High Finance Quotes

Financial hydrogen bombs built on personal computers by 26-year-olds with MBAs.

I always said that if I wasn't studying psychopaths in prison, I'd do it at the stock exchange.

I'd stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985, and stumbled out, richer, in 1988, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me me as totally preposterous-which is one reason the money was so easy to walk away from.

If you go back to the time of J.P. Morgan, the world of high finance was completely wholesale. The prestigious investment banks on Wall Street appealed exclusively to large corporations, governments, and to extremely wealthy individuals.

I spent many hours slaving away, day and night, bleary eyed, on multi-million pound takeovers, mergers and acquisitions, and the rest. It could sound glamorous (especially when it involved overseas travel) but often it wasn't partly because, as a lawyer, you were not the one calling the shots.

I saw someone lose $100 million in one night. When you watch that, as an owner-operator of a game, you realize that these numbers are incredibly unsustainable, incredibly unhealthy. So, I was not happy about this loss. It brought me no joy or adrenaline.

As boom- and bust-prone as high finance always has been and remains, the greatest systemic risk to our economy is not Wall Street. It's the growing federal debt (and weakening dollar) being enacted by those Washington politicians - the ones who want to protect us from Wall Street.

I look back on my years as a Wall Street lawyer as time spent in a foreign country.

The subconscious moral sense or the people has come to a distinct realization of the fact that crimes are possible in what we call high finance as they are in lower quarters.

I was an athlete in college, and Wall Street likes athletes because they're very competitive people that are willing to do anything to win. So I got a job at Bear Stearns in the summer of 2007.

There is nothing more nervous than a million dollars - it moves very fast, and it doesn't speak any language.