Andrew Ross Sorkin Quotes

As long as perverse compensation systems for financial executives exist, the United States financial problems will remain nearly, if not completely, intractable.

Wall Street has played a role in everyone's life, and it has been vilified by everyone, but I think that the average trader didn't have a sense of what was coming. The culture is so vacuous, it's possible to come to it straight out of college and never have a real adult life, even if you have the wife and kids.

I believe Wall Street needs serious ongoing regulation.

Markets are, in the end, man-made devices for utilitarian purposes, not a force of nature that we should not try to resist. If they end up serving the interests of only a tiny minority, as is increasingly the case, we have the right - and indeed the duty - to regulate them in the interest of greater social good.

We can't expect Wall Street to police itself - that's why we have a federal government.

It's time to put the national interest before the interests of Wall Street.

I'm not anti-Wall Street - I'm anti-distortions to free markets.

The people who work in Wall Street still look up to Gordon Gekko. He's sort of a guru.

The war to rein in Wall Street excess is never over.

The Dodd Bill does very little to reduce financial risks. What it will do is make Wall Street even more the servant of bureaucrats in Washington and the political party in power. That is not in the best interests of the American people.

Not only is self-regulation largely a fantasy, but repeated scandals across multiple industries have proved that companies are fundamentally incapable of self-regulating for the greater good.

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

We are all socialists now, it seems. John McCain, David Cameron and Gordon Brown attack bankers' irresponsible behaviour and salaries, and call for state intervention in the financial markets. But these calls will not get them elected or re-elected if they are addressed only to the banking sector.

I believe in humanitarian capitalism, and there are good people on Wall Street.

I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.

In a pure capitalist system, an institution as moronic and corrupt as Bank of America would be swiftly punished by the market - the executives would get to loot their own firms once, then they'd be looking for jobs again.

Tea Party people know that I stood against the Wall Street scam from Day One, that I voted against TARP, that I voted against repealing Glass-Steagall Act that kept these guys under some control.

By no stretch of the imagination can you describe me as a Wall Street lawyer. If you're going to do that, you'd have to say that 7,500 people who work here in Southwestern Pennsylvania for the Bank of New York Mellon with good family jobs are Wall Streeters.

People are rightfully upset about Wall Street abuses and excess.

Second of all, I don't think Wall Street is doing what it's supposed to be doing, even after the shameful performance of the last two years. They're are not allocating capital.

Washington told Wall Street, 'We're going to let y'all regulate yourselves.' The Republicans were in charge. They never said a word.

While one should never underestimate the ability of risk-besotted financiers to wreak havoc, the real threat to capitalism isn't unfettered financial cunning. It is, instead, the unwillingness of executives to confront the changing expectations of their stakeholders.

Look, I've always said from the word go many years ago that I felt the whole bonus culture, they need to think very carefully about being detached from the rest of the British public.

In Germany it is good if as many people as possible join initiatives and peaceful demonstrations against the rule of the financial markets. Worshipping the unfettered freedom of global markets has brought the world to the brink of ruin. We now need social and ecological rules for the market economy.

I do not understand how it is that financial institutions could think that they could take taxpayer money and then turn around and act like it's business as usual. I don't understand how they can't see that the world has changed in a fundamental way, that it is not business as usual when you take taxpayer dollars.