Cathy O'Neil Quotes

An unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world.

I didn't think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a sequel.

I think what's happened is that the general public has become much more aware of the destructive power of Wall Street.

The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less.

Your normal Wall Street big-swinging Richard has enough of a lingering moral compass to at least tell himself that his wizardry benefits somebody or something besides himself. You know, his cleverness makes capital markets more efficient. It provides credit to productive enterprise. Whatever.

The war to rein in Wall Street excess is never over.

Everywhere you look, there's a hunger to put the ethos by which Wall Street thrives on trial.

The market, as we're all painfully aware in the aftermath of the banking crisis, can be an idiot. It has no perception of right or wrong, or even sensible or insane. It sees profit.

Everything that happens on Wall Street only fortifies my opinion that there is in fact a more ludicrous industry than the entertainment industry.

Blaming speculators as a response to financial crisis goes back at least to the Greeks. It's almost always the wrong response.

Wall Street is populated by a bunch of people whose primary goal is to make money, and the rules are pretty much caveat emptor.

Second of all, I don't think Wall Street is doing what it's supposed to be doing, even after the shameful performance of the last two years. They're are not allocating capital.

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

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.

Markets are self-regulating only because some brave investors are prepared to bet against the market trend.

The stock market is the world’s largest Oujie Board.

As long as perverse compensation systems for financial executives exist, the United States financial problems will remain nearly, if not completely, intractable.

America's economic illness has a name: financialization. It's an academic term for the trend by which Wall Street and its methods have come to reign supreme in America, permeating not just the financial industry but also much of American business.

Banks and other financial institutions found that it was often impossible to obtain market prices for mortgage-backed securities and other risky assets. Not knowing the value of their own portfolios, they could not judge the solvency and liquidity of other financial institutions either. As a result, they were unwilling to lend to them, and the financial system ground to a halt.

The financial industry may not be synonymous with economics, but it does control a large enough sector of the global economy to sink us all, as was unnervingly demonstrated in 2008.

Helping Wall Street regain confidence and stability was the last thing an angry public wanted in 2009 after the markets crashed. But without such support, markets can buckle and liquidity can disappear - often for decades, as has been the case in Japan.

In my first book, 'Ghosts Of Manhattan,' the setting was Wall Street, and I explored the predictable nature of a bond trader inside the compensation scheme at Bear Stearns and the government regulations of Wall Street. That was about money.

Wall Street, like every industry, has good and bad players.

My impression of Wall Street growing up was certainly that it was like the big, bad place where all of the men did the bad things with our money.

The impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime markets seems likely to be contained.