Financial Derivatives Quotes & Sayings

Be ever thus, my dearest Evelina, dauntless in the cause of distress! let no weak fears, no timid doubts, deter you from the exertion of your duty, according to the fullest sense of it that nature has implanted in your mind. — Fanny Burney

The model used by Wall Street to price trillions of dollar's worth of derivatives thought of the financial world as an orderly, continuous process. But the world was not continuous; it changed discontinuously, and often by accident. — Michael Lewis

A corpse was merely an empty vessel for the spirit it had housed. "The soul," he'd said one night by a campfire in the Valley of the Kings, "is like a falcon. Despite its loyalty to the falconer, it longs to fly free. When my time comes, let my soul soar into the wind and the sky. Wherever its natural home is meant to be, that's where it will go. — Robert Masello

His gaze moved from me to my hand as his brows rose and his grin transformed into a heart-stopping smile that reached his eyes, lightening them and warming them up. Seth not smiling or smirking was beautiful, but him smiling? — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction. — Warren Buffett

I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding. — David Antin

If you have a traditional view of economics, you're probably thinking of Ben Bernanke making Fed policy, or the guys creating financial derivatives at Goldman Sachs. — Emily Oster

It is not by blood, anyhow, that man's true continuity is established: Alexander's direct heir is Caesar, and not the frail infant born of a Persian princess in an Asiatic citadel; Epaminondas, dying without issue, was right to boast that he had Victories for daughters. — Marguerite Yourcenar

Simply, humans should not be given explosive toys (like atomic bombs, financial derivatives, or tools to create life). — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In our view, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction carrying dangers that, while latent, are potentially lethal. — Warren Buffett

I mean, we've always had gold bugs, but now we sort of realize that Treasure Bills might be in the same category. And we have derivatives like credit default swaps which are in this category, and we have derivatives like volatilities that are actually an asset class that we can invest in which are now - would out perform if we have another financial crisis. — Robert F. Engle

If you want to know the value of a year, ask the student who was in the final year of his university education, when the lecturers went on strike and the school ended up closing for a year. — Sunday Adelaja

The Fed should make a clear commitment to stable money to reduce the swings in interest rates and inflation. Instead, it champions and flaunts unstable money. This encourages momentum trading and the growth of derivatives. Meanwhile, layers of financial regulation make Washington bigger and more powerful but don't fix the underlying problems. — David Malpass

My son ain't going to be miserable because he's going to be the child of a rock star, the end. — Noel Gallagher

Capitalism has become systemically risky when a single financial algorithm like the one that David X. Li created brought the entire global economic system close to collapse in 2008. — Said Elias Dawlabani

With respect to their safety, derivatives, for the most part, are traded among very sophisticated financial institutions and individuals who have considerable incentive to understand them and to use them properly. — Ben Bernanke

'Bush v. Gore' gave us a president who lost the popular vote, eventually appointed two more justices, and led us into a war of choice while failing to regulate a financial system dependent on toxic mortgage-backed derivatives. — Marvin Ammori

It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade. The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future. — Alan Greenspan

The use of a growing array of derivatives and the related application of more-sophisticated approaches to measuring and managing risk are key factors underpinning the greater resilience of our largest financial institutions ... Derivatives have permitted the unbundling of financial risks. — Alan Greenspan

The beauty of a financial institution is that there are a lot of ways to go to hell in a bucket. You can push credit too far, do a dumb acquisition, leverage yourself excessively - it's not just derivatives [that can bring about your downfall]. — Charlie Munger

Derivatives in and of themselves are not evil. There's nothing evil about how they're traded, how they're accounted for, and how they're financed, like any other financial instrument, if done properly. — James Chanos

The subprime disaster was a result of financial bombs - derivatives - exploding in financial institutions such as AIG and Lehman Brothers, as well as banks and financial institutions throughout the world. — Robert Kiyosaki

By far the most significant event in finance during the past decade has been the extraordinary development and expansion of financial derivatives. — Alan Greenspan

I come here as one of you - an Iowan! — Michele Bachmann

From the 1990s onward, the financial sector created a vast array of instruments designed to separate investors from their money, financial derivatives of an ever-increasing level of complexity. At some point, this complexity reached a point where even the creators of the derivatives themselves didn't understand them. — John L. Casti

The warning signs had been there since the crash of 2008, but after the initial shock, nothing had been done to correct the problem. Banks had been trading over $7 trillion in risky derivatives daily, as well as fixing interest rates and making bets on the rigged games. There was an ever-growing gap between the elite and all the rest of the people which had continued to develop even after the 2008 crash. — Kenneth Eade

Inappropriate macro economic policies in some economies, characterised by [a] low savings rate and high consumption [and] failure of financial supervision and regulation to keep up with innovation which allowed financial derivatives to spread. — Wen Jiabao

Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, 'toxic' financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them. — Richard Dooling

If the invention of derivatives was the financial world's modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, parallels the elusive nature of meaning in deconstrucitonism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always 'deferred,' moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings - a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an 'aporia,' from a Greek term meaning 'impasse.' There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect. — John Lanchester