Quotes & Sayings About Bankers And Banks

If mere scandal could have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they would have vanished long ago. This woman wasn't saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying that they were stupid. — Michael Lewis

I actually think that the economy has got some positives. It's got the market. It's got consumer confidence and it's got banks throwing - I mean central bankers throwing money at it around the world. — Jack Welch

Banks have never made money in the history of banking, losing the equivalent of all their past profits periodically - while bankers strike it rich. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We can have a just society whose guiding ethos is accountability and punishment, where both black kids dealing weed in Harlem and investment bankers peddling fraudulent securities on Wall Street are forced to pay for their crimes, or we can have a just society whose guiding ethos is forgiveness and second chances, one in which both Wall Street banks and foreclosed households are bailed out, in which both inside traders and street felons are allowed to rejoin polite society with the full privileges of citizenship intact. But we cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of forgiveness to the powerful. This is the America in which we currently reside. — Christopher L. Hayes

Money has always been a tool used to control the people. It did not evolve from thousands of years of barter and trade like we are led to believe; the priest-kings of ancient Sumer first introduced it. Written in the Sumerian tablets (the oldest written and deciphered record of human history), is a financial transaction of depositing silver shekels at the palace temple. It is one of the earliest examples of a "Bill of Exchange" used by modern banks, and tells us that temples in antiquity served as the first banks, creating a link between bankers and royal bloodlines as far back as we can trace. — Joseph P. Kauffman

Summarized, the letter explained that he was all against the banks but all for the bankers-except the Jewish bankers who were to be driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced by these same highly paid workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for Labor, but 100 per cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy the World...and maybe, if that World was so impertinent as to defy American in turn, Buzz hinted, he might have to take it over and run it properly. — Sinclair Lewis

The Congress has had an uneasy relationship with banks and bankers since Alexander Hamilton. It took the United States until 1913 to set up a central bank. The Federal Reserve earned its hard-won independence over years of effort. — Robert Zoellick

I think we're in the take-the-money-and-run stage of the economy. So the banks may go under, but the bankers, who make the policy, clean up. — Michael Hudson

When you say "bank," a bank is a building, a set of computers and chairs and things. The bankers are the people running these banks. They're the chief officers, and they push the loans because they don't care if they go bad. For one thing, they may package these bad loans and sell them off to gullible institutional investors. — Michael Hudson

Having wallowed in a delightful orgy of anti-French sentiment, having deplored and applauded the villains themselves, having relished the foibles of bankers, railwaymen, diplomats, and police, the public was now ready to see its faith restored in the basic soundness of banks, railroads, government, and police. — Michael Crichton

But if you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit. — Josiah Stamp

It would not be a bad idea if bankers were to go and sit occasionally with politicians in their political surgeries, where they might get a sense of the injustice that some of the community feel about the banks. — Prince Andrew

There is a defined gulf
Between credit and character
If you doubt this, ask any banker;
He will advise that character is nice
But it is not collateral. — Evan Rhys

In the case of the Irish banks, the private bonds that they had purchased were uninsured. In the case of Greek state bonds, their buyers also knew that these were Greek law contracts, meaning that they could be given a haircut (written down) by a future stressed Greek government. This is precisely why the interest rates were higher than in Germany. Higher risk, higher rewards. As long as the gamble was paying off, the German bankers reaped benefits that they shared with no one. But when the gambles turned bad, as Irish banks and the Greek state failed, they demanded that the taxpayers of Greece and Ireland pay up, as if they had bought insurance from them. — Yanis Varoufakis

We could have saved Wall Street without putting our future in jeopardy. I predicted that there would be all-around consequences - in the long run as well as in the short run. People are now saying we can't afford health care reform because we spent all the money on the banks. So, in effect, we're saying that it's better that we give rich bankers a couple of trillion than giving ordinary Americans access to health care. — Joseph Stiglitz

Banks don't commit crimes. Bankers do. And they won't ever stop if they don't have to pay for their crimes. — Jim Hightower

Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess — Irving Fisher

Managing the other fellow's business is a fascinating game. Trade unionists all over the country have pronounced ideas for the reform of Wall Street banks; and Wall Street bankers are not far behind in giving plans for the tremendous improvement of trade union policies. Wholesalers have schemes for improving the retailer; the retailer knows just what is wrong in the conduct of wholesale business-and we might go through a long list ... Yet for some reason the classes that ought to be helped keep on stubbornly clinging to their own method of running their affairs ... — B.C. Forbes

Later in life, as I competed against the banks, I would think back to this moment, and it gave me confidence. All the bankers did was copy what everyone else did. — Ashlee Vance

Now, obviously, Meredith Whitney didn't sink Wall Street. She'd just expressed most clearly and most loudly a view that turned out to be far more seditious to the social order than, say, the many campaigns by various New York attorneys general against Wall Street corruption. If mere scandal could have destroyed the big Wall Street investment banks, they would have vanished long ago. This woman wasn't saying that Wall Street bankers were corrupt. She was saying that they were stupid. These people whose job it was to allocate capital apparently didn't even know how to manage their own. — Michael Lewis

The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything. — Charles Moore

The goal of the FED, as with all central banks, is three-fold: (1) to protect the largest commercial banks from their depositors, who occasionally exercise their contractual right to withdraw currency (the ungrateful cads); (2) to control entry of newcomers into the bankers' cartel (interlopers); (3) to keep the stock market from collapsing in a panic, thereby persuading depositors to withdraw currency — Gary North

The first task of the Federal Reserve system would be to finance the World War. The European nations were already bankrupt, because they had maintained large standing armies for almost fifty years, a situation created by their own central banks, and therefore they could not finance a war. A central bank always imposes a tremendous burden on the nation for "rearmament" and "defense", in order to create inextinguishable debt, simultaneously creating a military dictatorship and enslaving the people to pay the "interest" on the debt which the bankers have artificially created. — Eustace Mullins

At the lowest level of the investment banking hierarchy are the analysts. To find this young talent, the I-banks send their manicured young bankers out to the Whartons, Harvards and Princetons of the world to roll out the red carpet for the top undergraduates and begin the process of destroying whatever noble ideals the youngsters have left. — John Rolfe

Nationalization would likely mean wiping out the big banks' managements and shareholders. It's because that reckoning has mostly been avoided so far that those bankers may be the Americans in the greatest denial of all. — Frank Rich

The Bankers' New Clothes makes a simple, powerful argument: that banks need to raise more capital. It is entirely persuasive that the extent of their leverage makes the financial system fragile, and it clearly and patiently demolishes all the counter-arguments made by the banks and their lobbyists. — Diane Coyle