Cathy O'Neil Quotes

Wall Street is at best ambivalent. The size of the accounts is nothing big. How many Wall Street firms do you know that are running after people with $5,000 accounts?

I think Wall Street is very important, especially to tech companies. Wall Street will get in their rhythm and go fund tech companies, and tech companies will go create jobs and employ a lot of people, so there's that aspect of Wall Street.

I wouldn't in any way say I distanced myself from Wall Street.

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.

I don't think Wall Street people in general are smart. I think that's one of the biggest myths in American lore. They're tough, aggressive, greedy, quick thinking but I don't think they're particularly smart at all.

Wall Street. - The abode of the Brokers and the Broke.

Business has to have capital.I think Wall Street is a necessary ingredient of the global economy, you've just got to keep people realizing that helping clients is the most important thing, not helping yourself.

On Wall Street, there is no "Wall Street"; there are individuals.

The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.

I have been in Wall Street all of my life. I love it. It has been good to me. I know many wonderful, decent, honorable, ethical, hard-working people that were in Wall Street with me.

Those of Manhattan are the brokers on Wall Street and they talk of people who went to the same colleges; those from Queens are margin clerks in the back offices and they speak of friends who live in the same neighborhood.

But Wall Street people are in fact very smart; they're funny, they're not company men who work their way up the chain.

There is one thing Anthony Weiner and I agree on: there are a lot of smart, hard-working people in the financial industry.

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.

I was in the equity-trading department at Merrill Lynch. I was there in 1987 when the market crashed.

The Commission concludes that, as massive losses spread throughout the financial system …, many institutions failed, or would have failed but for government bailouts. As panic gripped the market, credit markets seized up, trading ground to a halt, and the stock market plunged. Lack of transparency contributed greatly to the crisis: the exposures of financial institutions to risky mortgage assets and other potential losses were unknown to market participants, and indeed many firms did not know their own exposures.

… 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.

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 charge that [Tim] Geithner advocated taxpayer relief for Wall Street regardless of the community’s sins, will probably follow him to his grave.

Bankers are doing God’s Work!

I believe most people think the economy is very important.

I went to work on Wall Street for about three or four years with an investment bank, got certified: series 3, series 7, and all this stuff.

I had come from a middle-class family in Port Washington, Long Island, and I was really clueless about Wall Street. My first job there I basically got fired from.

In my first book, 'Ghosts Of Manhattan,' the setting was Wall Street, and I explored the predictable nature of a bond trader inside the compensation scheme at Bear Stearns and the government regulations of Wall Street. That was about money.

I'm not pro-Wall Street or anti-Wall Street. I'm pro-New York City.