Imagine the big rating agencies as three competitive saloons standing side by side, with each free to set its own drinking age. Before long, nine-year-olds would be downing bourbon
This is a nation of inconsistencies. The Puritans fleeing from oppression became oppressors. We fought England for our liberty and put chains on four million of blacks. We wiped out slavery and our ta...
What Gutfreund said has become a legend at Salomon Brothers and a visceral part of its corporate identity. He said: One hand, one million dollars, no tears.
The Piranha didn’t talk like a person. He said things like If you fuckin’ buy this bond in a fuckin’ trade, you’re fuckin’ fucked. And If you don’t pay fuckin’ attention to the fuckin’ two-year, you g...
A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn’t really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term. For ins...
They had stumbled either upon a serious flaw in modern financial markets or into a great gambling run. Characteristically, they were not sure which it was. As Charlie pointed out, It’s really hard to...
In order to remain undead, I must steal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own.' I've always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence.
Love is like stocks, if you don't want to suffer loss quickly, you better diversify!
On its surface, the booming market in side bets on subprime mortgage bonds seemed to be the financial equivalent of fantasy football: a benign, if silly, facsimile of investing. Alas, there was a diff...
Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.
Sir Gerald Moore: I was at dinner last evening, and halfway through the pudding, this four-year-old child came alone, dragging a little toy cart. And on the cart was a fresh turd. Her own, I suppose....
Before Volcker’s speech, bonds had been conservative investments, into which investors put their savings when they didn’t fancy a gamble in the stock market. After Volcker’s speech, bonds became objec...
That City of yours is a morbid excrescence. Wall Street is a morbid excrescence. Plainly it's a thing that has grown out upon the social body rather like -- what do you call it? -- an embolism, thromb...
The creation of the mortgage bond market, a decade earlier, had extended Wall Street into a place it had never before been: the debts of ordinary Americans.
When you’re a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off, he said. His mind was now fully open to the possibility. I now realized there was an entire...
But everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women. Big Swinging Dickettes.
Corporate finance, which services the corporations and governments that borrow money, and that are known as clients, is, by comparison, a refined and unworldly place. Because they don’t risk money, co...
I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning.
Because the lenders sold many—though not all—of the loans they made to other investors, in the form of mortgage bonds, the industry was also fraught with moral hazard. It was a fast-buck business, say...
On Wall Street, Clarence was a diamond in a sea of glass, never greedy, never an ambulance-chaser, never the kind of person who deserved to die in the way that he did.
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