Richard Grenell Quotes

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.

When I was 15 years old, I read an article about Ivan Boesky, the well-known takeover trader - turned out years later it was all on inside information! But before that came to light, he was very successful, very flamboyant. And I thought, 'This is what I want to do.' So I'm 15 years old, I decide I'm going to 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.

Everything that happens on Wall Street only fortifies my opinion that there is in fact a more ludicrous industry than the entertainment industry.

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.

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.

I met Michael Milken for the first time with Oliver Stone at the Drexel Burnham offices in Los Angeles.

You're not going to hear me singing songs about Wall Street because I don't know anything about that.

Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything.

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.

Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.

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.

Wall Street has desperate need of men like you.

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

… 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.

I think very few people still understand the distinction between CEOs on Wall Street and the hedge-fund billionaires operating separately.

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

On Wall Street, every story becomes known so quickly. They are all so connected that everything disseminates there faster than anywhere.

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.