Alex Berenson Quotes

It's hard to tell which assets will be toxic. The best way to ensure that only shareholders and banks feel it is have adequate capital.

Complexity and interconnectedness matter as much as size in assessing risk in banking.

When you're levered 9 to 1, it'd be unreal for a bank to go down.

Loss-absorbing capacity among banks is substantially higher as a result of both regulatory requirements and stress testing exercises.

I do believe that banks are special - they are very leveraged institutions by nature; therefore, it's even more critical to ensure that the governance and the process of running a banking company are well-organised, managed and regulated.

The very nature of finance is that it cannot be profitable unless it is significantly leveraged... and as long as there is debt, there can be failure and contagion.

The fundamental problem with banks is what it's always been: they're in the business of banking, and banking, whether plain vanilla or incredibly sophisticated, is inherently risky.

Leverage is great when it works, and when it doesn't work, it creates a lot of issues. So I think if you limit the amount of leverage that people can borrow, or that banks can borrow, I think you'll find that you'll have a lot less issues going forward.

I've been telling anyone willing to listen that banks have a tendency to sit on time bombs while convincing themselves that they are conservative and nonvolatile.

A bank needs models to measure risk. The problem, however, is that any one bank can measure its risk, but it also has to know what the risk taken by other banks in the system happens to be at any particular moment.

We've always been modestly leveraged, and we've never believed in a great deal of leverage on either our private equity business or on our investment banking business. And I think it really goes back to my uncle and dad growing up in the Depression and just seeing what happened to people who were overly levered.

Investment banks manage to go bankrupt through their investment-banking activities, commercial banks manage to go bankrupt through their commercial-banking activities.

If I'm a bank, and I'm making risky loans, I have an incentive, if I can, to make those loans using other people's money: in other words, to make highly leveraged loans.

Most companies can survive even if their debt ratings are lowered below investment grade, although they will have higher borrowing costs.

If nobody can sell mortgage-backed securities based on trillions of dollars of unpayable instruments, there's a lot less risk in the overall system.

Banks always want their capital requirements to be as low as possible, so they can take more risks, which can enable them to make more money – and reap bigger bonuses for executives.

There’s nothing like doing things with OPM—Other People’s Money. It takes the risk out of it.

A financial institution has the task of taking risks, and if it's a well run institution - say, Goldman Sachs - it tries to cover the potential losses to itself, but only to itself.

The Bankers' New Clothes makes a simple, powerful argument: that banks need to raise more capital. It is entirely persuasive that the extent of their leverage makes the financial system fragile, and it clearly and patiently demolishes all the counter-arguments made by the banks and their lobbyists.

Would I advise early-stage companies against taking debt? One hundred percent yes.

You know, when the cost of capital goes down, when credit becomes cheap, people start taking greater and greater risks.

Business is other people's money.

Financially, I've lost money and made money, but I know my way around financially.

Among other objectives, liquidity guidelines must take into account the risks that inadequate liquidity planning by major financial firms pose for the broader financial system, and they must ensure that these firms do not become excessively reliant on liquidity support from the central bank.

The real danger with debt is what happens if lots of people decide, or are forced, to pay it off at the same time.