Big Banks Quotes & Sayings

The financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by investment banks betting against the housing market in 2007. It was caused by the fact that too few investors - including all of the big investment banks - bet too heavily on the housing market in the years before 2007. — James Surowiecki

They like to take all this money from sin, build big universities to study in, sing Amazing Grace all the way to the Swiss banks. — Bob Dylan

Forget about banks that are too big to fail; the focus should be on cities, municipalities and countries that are too big to fail. — Andrew Ross Sorkin

In the old days we were the challenger brand competing against the big banks, but today I go round the world and I sit with governors of central banks and finance ministers and, in some cases, prime ministers. They all know Travelex. We are regarded as the establishment - the world's largest retailer of foreign currency. — Lloyd Dorfman

If nations join together now, before the big collapse and share their resources, they can maintain a level of sustainability. Sustain the people that is, and not banks and businesses. — Jacque Fresco

I mean time management is a big factor in my life. I'm a very organized person. You can only do one thing at a time, so that's the main way I do everything. When I'm with my kids, I'm with my kids. When I'm directing a movie, I'm directing a movie. When I'm making Magic Mike, I'm making Magic Mike. So you just really have to fragment and focus. — Elizabeth Banks

Nobody had a credit card when I was a kid. No one had credit card debt. But these big companies and banks wanted to know how to get more money out of people - get them charging things. — Michael Moore

The financial education taught in schools is funded and taught by the big banks and corporations. It's like having the cat train the mice. — Robert Kiyosaki

It is a campaign to break down every barrier that holds you back. We need more than a plan for the big banks. The middle class needs a raise. And we need more jobs. — Hillary Clinton

How Wall Street investment banks somehow had conned the rating agencies into blessing piles of crappy loans; how this had enabled the lending of trillions of dollars to ordinary Americans; how the ordinary Americans had happily complied and told the lies they needed to tell to obtain the loans; how the machinery that turned the loans into supposedly riskless securities was so complicated that investors had ceased to evaluate risks; how the problem had grown so big that the end was bound to be cataclysmic and have big social and political consequences. — Michael Lewis

Don't blame Wall Street, don't blame the big banks. If you don't have a job and you are not rich, blame yourself! — Herman Cain

And was taken to the Forward Docks and a big, brightly lit hangar, where the Psychopath Class ex-Rapid Offensive Unit Frank Exchange of Views was waiting for her. Ulver laughed. 'It looks,' she snorted, 'like a dildo!' 'That's appropriate,' Churt Lyne said. 'Armed, it can fuck solar systems. — Iain M. Banks

Nick did not want to go in there now. He felt a reaction against deep wading with the water deepening up under his armpits, to hook big trout in places impossible to land them. In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it. He did not want to go down the stream any farther today. He — Ernest Hemingway,

Over the last 30 odd years, Democrats have moved to the right and the right has moved into the mental hospital. So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge fund managers, credit card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture and the pharmaceutical lobby ... That's the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat-earthers and civil war re-enactors who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans and who actually worry that Obama is a socialist. Socialist? He's not even a liberal. — Bill Maher

Rather than justice for all, we are evolving into a system of justice for those who can afford it. We have banks that are not only too big to fail, but too big to be held accountable. — Joseph E. Stiglitz

We need to remind politicians they don't work for the big banks - they work for us. — Elizabeth Warren

More paper money cannot make a society richer, of course - it is just more printed paper. Otherwise, why is it that there are still poor countries and poor people around? But more money makes its monopolistic producer (the central bank) and its earliest recipients (the government and big, government-connected banks and their major clients) richer at the expense of making the money's late and latest receivers poorer. — Hans-Hermann Hoppe

I grew up in L.A. I actually grew up in the Valley, which was a pretty amazing place to grow up because everybody has nice, big backyards, and I was kind of a little nature being. — Banks

Wait," I call to him. He stops. " I just wanted to say, I like your big fin. I think it's very sexy. — Anna Banks

People were paid lots of money to make stupid decisions, people in big banks, and when people are paid to be stupid they'll be stupid. The question was, did they know they were being stupid or were they just stupid? I think you need to take it on a case by case basis. There was some sinister activity, but I think by and by it was people being incentivised to do the wrong thing. — Michael Lewis

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

Swipe fees have increased steadily since the introduction of debit cards 20 years ago, when there were no swipe fees at all. Merchants can't negotiate or control them. They've tried, but they have no leverage against the big banks and issuers. So they get ignored. — Peter Welch

