Matt Taibbi Quotes

Financial institutions like to call what they do trading. Let's be honest. It's not trading; it's betting.

Wall Street has become a veritable casino.

The people who did the collateralized mortgage obligations, sold them to pension funds, then sold them short, then bought credit default swap insurance on them, are just amazing. They are a law unto themselves.

As the world has become more predatory and aggressive, my impression is that the investment banking business has moved from being relationship-oriented to being increasingly transaction-oriented.

I've nothing against Goldman Sachs. But Goldman Sachs isn't an investment bank. Goldman Sachs is a hedge fund. It's bigger than any hedge fund. It's more leveraged, to the power of three or five, than any hedge fund.

Speculation is only a word covering the making of money out of the manipulation of prices, instead of supplying goods and services.

You want to know the way to raise money? Put a transaction fee on Wall Street, so maybe we can curb some of the speculation and raise some money.

Short sellers sell stock they have borrowed, hoping to buy it back later when its price has fallen.

Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, 'toxic' financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.

I don't see any magic in hedge funds.

If you rank the top 50 one-day moves in the S&P 500, a fair number of those happened within the last five or 10 years. That tells you that we're in a different, riskier market now.

The financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by investment banks betting against the housing market in 2007. It was caused by the fact that too few investors - including all of the big investment banks - bet too heavily on the housing market in the years before 2007.

It is an extreme perversion of capitalism if you can trade in something before you have even paid for it.

Speculators get a bad rap. In the popular imagination they're greedy, heedless, and amoral, adept at price manipulations and dirty tricks. In reality, they often play a key role in making markets run smoothly.

Anybody who plays the stock market not as an insider is like a man buying cows in the moonlight.

Let's embrace productive capitalism, not casino capitalism, by restoring transparency and true competition in the commodities markets.

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.

Some of these biggest financial institutions are out there trading in commodities. They're buying oil tankers. This is not a financial system that has calmed down and is there to serve the American people.

The American banking system, which at one time extended productive loans to agriculture and industry, has today become a giant betting machine

The Panic of 1893 was a dismal time of radiating destruction …. It was good for the bears …. the wild joy of men who shorted stocks and rejoiced in the ruin…

Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn't willing to.

Walk across any of the trading floors - they are full of 29-year-old kids. The capital markets of America are controlled by a bunch of right-out-of-business-school young guys who haven't really seen that much.

A financial institution has the task of taking risks, and if it's a well run institution - say, Goldman Sachs - it tries to cover the potential losses to itself, but only to itself.

I get very worried that people that are buying bitcoins don't really understand what they're participating in other than the headline stories that it keeps going higher and 'I want to make sure I don't miss this opportunity to make some money.'

Proprietary trading does not belong in banks with FDIC insurance.