Alex Berenson Quotes

If I finance a bank and I know if the bank will get in trouble, I will be hit and I will lose money, I will put a price on that.

One day we will have more inflation, and our bonds will bleed like a pig. The only reason for buying long bonds is short-term or as a desperate haven for terrorized investors. But the potential to make longer-term real money is naught.

As a rule, bond funds will not double your money overnight.

Any investment bought via credit always runs the risk of margin calls and, eventually, liquidation.

I could never gamble on stocks and shares because I saw my father get hurt that way - he lost quite a lot of money when the stock market collapsed in 2001.

Investors should be cautiously positioned as the global economy and markets face major uncertainties. The downgrade will be a further headwind to growth and job creation in the U.S.

The problem with interest rates are that you are not modeling a single number, you are modeling a whole term structure, so it is a sort of different type of problem.

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.

And so Fannie Mae produces very strong results for investors in - when interest rates are high and when interest rates are low, in recession and during booms.

What the banking system needs is creditors who monitor risk and cut their exposure when that risk is too high. Unlike regulators, creditors and counterparties know the details of a deal and have their own money on the line.

Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind.

I've got a huge, huge position in mortgage-backed securities. I started accumulating them in 2009, when the market was really down and things were really scary.

At the heart of banking is a suicidal strategy. Banks take money from the public or each other on call, skim it for their own reward and then lock the rest up in volatile, insecure and illiquid loans that at times they cannot redeem without public aid.

When you lose control of risk at a financial institution, you do a variety of unfortunate credit extensions or purchases - and all of a sudden, you've blown up your business.

There is no risk-free path for monetary policy.

I've lost tremendous amounts of money in various markets and I think that that's something that makes you better at my job, not worse.

If you have trouble imagining a 20% loss in the stock market, you shouldn't be in stocks.

You can make great money in a utility type of business by borrowing cheaply and lending sensibly but that's not what's being done.

Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It

When you trade sometimes you lose.

If the legal rate of interest in Great Britain, for example, was fixed so high as eight or ten per cent. the greater part of the money which was to be lent, would be lent to prodigals and projectors, who alone would be willing to give this high interest. Sober people, who will give for the use of money no more than a part of what they are likely to make by the use of it, would not venture into the competition. A great part of the capital of the country would thus be kept out of the hands which were most likely to make a profitable and advantageous use of it, and thrown into those which were most likely to waste and destroy it. Where the legal interest, on the contrary, is fixed but a very little above the lowest market rate, sober people are universally preferred as borrowers, to prodigals and projectors. The person who lends money, gets nearly as much interest from the former, as he dares to take from the latter, and his money is much safer in the hands of the one set of people than in those of the other.

Whoever gambles with the dollar, loses

Banks are employing risky derivatives strategies to goose up returns….the interbank market could freeze up, and one could well have a full blown financial crisis.

One of the most important causes of economic crises is “running liabilities”, or short term debt that the government does not insure. The U. S. financial sector holds trillions of dollars of such debt, including uninsured bank deposits and the short-term liabilities of other financial institutions, such as overnight loans…. Amongst the potential causes of the next crisis, the massive amount of short-term debt ranks as the most probable.

Never give anyone the advice to buy or sell shares, because the most benevolent price of advice can turn out badly.