The Germans made just about every bad investment you could have made. They invested in Icelandic banks. They invested in Greek government bonds. They were heavy into Irish banks, big into Irish banks, and they bought U.S. subprime mortgage bonds. — Michael Lewis

I clung tightly to Kwan's mane as he propelled his great serpent body through the cloud banks. The cockatrice's big green head dipped under the clouds, and I spotted an emerald island below, with dramatic peaks jutting up from the jungle. I asked the great cockatrice for the name of the isle, but he only laughed at me, saying that names changed faster than a century's wind. That didn't seem very fast to me, but I took his word for it. — Heather Heffner

The banks that each of you gentlemen cater to have been allowed to become too big. Not too big to fail, as you have said in the past, but destined to fail because they are too big. — Kenneth Eade

I'm not afraid of having big banks. — Kevin Warsh

Trapped in the bureaucracy nightmare, real families suffer when the big banks and their servicers force foreclosures. The emotional toll on children packing up their rooms and on parents struggling to find a temporary roof is a deep one. — Sheldon Whitehouse

Voting wouldn't excite me unless it included electing the directors of the big banks and corporations, who make the real decisions that affect our lives. It's hard to get excited about the trained seals in Washington. — Robert Anton Wilson

The New York Federal Reserve is a tool of the big banks. — Collin Peterson

I like entertaining people. I want to make big entertainment. — Elizabeth Banks

Myth: US housing market is in recovery. Fact: Big banks have been hiding their bloated home inventory, seized by virtue of home foreclosures. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Often you see big companies, big banks who are eager to embrace crushing regulatory burdens because they drive up everyone's costs. — Ted Cruz

Big banks churn out page after page of incomprehensible fine print to obscure the cost and risks of checking accounts, credit cards, mortgages and other financial products. The result is that consumers can't make direct product comparisons, markets aren't competitive, and costs are higher. If the playing field is leveled and the broken market fixed, a lot more money will stay in the pockets of millions of hard-working families. That's real stimulus - money to families, without increasing our national debt. — Elizabeth Warren

My parents are divorced, and seeing that was really painful for me. Really painful for me. But that's also a big part of why I'm intrigued by the dynamics between people - because I was close to something that fell apart. — Banks

Or maybe they're the only sane ones. After all, they're the ones with all the power and riches. They're the ones who get everybody else to do what they want them to do, like die for them and work for them and get them into power and protect them and pay taxes and buy them toys, and they're the ones who'll survive another big war, in their bunkers and tunnels. So, given things being the way they are, who's to say they're the loonies because they don't do things the way Joe Punter thinks they ought to be done? If they thought the same way as Joe Punter, they'd be Joe Punter, and somebody else would be having all the fun. — Iain Banks

One of the big, most underlying messages for me is celebrating beauty that is not typical. — Tyra Banks

In 1902 I left the A.E.G. in order to enter finance. I joined the management of one of our big banks, the Berliner Handelsge-Sellschaft, and reorganized a great part of its industrial undertakings. I gained an insight into German and foreign industry, and belonged at that time to nearly a hundred different concerns. To recognize and create a demand is the secret of all sound business. — Walther Rathenau

Please let him come, and give me the resilience & guts to make him respect me, be interested, and not to throw myself at him with loudness or hysterical yelling; calmly, gently, easy baby easy. He is probably strutting the backs among crocuses now with seven Scandinavian mistresses. And I sit, spiderlike, waiting, here, home; Penelope weaving webs of Webster, turning spindles of Tourneur. Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry hungry. I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love: I am here; I wait; and he plays on the banks of the river Cam like a casual faun. — Sylvia Plath

Right now, with millions of Americans still out of work, and struggling to recover from the worst economic downturn since the great depression, with 40 million Americans dealing with student loans, with millions of people working full-time at minimum wage and still living in poverty, with the big banks getting bigger and the workers getting poorer, and seniors struggling to make ends meet, Republicans in Washington have decided the most important thing for them to focus on is how to deny women access to birth control. — Elizabeth Warren

By early 2005 all the big Wall Street investment banks were deep into the subprime game. Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley all had what they termed "shelves" for their subprime wares, with strange names like HEAT and SAIL and GSAMP, that made it a bit more difficult for the general audience to see that these subprime bonds were being underwritten by Wall Street's biggest names. — Michael Lewis

When you have three out of the four largest banks in America today, bigger than they were - significantly bigger than when we bailed them out because they were too big to fail, I think if Teddy Roosevelt were alive today, a good Republican by the way, what he would say is: Break them up; they are too powerful economically; they are too powerful politically. — Hillary Clinton

