Financial Complexity Quotes

I'm no financial expert. I scarcely know what a coin is. Ask me to explain what a credit default swap is, and I'll emit an unbroken 10-minute 'um' through the clueless face of a broken puppet. You might as well ask a pantomime horse.

You can't explain collateralized debt obligation in a novel - it's too draggy.

I can tell you, because I serve on so many nonprofit boards - where half of us are academics and half of us are from Wall Street - that there's no CEO who understands at all a derivative. All they know is that somebody tells them in their organization, 'We've got a wonderful profit center.'

The richer you are and the more financial advisers you employ, the less likelihood there is that you can ever discover what you are really worth.

It is impossible to understand the financial health of big financial institutions and their potential impact on the market. They don't even understand it themselves.

No one in his right mind would walk into the cockpit of an airplane and try to fly it, or into an operating theater and open a belly. And yet they think nothing of managing their retirement assets. I've done all three, and I'm here to tell you that managing money is, in its most critical elements even more demanding than the first two.

What's both fascinating and challenging about investing is that the changing nature of business and finance means you can never have it all figured out.

For all of us, it's very hard to think about money, and because of that, we need help. In the same way that for all of us, it is hard to eat well, and we need some help. The poor have a particular challenge, which is that their life is actually much more complex - and they're much more complex cognitively.

As the financial experts all over the world use machines to unwind Gordian knots of financial arrangements so complex that only machines can make - 'derive' - and trade them, we have to wonder: Are we living in a bad sci-fi movie? Is the Matrix made of credit default swaps?

Payments is a hard business. It's a messy business, with not necessarily the largest of margins.

The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less.

To say accounting for derivatives is Americais a sewer is an insult to sewage.

If we are really serious about preventing another crisis like the 2008 meltdown we should simply ban complex financial instruments, unless they can be unambiguously shown to benefit society in the long run. This is what we do all the time with other products-drugs, cars, electrical products and many others.

Well money is not easy to describe. It is easy to lose but it cannot be lost, and no one can get really get used to it.

Our financial system is so complicated and so interactive - so many different markets in different countries and so many sets of rules.

Summers was simply a master explainer, able to deftly boil down the complexities of economic and financial, and to put them in terms the non-expert could understand. He was brilliant at cultivating a sense of control, even as events spun far beyond what could be managed with any certainty. He could will into being the confidence that eluded others, those less self-assured and, maybe sensibly, on humbler terms with the world.

There are some who think that the government is limited in how many corruption cases it can bring against Wall Street, because juries can't understand the complexity of the financial schemes involved. But in 'U.S.A. v. Carollo,' that turned out not to be true.

I would say the No. 1 problem with the Volcker Rule is it's too complicated, and people don't know how to interpret it.

Simplicity just isn't a word synonymous with taxes.

I understand that finance can be very complex.

When people start talking about venture capital and finances and how to create this and do that, a lot of it, I swear, it's like sitting in an escrow meeting when all you want to do is buy a house, and you're signing 50 pieces of paper, but you have no idea what they're talking about.

The risks facing hedge funds are non-linear and more complex than those facing traditional asset classessuch risks are currently not widely appreciated or well-understood

The United States is the only country where it takes more brains to figure your tax than to earn the money to pay it.

A profession which is seen as intellectually glamorous is often the most misunderstood when it comes to the commerce involved.

The math you need for most of finance is ninth-grade algebra, and most people feel reasonably comfortable with that. But I think the financial world there has been - I don't know if it's by design, or this is how it's evolved - there are bad actors who have wanted to obfuscate because you can benefit from the lack of transparency.