Financial Securities Quotes

Gentlemen who prefer bonds don't know what they're missing.

The collateralized debt obligation, the CDO, is a structure which allows you to more or less continuously choose how much risk you want to take in a whole batch of securities. And the reason why they got us into so much trouble is that it's hard to figure out how much risk you really are taking.

Investigating some of the largest subprime lenders - Wells Fargo, Countrywide, Ameriquest, Household Finance - I've seen how their terrible, toxic loans were closed by any means necessary and eventually packaged, sold as securities, and bet upon until they exploded and decimated our economy.

Not having sub-governance would be like anyone who owns USD being able to walk into a Google shareholder meeting and voting without owning Google stock just because Google shares happen to be denominated in USD.

Cannot the poor man's cattle, and horses, and corn be thus taken by the government when the public exigency requires it, and cannot the rich man's bonds and notes be in like manner taken to reach the same end? If the government enacts that the certificates of indebtedness which it gives the farmer for his cattle and provender shall be receivable by the farmer's creditors in payment of his bonds and notes, is it anything more than transferring the government loan from the hands of one man to the hands of another—perhaps far more able to advance it? Is it anything more than putting the securities of the capitalist on the same platform as the farmer's stock?

The trouble is that the risks that are being hedged very well by new financial securities are financial risks. And it appears to me that the real things you want to hedge are real risks, for example, risks in innovation. The fact is that you'd like companies to be able to take bigger chances. Presumably one obstacle to successful R&D, particularly when the costs are large, are the risks involved.

The important source of finance is now commercial papers, bonds, and so on.

Global central banks are working hard to lift their economies through an aggressively easy monetary policy. The ECB [European Central Bank] and BOJ [Bank of Japan] are buying tens of billions of bonds and other financial securities each month in an effort to stimulate their economies, which is pushing down rates everywhere, including in the U.S.

[A] major source of wealth for many families is financial assets, including stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and private pensions. ...the wealthiest 5 percent of households held nearly two-thirds of all such assets in 2013

You should be unconcerned about short-term price action when you own the securities directly, just as you were unconcerned when you owned them indirectly through BPL. I think about them as businesses, not "stocks", and if the business does all right over the long term, so will the stock.