10/20/30 Rule in my book can level the playing field for a retail forex trader to trade alongside big banks and hedge funds. — Ramesh Selvarajoo

Democrats fought to get health insurance for more Americans. Democrats fought for a strong consumer agency so big banks can't cheat people. We fought, we won, and we improved the lives of millions of people - thank you, President Obama! — Elizabeth Warren

When modeling agencies were saying that I was too big and gaining weight, my mom said, 'OK, we're going to discuss what they're saying over pizza, and we're going to plan the future of your career which doesn't involve you having to be skinny.' — Tyra Banks

Why do we still cling to the intellectually retarded notion that liberty can be obtained, maintained, or lost at the end of a gun barrel? When you're working 3 minimum wage jobs to make the minimum payment on a pair of socks you bought 12 years ago because your credit card company slapped you with an interest rate that would make a loan shark holler WTF! ... well, no one needs to hold a gun to your head. Your ass has already been sold down the river. — Quentin R. Bufogle

I'd like to sit down with Hillary Clinton onstage and ask her about Glass Steagall and all the big banks and her own campaign contributions. — Eileen Myles

I'm so moved when I see everyday Americans standing together, against all odds, to make their lives and communities better - whether it's organizing against big factories polluting their air or against big banks corrupting our economy and political system. — Sally Kohn

As long as the big banks are allowed to remain big, their political leverage over Washington will remain big. And as long as their political leverage remains big, the taxpayer and economic tab for the next mess they create will be big. — Robert Reich

Whether or not you have good consumer protection has a big effect on safety and soundness of the banking community, especially smaller banks. — Judd Gregg

Average working people need more fresh starts. Big corporations, banks, and Donald Trump need fewer. — Robert Reich

It's a big theme throughout my music to just embrace everything about your own mind and to always feel powerful. It's not just a feminine thing, but for men, too, whether they feel weak, or strong or crazy or reclusive. I want everyone to feel powerful no matter what little beasts they have in their head. — Banks

Only dramatic cuts in the federal deficit, a rollback of regulations that cripple small and community banks, a cancellation of future tax increase plans, a big reduction in federal spending, repeal of Obamacare, freeing manufacturing from the prospect of carbon taxation and unleashing out domestic energy potential can solve our problems. But Obama is not about to undo his legacy of disaster for the American people. — Dick Morris

The market might have learned a simple lesson: Don't make loans to people who can't repay them. Instead it learned a complicated one: You can keep on making these loans, just don't keep them on your books. Make the loans, then sell them off to the fixed income departments of big Wall Street investment banks, which will in turn package them into bonds and sell them to investors. — Michael Lewis

I've always loved Scotland, and I'm not a huge fan of big cities, to be honest. I like them to dip into for a bit, but I'm not sure I would want to live in one again. — Iain Banks

Some big actresses told me a few things that inspired me. One said that the biggest challenge for a female actress was to make sure they are not profoundly bored. Another told me to just do whatever you want - do anything. — Elizabeth Banks

I have a big forehead, and I got made fun of all time. When I was a little girl, they used to call me 'five-head.' — Tyra Banks

Every Republican's voted for it. Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they're proposing. Romney wants to let the - he said in the first 100 days he's going to let the big banks once again write their own rules - unchain Wall Street. They're gonna put y'all back in chains. — Joe Biden

I've learned all my hair and makeup tricks on the set, and I incorporate all kinds of things when I'm getting ready, and I'm big on blotting papers. I get a very shiny forehead, which I like to call my inner glow coming out. — Elizabeth Banks

The only sure way to stop excessive risk taking on Wall Street so you don't risk losing your job, or your savings or your home, is to put an end to the excessive economic and political power of Wall Street by busting up the big banks. — Robert Reich

Promise me, man. If anything ever happens to me, promise me you'll take care of
Angelina. She's something special, Micah. Heart way too big for her own good. I worry
because she doesn't see everyone for who they are. She's too busy looking for the good.
I've tried to get her to adopt some cynicism, but the truth of the matter is, she wouldn't be
the same girl if she did. — Maya Banks

I think changing the Democratic Party platform [at the convention] is a great place to start. It should include expanding Social Security, a $15 minimum wage, and breaking up too-big-to-fail banks on Wall Street - among other Sanders priorities. — Ben Wikler

I know the pain of somebody who's too thin and the pain of somebody that people say is too big. — Tyra Banks

