Risky Investments Quotes

Wall Street excesses helped lead to the Great Recession.

Investment banking has, in recent years, resembled a casino, and the massive scale of gambling losses has dragged down traditional business and retail lending activities as banks try to rebuild their balance sheets. This was one aspect of modern financial liberalisation that had dire consequences.

If you'd like to buy some of the fruits of deregulation, we have some S&L's [savings & loan's] we'd like to sell you.

Following the automotive pack down unwise and unprofitable roads is not just naive but also very dangerous.

Never put your savings in risky investments. Only disposable income should find its way there.

Our whole Depression was brought on by gambling, not in the stock market alone but in expanding and borrowing and going in debt... all just to make some easy money quick.

When reviewing one's portfolio, it is important to be aware of common mental mistakes that may lead to bad decisions. The most powerful is commitment bias, which, as manifested in investing, is the tendency to fall in love with one's stocks.

The Chinese banking system is built on quicksand and that's the one thing a lot of people don't realize. Everybody seems to think it is a free and clear open checkbook. It's not. The banking system in China is extremely fragile.

If I owned any of these Hot New Issues that have doubled, tripled, quintupled or umptupled within days and in some cases hours after they were issued, I most certainly would grab my fabulous windfall, thank my lucky stars and invest the money. It's utter nonsense to think any newly issued stock is really worth two, ten or 20 times the [offering] price.... A management so stupid as to sell shares [cheap], and an underwriter so obtuse as not to discern the real value, together would provide reason enough for a sensible man to get rid of his shares.

The people who generated great personal wealth in the process of creating this mess [the Great Recession]—bankers and financiers who invented products like mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps—are now actively eschewing any responsibility for that problem by blaming the state for their mistakes.

The Department of Energy made an investment that failed, and it got raked over the coals for that failed investment. This is ridiculous. The fact of the matter is, the government should be making a lot of risky investments, the majority of which are likely to fail.

There seems to be an unwritten rule on Wall Street: If you don't understand it, then put your life savings into it. Shun the enterprise around the corner, which can at least be observed, and seek out the one that manufactures an incomprehensible product.

Big banks have long had private equity divisions that put up capital for deals too complex or risky for individual shareholders to finance.

There's still a lot of investors wondering what to invest in. And, of course, I think entertainment looks attractive when you read the few films that make these insane amounts of money. What they don't know is they don't always do that.

After 2008, my brand of finance got a bad rap.

I think there are a lot of people out there that are speculating in the stock market. They have all kinds of tech stocks or social media stocks. If you want to gamble in the stock market, I would much rather gamble on a mining stock than a social media stock.

In a world where socialism has disappeared, it can still be found lurking in the boardrooms of failing and bad-risk investment companies … that yearn to spread their losses across the backs of long-suffering taxpayers.

Bailing out people who made ill-advised mortgages makes no more sense that bailing out people who lost their life savings in Las Vegas casinos.

Never invest in anything that eats or needs painting.

Our experience is that most entrepreneurs are able to attract debt, even for risky and early stage investments. There are investors who provide debt, but very few who fund through equity.

We [US government] have used our taxpayer dollars not only to subsidize these banks but also to subsidize the creditors of those banks and the equity holders in those banks. We could have talked about forcing those investors to take some serious hits on their risky dealings. The idea that taxpayer dollars go in first rather than last - after the equity has been used up - is shocking.

When we first invested in Red Hat, it was thought to be totally insane. When we funded MySQL, it was only partly insane.

Taxpayers have put more than $24 trillion on the line to resuscitate Wall Street after the economic meltdown of last year. With the help of this massive taxpayer support, the nation's largest banks are posting record profits.

It can be difficult to find investment for a new business, particularly one which is highly innovative or breaks new ground.

My dad was a terrible businessman.