James Surowiecki Quotes

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.

We certainly had an upheaval at the start of the Great Depression, and that resulted in a lot of financial reform, but it wasn't done in one stroke, and it wasn't done immediately. The Depression was in 1929 and resulted in the Securities and Exchange Act of '33, '34, '35, '37, '39, and '41.

It appears to me that no one has learned a thing; that Wall Street is still operating as if 2008 never happened.

I believe Wall Street needs serious ongoing regulation.

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

The reality is that the institutional framework in which Wall Street operates is fundamentally inappropriate, and it inevitably generates violent fluctuations of the market.

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.

… clean up thoroughly unwholesome conditions in the field of investment. In this we have had assistance from many bankers and businessmen, most of whom recognize the past evils in the banking system, in the sale of securities, in the deliberate encouragement of stock gambling, in the sale of unsound mortgages and in many other ways in which the public lost billions of dollars. They saw that without changes in the policies and methods of investment there could be no recovery of public confidence in the security of savings.

Wall Street has desperate need of men like you.

Nowhere does history indulge in repetitions so often or so uniformly as in Wall Street.

Something is missing from Main Street: Trust in Wall Street

What I immediately recognized about Wall Street in 1983 was that it was a continuation of my career in theater. Wall Street is a big theater, and it's all illusions.

While short sellers probably will never be popular on Wall Street, they often are the ones wearing the white hats when it comes to looking for and identifying the bad guys!

In the 1920s, Wall Street was a world that was really dominated by professional speculators and stock pools. These people had a monopoly over information.

By incentivizing Wall Street players to sniff out inefficient or corrupt companies and bet against them, short-selling acts as a sort of policing system; legal short-sellers have been instrumental in helping expose firms like Enron and WorldCom.

Banks are slowly but surely lending again, and never again will taxpayers foot the bill for Wall Street's excesses. In case we forgot, that was the change we believed in. That was the change we fought for. That was the change President Obama delivered.

We don't have sales trading, brokerage, capital lending - any of those kinds of things that got some of the Wall Street firms a little bit in trouble.

Market capitalism survived and prospered after the boom-bust industrial revolution of the 19th century, and the Great Depression and world wars of the 20th century. It will recover from the financial panic of 2008-09 and Obamanomics.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'

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

The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.

People are rightfully upset about Wall Street abuses and excess.

I think that the S.E.C. has been pretty feckless when it comes to reigning in reckless behavior on Wall Street.

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