Michael Douglas Quotes

The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.

We did not investigate Wall Street because we were troubled by large institutions making a lot of money; we took action to stop a blatant fraud that was ripping of small investors.

The best way to rob a bank is to own it.

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

While short sellers probably will never be popular on Wall Street, they often are the ones wearing the white hats when it comes to looking for and identifying the bad guys!

For CNBC, and for Wall Street, billion-dollar fines for violations of the law are just part of the price of doing business, along with litigation costs and 'compliance.'

Securities fraud generally and insider trading in particular should be eminently deterrable crimes.

If you go back to the time of J.P. Morgan, the world of high finance was completely wholesale. The prestigious investment banks on Wall Street appealed exclusively to large corporations, governments, and to extremely wealthy individuals.

You'd be a fool or a deluded idealist to think ethics would be prominent on Wall Street. That is not a statement against people in the money business, just a fact.

Significant officials at publicly traded companies are casually and cavalierly engaged in insider trading. Because insider trading has as one of its elements communication, it doesn't take rocket science to realize it's nice to have the communication on tape.

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.

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.

It's a very enclosed world on Wall Street.

We have decriminalized Wall Street malfeasance.

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.

The subconscious moral sense or the people has come to a distinct realization of the fact that crimes are possible in what we call high finance as they are in lower quarters.

We're going to be aggressive on Wall Street and in Albany and on Medicaid fraud.

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 think that, in addition of the intersection of media and technology, there has also been an intersection between technology and finance, which is something I find a little closer to home, seeing as I spend so much time covering Wall Street banks.

I'm asked, what about criminal prosecution of those on wall street? You know what, it's probably because none of them committed any crimes. They just made some incredibly bad decisions.

The fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism.

… 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.

Something is missing from Main Street: Trust in Wall Street

A striking feature of financial service activities during the past few decades is that the financial transactions essential to the operation of the 'real' economy has become increasingly dwarfed by speculative activity.