I deposit in many banks including the bank of wisdom. The more I draw on my accounts, no matter how big the sum, the bigger my balance becomes — Ameen Rihani

President Obama made a big speech. He welcomed the members of the U.N. General Assembly to New York, and he said, 'I'd like to encourage you to do some shopping while you're here.' I think it worked because China immediately bought eight banks, two car companies, and the state of Wyoming. — Conan O'Brien

Limits should be placed on how big big banks can become. — Robert Reich

Capping the size of American banks won't eliminate the needs of big businesses; it will force them to turn to foreign banks that won't face the same restrictions. — Jamie Dimon

By the middle of 2011, roughly 30 percent of all stock market trades occurred off the public exchanges, most of them in dark pools. The appeal of these dark pools - said the Wall Street banks - was that investors could expose their big stock market orders without fear that those orders would be exploited. — Michael Lewis

It has been a masterful fight-back by the big banks. We the paying public can't do anything much except admit defeat and settle back for the next set of bills. In the meantime, perhaps, we should try and think of a name for the new economic system, which certainly isn't capitalism ... The most accurate term would probably be "bankocracy". — John Lanchester

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - two bloated and corrupt government-sponsored programs - contributed heavily to the crisis.In order to prevent another crisis, we need to do what we should have done years ago - reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We also need to repeal Dodd-Frank, the Democrats' failed solution. Under Dodd-Frank, 10 banks too big to fail have become five banks too big to fail. Thousands of community banks have gone out of business. — Carly Fiorina

New Yorkers have been fortunate to have Andrew Cuomo as our Attorney General - protecting working New Yorkers against the banks, insurance companies and big corporations. — Eric Schneiderman

In the two decades after I left, I waited for the end of Wall Street as I had known it. The outrageous bonuses, the endless parade of rogue traders, the scandal that sank Drexel Burnham, the scandal that destroyed John Gutfreund and finished off Salomon Brothers, the crisis following the collapse of my old boss John Meriwether's Long-Term Capital Management, the Internet bubble: Over and over again, the financial system was, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet the big Wall Street banks at the center of it just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to twenty-six-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents' world when you can buy it and sell off the pieces? — Michael Lewis

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

If the big banks expect to buy influence when they give money to favored think tanks, then the public has a right to know. If the big banks don't expect to buy influence and are merely making charitable contributions, then their shareholders have a right to know. Either way, there's no excuse for keeping these payments secret. — Elizabeth Warren

If you think too-big-to-fail banks are not worthy of investment because of their impossible-to-read balance sheets, well then, don't buy them. — Barry Ritholtz

Myth: Bail-in plans would recapitalize big banks. Fact: big banks are far too insolvent to remotely be in a position for such restoration. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

I'm a big fan of Lady Gaga. — Tyra Banks

The big banks advise cities about whether privatization is a wise choice. They also control the ability of states and cities to access the market for their financing needs. — Bethany McLean

But now, I don't feel silly. I just feel a rush of something up through my heart, wide and deep as a river of light, and it rushes over the banks, and up through the throat and into the mouth and out my eyes, a great big surge of something that for so long had no name, a fugitive animal in a wood, and I know the name of it now, and what it is, is love. — Harrison Scott Key

Big banks are more dangerous than standing armies, and the practice of borrowing and spending money to be paid back by the next generation is stealing from their future. — Thomas Jefferson

In America, we have subsidized private jets, big banks and hedge fund managers. Wouldn't it make more sense to subsidize kids? — Nicholas Kristof

Most of the big banks were shot through with short-termism, deceptive practices and self-dealing. We must institute basic changes in corporate governance and in management practice to restore responsibility and honesty for the sake of the economy and for the self-respect of the country. — Edmund Phelps

On the Big Blackfoot River above the mouth of Belmont Creek the banks are fringed by large Ponderosa pines. In the slanting sun of late afternoon the shadows of great branches reached from across the river, and the trees took the river in their arms. The shadows continued up the bank, until they included us — Norman Maclean

Subject that got people aroused ... was Who Owns America? ... They had a chart going ... filling in connections between the big local contractors and the steel companies and the city and county governments and the unions ... and the downtown merchants ... They found they still did not know who owned obvious centers of power like the banks. They did not know who owned the local paper. Or the radio stations. — Marge Piercy

Banks don't want certain asset classes, and that's created opportunities for private equity, hedge funds, Silicon Valley. In this case I think he was referring to some of the European banks shedding assets, and the big buyers are probably not going to be big American banks. Someone like Blackstone may have a very good chance to buy those assets, leverage them, borrow up a little bit, and do something good there. — Jamie Dimon

