Warren Farrell Quotes

Let's be honest: the trappings of investment banking are quite tempting. I do miss it sometimes. And to be honest, there was a time I'd read the 'WSJ' in the morning, and for years I have done that.

For seven years after college, I was a waitress at the Buttercup Bakery in Berkeley, and from there I got a job at Merrill Lynch as an account executive, from where I went to vice president of investments for Prudential-Bache Securities. I started my own firm in 1987.

Merrill Lynch is this hugely prestigious brand.

When you hear of somebody named Goldberg, you think of a guy sitting behind a desk investing your money.

I hated being a junior investment banker. I loved the research business, the wealth management business.

I studied economics and thought I wanted to play with the stock market - my dad was a financial adviser - and I was going to go down that path. I was an intern at Smith Barney.

It's natural that you'd have more brains going into money management. There are so many huge incomes in money management and investment banking - it's like ants to sugar. There are huge incentives for a man to take up money management as opposed to, say, physics, and it's a lot easier.

Thirty to 40 years ago, most financial decisions were fairly simple.

I have nothing against investment banking, but it's like massaging money rather than creating money.

I was involved with Wells Fargo Bank as a consultant in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I suggested to them that they develop a product that has become known as index funds.

Investment banking is not a business; it is a personal service where bankers work hand in hand with their clients. And it is a service that must not simply be about making bigger and bigger deals that reap rewards for only a small group of executives.

Any company of my size cannot live without thinking it's possible to go public one day.

If my strength is technology, financial structuring is my son's skill.

I thought at the time that I wanted to go into institutional sales, selling stocks and bonds to institutions. In those days, which was the 1960s, the institutional salesman was making about $100,000 a year. I thought that was just an enormous amount of money.

When I come to work each day, whether as a commentator for TheStreet.com or a host of Mad Money With Jim Cramer, I have only one thought in mind: helping people with their money.

And at a relatively early age, ten or so, I invested my first share of stock. And I used to follow, look at companies and so forth. But throughout the whole period, and indeed right through my college years, while I was involved in the stock market, always interested in finance, I never thought of it as a full-time job.

There's more honor in investment management than in investment banking.

How do you make money? Spinoffs, split-ups, liquidations, mergers and acquisitions.

I have no use for bodyguards, but I have very specific use for two highly trained certified public accountants.

A stock certificate is not a tool, like a shovel, or a commodity, like a pound of cheese. What we sell a customer is not a share in a business, but a view of the Elysian Fields. A financier is a creative artist. Our function is to stimulate the imagination. We are poets!

Americans no longer look to government for economic security; rather, they look to their portfolios.

My early work and publications centered around expanding on the analysis of life insurance in my dissertation and its relationship to investment banking.

Even people who feel perfectly comfortable investing in the stock market and owning their own homes often have qualms about individual medical accounts or Social Security private accounts.

One, I love the creativity. I love the ability to create a capital structure that is appropriate for a company, no matter what field it happens to be in.

I've been a financial journalist for 30 years.