Walter Isaacson Quotes

It is a truth universally acknowledged on Wall Street that original research is on life support. Serious research can be bad for business, as well as expensive.

The markets were run by mathematicians and their models but they had no business sense.

My father was an investment banker, a stock broker.

There are a lot of jobs in the financial industry that do need a math major.

In the financial sector, those whom the gods want to destroy they first teach math.

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

My career in academic research has not been involved with active management of securities. I've tried to understand risk-and-return relationships; also the pricing of derivative securities.

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

The financial world is at the cutting edge of high technology.

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.

There’s a lot of money in making financial products whose risk few understand. Simplicity might be good for economics, but it’s lousy for Wall Street bonuses.

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.

No doubt bias exists everywhere, but Wall Street is a ferocious battlefield with everyone in search of the next rainmaker or best strategy. It shouldn't matter who delivers it.

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

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

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.

Math people are math people. When you approach them with investments and business, they don't just ask the soft questions but eventually get to the hard questions.

The world of derivatives is full of holes that very few people are really aware of. It's like hydrogen and oxygen sitting on the corner waiting for a little flame.

When we were young, there weren't very many smart people in the investment world. You should have seen the people in the bank trust departments. Now, there are armies of smart people at private investment funds, etc . If there were a crisis now, there would be a lot more people with a lot of money ready to take advantage.

The memory of the financial community is proverbially and distressingly short.

By far the most significant event in finance during the past decade has been the extraordinary development and expansion of financial derivatives.

We know where most of the creativity, the innovation, the stuff that drives productivity lies - in the minds of those closest to the work.

At heart, "uncertainty" and "investing" are synonyms.

Mea culpa, mea culpa. MIT and Wharton and University of Chicago created the financial engineering instruments, which, like Samson and Delilah, blinded every CEO. They didn't realize the kind of leverage they were doing and they didn't understand when they were really creating a real profit or a fictitious one.