Michael Shannon Quotes

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.

… the U.S. brokerage and investment banking industry has transformed the modern American stock market into nothing more than a mechanism for transferring wealth from shareholders to management.

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

The financial markets tend to be just a backdrop for a novel, for a heist or something that isn't necessarily integral to it. On the whole, I don't think the financial world has been well served by novels.

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

It's a very enclosed world on Wall Street.

Wall Street has desperate need of men like you.

There is a growing distrust of the market and a feeling that Wall Street is a crooked casino where the house always wins. Yes, the game is rigged.

This was a massive Ponzi scheme and the biggest crime against the American economy in our lifetimes—in fact, ever…. You had various traders buying each other’s products to artificially keep the prices up so that the bubble didn’t collapse.

I think financial markets only look after their own interests.

What I immediately recognized about Wall Street in 1983 was that it was a continuation of my career in theater. Wall Street is a big theater, and it's all illusions.

I wouldn't in any way say I distanced myself from Wall Street.

I have very good friends on Wall Street.

On Wall Street, every story becomes known so quickly. They are all so connected that everything disseminates there faster than anywhere.

If you're the kind of kid who thinks that all that's important in life is making money, Wall Street is probably still the place to go, especially now that Trump's elected.

I think Wall Street is very important, especially to tech companies. Wall Street will get in their rhythm and go fund tech companies, and tech companies will go create jobs and employ a lot of people, so there's that aspect of Wall Street.

In the 1920s, Wall Street was a world that was really dominated by professional speculators and stock pools. These people had a monopoly over information.

In 'Wall Street,' Charlie Sheen carried that movie.

The people who work in Wall Street still look up to Gordon Gekko. He's sort of a guru.

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

The people who watch a movie like 'Wolf of Wall Street' and want to work on Wall Street are exactly the kind of people who shouldn't.

Buying only what you know can end in disaster. Just think about Enron's employees and business partners, the 'locals' who bought lots of its stock because they thought they were in the know.

I loved Internet businesses, having built and sold one. And I loved the financial business, despite the fact that it was almost all a scam.

When I was 15 years old, I read an article about Ivan Boesky, the well-known takeover trader - turned out years later it was all on inside information! But before that came to light, he was very successful, very flamboyant. And I thought, 'This is what I want to do.' So I'm 15 years old, I decide I'm going to Wall Street.

You're not going to hear me singing songs about Wall Street because I don't know anything about that.