Over the last few years, banks and governments have been frenziedly printing money. Everybody is terrified that the current economic crisis may stop the growth of the economy. So they are creating trillions of dollars, euros and yen out of thin air, pumping cheap credit into the system, and hoping that the scientists, technicians and engineers will manage to come up with something really big, — Yuval Noah Harari

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

I directed plays in college. It's something that I have sort of always put in the back of my mind, and I'm a busy actress, and it's very difficult to sort of find the time, honestly, to commit to directing. It's a very - it's a big, big job. — Elizabeth Banks

We need to think deeply about whether we can sustain banks that are not only too big to fail, but potentially too big to bail. — George Osborne

Some big banks remain wary of venture capital. — Alex Berenson

For PayPal to work, we needed to attract a critical mass of at least a million users. Advertising was too ineffective to justify the cost. Prospective deals with big banks kept falling through. So we decided to pay people to sign up. We gave new customers $10 for joining, and we gave them $10 more every time they referred a friend. This got us hundreds of thousands of new customers and an exponential growth rate. — Peter Thiel

This is one of those big, fat paperbacks, intended to while away a monsoon or two, which, if thrown with a good overarm action, will bring a water buffalo to its knees. — Nancy Banks-Smith

Even in my side of the world, I've been in publishing for what, 25 or 26 years, and it's gone from being a gentlemen's club to being a few big players, and it's very corporatised. — Iain Banks

The financial collapse of 2008 got its start with predatory mortgages, that weren't sold by community banks and credit unions, they were sold by fly by night mortgage brokers who had almost zero federal oversight and then the big banks looked over, saw the profit potential and they wanted it bad. So they jumped in and sold millions of these terrible mortgages while the bank regulators just looked the other way. — Elizabeth Warren

What the mortgage bubble was all about was big banks like Goldman Sachs taking big bundles of subprime mortgages that were lent out largely to low-income, highly risky borrowers, and applying this kind of magic-pixie-dust math to these bundles of securities and slapping AAA ratings on them. — Matt Taibbi

Would get angry through the greatness of his thirst, and take a terrible vengeance. So he sweated and fired up and watched the glass fearfully (with an impromptu charm, made of rags, tied to his arm, and a piece of polished bone, as big as a watch, stuck flatways through his lower lip), while the wooded banks slipped past us slowly, the short noise was left behind, the interminable miles of silence - and we crept on, towards Kurtz. — Joseph Conrad

In his searches, Schwall noticed something else, though at first he didn't know what to make of it: A surprisingly large number of the people pulled in by the big Wall Street banks to build the technology for high-frequency trading were Russians. "If you went to LinkedIn and looked at one of these Russian guys, you would see he was linked to all the other Russians," said Schwall. "I'd go to find Dmitri and I'd also find Misha and Vladimir and Tolstoy or whatever." The Russians came not from finance but from telecom, physics, medical research, university math departments, and a lot of other useful fields. The big Wall Street firms had become machines for turning analytically minded Russians into high-frequency traders. — Michael Lewis

What we prefer to do is operate our investment bank in a way that is like what investment banks used to be, which is a middle man - someone who is here to match people who need capital with people who have capital - and not position ourselves at the center of that by taking big positions on a trading stance. — Warren Stephens

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

The new structure of the U.S. stock market had removed the big Wall Street banks from their historic, lucrative role as intermediary. At the same time it created, for any big bank, some unpleasant risks: that the customer would somehow figure out what was happening to his stock market orders. And that the technology might somehow go wrong. If the markets collapsed, or if another flash crash occurred, the high-frequency traders would not take 85 percent of the blame, or bear 85 percent of the costs of the inevitable lawsuits. The banks would bear the lion's share of the blame and the costs. The relationship of the big Wall Street banks to the high-frequency traders, when you thought about it, was a bit like the relationship of the entire society to the big Wall — Michael Lewis

They checked Westish Field, and then the big stone bowl of the football stadium. Nothing. There weren't many electric lights nearby, and the moon that hung between banks of clouds was as slender as an eyelash. Schwartz had never experienced this kind of darkness before enrolling at Westish; in his first days on campus he'd been afraid to fall asleep, as if the night and the quiet might swallow him whole. Now he wondered whether he could ever live in a city again. "I don't suppose he's out drowning his sorrows," Owen said. Henry never went to the bars unless he — Chad Harbach