Jeff Greene Quotes

I was able to use credit default swaps to protect not only my investments but the hundreds of jobs that exist because of my investment. I understand the dangers of credit default swaps and the benefits of credit default swaps.

We concluded that you cannot rely on delta hedging alone. It sounds simplistic to say that now, but back then, this was the sort of thing people were only just beginning to realize.

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.

There are challenges in terms of the measurement of VAR for what are known as nonlinear derivatives, where things like gamma and vega are important dimensions of the risk.

If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.

Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It

We don't understand the equity market well, and so we deploy funds in fixed-income securities, and like any other securities, investment in those securities also need to follow the mark-to-market accounting principle.

I have a quantitative background, but really, derivatives appealed to me because they require so much creativity.

The good thing about a dealer's derivatives portfolio is that it is marked to market.

What you want to watch are the lenders, not the borrowers. The borrowers will always be willing to take a great deal for themselves. It's up to the lenders to show restraint, and when they lose it, watch out.

I'm no financial expert. I scarcely know what a coin is. Ask me to explain what a credit default swap is, and I'll emit an unbroken 10-minute 'um' through the clueless face of a broken puppet. You might as well ask a pantomime horse.

One of the risks for anybody in the lending business is that being conservative can harm your competitiveness.

I have no interest in bailing out anybody, quite frankly, and I think banks have to suffer every dollar of loss if they make a bad loan.

I think what we need is better understanding of how to do risk analysis of a CDO, but that they still can perform a very valuable function because they can aggregate these risks and pass them around so that mortgages or other kinds of loans can be packaged and sold to investors all over the world, who in most times, would justify a small amount of each one.

We've used derivatives for many, many years. I don't think derivatives are evil, per se, I think they are dangerous.

Credit-default swaps, I think, have serious problems associated with them.

I think the credit default swaps can take the place of the rating agencies who really have missed the ball in this procedure and are quite conflicted by the way the ratings are paid for. So, I would like to see credit default swaps become an evermore important way of understanding credit risk in the economy.

So what is the role that credit default swaps can play in an economy? Well my feeling is that if these things actually will now be traded on either exchanges or some kind of central clearing, they are going to be a very good measure of the credit worthiness of different companies.

Derivatives are like sex. It's not who we're sleeping with, it's who they're sleeping with that's the problem.

I do believe CDSs [credit default swaps] have been miscast, much as poor workmen tend to blame their tools.

Credit-default swaps remedied the problem of open-ended risk for me. If I bought a credit-default swap, my downside was defined and certain, and the upside was many multiples of it.

The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst was after Lomas said they were hedged: 'The Lomas Financial Corporation is a perfectly hedged financial institution: it loses money in every conceivable interest rate environment.' I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.

The financial crisis revealed important weaknesses in many areas of our financial system.

You can't explain collateralized debt obligation in a novel - it's too draggy.

The FM proposed to set up a Credit Guarantee Fund to ensure better flow of funds to students.