Financial Jargon 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.'

I have some classes in accounting, but I don't know anything about accounting. I - you know, when my accountant tells me all the things he does, it's a foreign language to me.

When somebody asserts that a stock has an earning power of so much, I am sure that the person who hears him doesn't know what he means, and there is a good chance that the man who uses it doesn't know what it means.

Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, 'toxic' financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.

We believe that according the name 'investors' to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a 'romantic.'

Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?

The ones I like are ‘cheque’ and ‘enclosed.’

There's an awful lot of us who don't quite speak finance, speak money.

Credit card agreements run as long as 30 pages, and it's 30 pages of largely incomprehensible text.

It's complicated.' 'So's quantitative easing. But I still get that it means printing money.

When someone uses 'low eight figures,' that means barely eight figures.

You know how on the evening news they always tell you that the stock market is up in active trading, or off in moderate trading, or trading in mixed activity, or whatever. Well, who gives a

It's not long-term debt if the money is immediately paid back.

I don't even know what that means. People who get credit have to get it from somewhere. Does a credit bubble mean that people save too much during that period? I don't know what a credit bubble means. I don't even know what a bubble means. These words have become popular. I don't think they have any meaning.

Much discussion of money involves a heavy overlay of priestly incantation.