Steve Eisman Quotes

Wall Street has been beset with problems. The cycle of greed and personal aggrandizement and lifestyle grandstanding is an affront to any American.

The middle years - the eighteen-seventies, 'eighties, 'nineties - were a time of moral bankruptcy when men stole millions by a stroke of the pen or by the simple expedient of printing tons of worthless paper.

From 1934 to 1963, the biggest criminals in America ended up on Alcatraz. Nowadays they end up on Wall Street.

At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we'll all be paying for until the end of time.

Everywhere you look, there's a hunger to put the ethos by which Wall Street thrives on trial.

Over the years, many in the public have become numb to news of financial corruption, partly because too many of these stories involve banker-on-banker crime.

I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.

Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up.

I am well aware that the International Bankers who drive up to the door of the United States Treasury in their limousines, look down with scorn upon members of Congress because we work for so little, while they draw millions a year. The difference is that we earn, or try to earn, what we get- and they steal the greater part of their takings.

Before the stock market crash of 1929 approximately half of all the stock sold in America was fraudulent. President Coolidge did not believe in the Federal Government interfering with business and would not interfere. His Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover however was worried about the extreme corruption of the system. By the time he succeeded Coolidge as President, it was too late.

We have to put an end to the culture of selfishness and corruption that allows greedy Wall Street banks and executives to rip off working people without any consequences.

We're constantly having to go head-to-head with the Bernie Madoffs of the world who just want more and more money.

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

I'm not going to let Wall Street get away with murder. Wall Street has caused tremendous problems for us.

Not one Wall Street executive has been charged with crimes since the 2008 financial crash.

Goldman Sachs was one of those companies whose illegal activity helped destroy our economy and ruin the lives of millions of Americans. But this is what a rigged economy and a corrupt campaign finance system and a broken criminal justice is about. These guys are so powerful that not one of the executives on Wall Street has been charged with anything after paying, in this case of Goldman Sachs, a $5 billion fine.

Wall Street is not being made a scapegoat for this crisis: they really did this.

... the loss of public confidence in the financial community growing out of its own conduct in recent years. I insist that more damage has been done to stock values and to the future of equities from inside Wall Street than from outside Wall Street.

I think any time you couple the term "Wall Street" with "bailout" or something like that, you know - I don't like what's going on in Wall Street.

In the business world, allegations of accounting irregularities is tantamount to yelling fire in a crowded theater, except, today, in our Internet world, instead of people running for the exit signs, they just push the button on their computer.

Evidently there is no need for delay, no need for further study, if the government takes a loss and Wall Street makes a profit, but it is absolutely necessary to delay if homeowners might have a chance to cut their mortgages and stay in their homes. This is wrong, and it is time to fight back!

Over the years, Charlie [Munger, Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman] and I have observed many accounting-based frauds of staggering size. Few of the perpetrators have been punished; many have not even been censured. It has been far safer to steal large sums with pen than small sums with a gun.

I want to say something, and it may sound harsh, not to you, but to the American people. In a sense, in my view, the business model of Wall Street is fraud. It's fraud. I believe that corruption is rampant, and the fact that major bank after major bank has reached multi billion dollar settlements with the United States government when we have a weak regulator system tells me that not only did we have to bail them out once, if we don't start breaking them up, we're going to have to bail them out again, and I do not want to see that happen.

The people on Wall Street broke this country, and they did it one lousy mortgage at a time. It happened more than three years ago, and there has been no real accountability, and there has been no real effort to fix it.