Umberto Eco Quotes

From coast to coast, the FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission have ensnared people not only at hedge funds, but at technology and pharmaceutical companies, consulting and law firms, government agencies, and even a major stock exchange.

I spent 10 years as a marketing manager. I've found my experience in the financial world invaluable background for writing about white-collar crimes.

Over the years, many in the public have become numb to news of financial corruption, partly because too many of these stories involve banker-on-banker crime.

Wall Street is broken for sure because it succumbed to greed and corruption and pure speculation with no values.

I've never taken one cent from a savings and loan. I've never taken one cent from an oil company ...

The stock market is a racket. Those guys are crooks.

In the public mind, an investment banker is no longer conservative; he's a risk taker, a gambler in high stakes, not to mention a thief. These people are dangerous - deliciously so.

Britain is the epicentre of financial fraud. Most major players outsource their fraud here because London is the unregulated cesspit of global finance.

Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, has seen a few financial schemes in his time. As the lead local prosecutor in the world's financial capital, he has battled frauds like the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which stole billions of dollars from investors worldwide.

I don't think anyone would argue with the notion that there have been serious abuses on Wall Street.

In the movie 'Wall Street' I play Gordon Gekko, a greedy corporate executive who cheated to profit while innocent investors lost their savings. The movie was fiction, but the problem is real.

My little scam in April '85 went like this: Give me $50,000; here's some names of some people we've recruited.

Because the sad fact is that the Enron Corporation and others manipulated with unfortunately great effect the energy market in the West Coast starting in 2000.

White-collar crime has been marketed - billions of dollars have been put in to have us be bored by it.

You have a guy like Bernie Madoff literally steal $80 billion, you know, AIG steal hundreds of billions, Goldman Sachs. Crime has changed so much, and to really do a movie with, like, drug dealers or drug smugglers is kind of almost quaint at this point.

White-collar crime gets more outrageous by the second in America.

In some respects, inside information is a form of financial steroid. It is unfair: it is offensive; it is unlawful; and it puts a black mark on the entire enterprise.

On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough.

Wall Street wants to keep its schemes too complicated to understand so that the roulette wheel can keep turning.

I agree that there are some bad apples on Wall Street. I spent about ten years exposing corporate and financial fraud for 'Barron's' magazine and I found a lot to write about.

The economy may be complex, but Americans understand that the Wall Street banks control an outsized portion of the economy and that they have an outsized interest in their own profits.

A man with a briefcase can steal millions more than any man with a gun.

We did not investigate Wall Street because we were troubled by large institutions making a lot of money; we took action to stop a blatant fraud that was ripping of small investors.

The trusts and combinations—the communism of self—whose machinations have prevented us from reaching the success we deserved, should not be forgotten or forgiven.

The savings and loan scandals grew in the dark basements of official government secrecy.