Michael Lewis Quotes

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.

Business has to have capital.I think Wall Street is a necessary ingredient of the global economy, you've just got to keep people realizing that helping clients is the most important thing, not helping yourself.

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

After I finished college, I got a job on Wall Street as a derivatives trader, but after a couple years of it, I was calling in sick in order to work on my novel.

The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.

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.

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.

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

I don't think Wall Street people in general are smart. I think that's one of the biggest myths in American lore. They're tough, aggressive, greedy, quick thinking but I don't think they're particularly smart at all.

Wall Street. - The abode of the Brokers and the Broke.

Wall Street is stronger than ever.

My mind immediately shot to South Africa the moment I sat down to think what I was going to write, what I was going to say. There was no other choice.

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.

It appears to me that no one has learned a thing; that Wall Street is still operating as if 2008 never happened.

Wall Street has become a veritable casino.

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

It appears that Wall Street is not acting as a force for economic expansion, providing access to capital for companies that make things. Rather, it seems, Wall Street is using government bailouts to lever up.

By no stretch of the imagination can you describe me as a Wall Street lawyer. If you're going to do that, you'd have to say that 7,500 people who work here in Southwestern Pennsylvania for the Bank of New York Mellon with good family jobs are Wall Streeters.

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

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.

I have been in Wall Street all of my life. I love it. It has been good to me. I know many wonderful, decent, honorable, ethical, hard-working people that were in Wall Street with me.

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.

I decided I was going to go to Wall Street, and I was introduced to some people... I met a guy who knew a bond trader at Pressprich, and he got me to meet him and the guy that ran their sales department, Jack Collin.

I represented Wall Street, as a senator from New York, and I went to Wall Street in December of 2007 - before the big crash that we had - I basically said, 'Cut it out! Quit foreclosing on homes! Quit engaging in these kinds of speculative behaviors.'