. But then people realized they could scam it.

A free-enterprise economy depends only on markets, and according to the most advanced mathematical macroeconomic theory, markets depend only on moods: specifically, the mood of the men in the pinstripes, also known as the Boys on the Street.