Quotes & Sayings About Investment Bankers

[I]nfectious disease is merely a disagreeable instance of a widely prevalent tendency of all living creatures to save themselves the bother of building, by their own efforts, the things they require. Whenever they find it possible to take advantage of the constructive labors of others, this is the path of least resistance. The plant does the work with its roots and its green leaves. The cow eats the plant. Man eats both of them; and bacteria (or investment bankers) eat the man ... — Hans Zinsser

Some burglars are vermin, they're no better than, well, investment bankers - there, I've said it. — Ian Pattison

Risk managers and investment bankers and actually, all kinds of investors took on more risk than they expected. So there was a failure of risk management. There was a failure to recognize how much risk there was in some of these securities that people bought. — Robert F. Engle

How many more investment bankers need to show up in court before people stop incriminating themselves in writing? — Penelope Trunk

Merchandise from Wal-Mart has become as ubiquitous as the water supply. Yet, still, the company is rebuked and reviled by anyone claiming a social conscience and is lambasted by legislators as if its bad behavior places it somewhere between investment bankers and the Taliban. — Charles Platt

We don't think of ourselves as a regional investment bank. We think of ourselves as merchant bankers with clients all over the country. — Warren Stephens

I recall that one of the first investment bankers I met taught me a poem. God gave you eyes, plagiarize. A — Michael Lewis

Every dollar that is printed should not represent a debt to private bankers. It should represent an investment potential in the common good, in the common needs of our country. — Cynthia McKinney

People who sell advertising are called "account executives." People who sell customers work in "business development." People who sell companies are "investment bankers." And people who sell themselves are called "politicians." ========== — Anonymous

Research suggests that investment bankers are more prone to commit fraud when they feel the competitor at their heels. — Charles Duhigg

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

Investment banking is not a business; it is a personal service where bankers work hand in hand with their clients. And it is a service that must not simply be about making bigger and bigger deals that reap rewards for only a small group of executives. — Felix Rohatyn

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

The challenge of our generation, whether it's young lawyers, young investment bankers, is to make capitalism work for people not just around the corner, but for people all around the world. — Kabir Sehgal

The only inexplicable aspect of the process was that economic theory (which is, after all, what economics students were supposed to know) served almost no function in an investment bank. The bankers used economics as a sort of standardized test of general intelligence. — Michael Lewis

It's going to take a while to rebuild manufacturing out here," he said. "Ten years, minimum. But once we get the unions involved, we'll have a base to negotiate from. In the meantime, we just need to stop the hemorrhage and give people some short-term victories. Something to show people how much power they have once they stop fighting each other and start going after the real enemy." "And who's that?" Marty shrugged. "The investment bankers. The politicians. The fat cat lobbyists." Marty — Barack Obama

Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I've been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers. — P. J. O'Rourke

There was a time traditionally - say, GM in the 1950s - it was trying to develop a consumer base that would be loyal and lasting and they were thinking in terms of an institution that would remain and grow and thrive in the society. By now, a lot of the investment firms - bankers, hedge funds - are perfectly happy to destroy what they're in and come out with huge, tremendous benefits. That's a new stage of capitalism. — Noam Chomsky

We are Americans. We - we - we are - we are doctors. We are investment bankers. We are taxi drivers. We are store keepers. We are lawyers. We are - we are part of the fabric of America. And the way that America today treats its Muslims is being watched by over a billion Muslims worldwide. — Feisal Abdul Rauf

Society, magazines, posters, music videos, investment bankers. A lot of times, in my past anyway, looking within wasn't overly encouraged. Pretty much everybody proclaimed that fame would give me power and fortune. — Alanis Morissette

During the dot-com days, one could take just about any company public and reap fortunes. All you had to do was to make sky-high projections for growth, say you were in the Internet space, and go along with unscrupulous investment bankers and their analysts. — Vivek Wadhwa

You know, Greenwich Village was the traditional bohemia of New York. I wish I could say that was entirely true now. It's, uh ... changed. It's now got, God help us, investment bankers and journalists, but it's still a very beautiful part of New York. — Jay McInerney

Why is it possible to rescue S&L buccaneers in the early '90s and provide guidance to levered Wall Street investment bankers during the 1998 long-term capital management crisis, yet throw 2 million homeowners to the wolves in 2007? — Bill Gross

They [investment bankers] don't even want the stuff that they've got, you know the fancy cars and houses. Their consumption is basically just a keeping up with the Joneses or let's buy the markers of success because this is what I'm supposed to have and this is what I'm supposed to do. And they are working so hard that they don't even have the time to think about what they might actually desire. — Larkin Grimm

This conceit went hand in glove with the investment bankers' belief that they could control their destiny, which, as we shall see, they couldn't. — Michael Lewis

When investors, particularly investment bankers, talk about splitting up companies, there's a lot of discussion about multiple expansion, and the reality is multiple expansion is an outcome, not a strategy. — Irene Rosenfeld

Criminals are dumb as stumps. If they were smart they could go be investment bankers. Or judges. — Jeff Abbott

Investment bankers do much of their business underwriting government bonds, in the United States and abroad. Therefore, they have a vested interest in promoting deficits and in forcing taxpayers to redeem government debt. — Murray Rothbard

The socially redeeming aspect of golf lies in the vast number of lawyers and bankers and managers who play it, and when you think of the damage they would do if they were at the job instead, you can see why golf courses are a wise investment for any municipality. — Garrison Keillor

When the word 'morality' comes up in connection with economics, income distribution and financial stability are usually the issues. Is it moral for rich countries to use such a high proportion of the world's resources or for investment bankers to earn large bonuses? — Edmund Phelps

They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers. — Michael Lewis

The general culture of investment banking has deteriorated over the years. We did a $6 million deal years ago for Diversified Retailing and we were rigorously and intelligently screened. They bankers cared and wanted to protect their clients. The culture now is that anything that can be sold for a profit will be. 'Can you sell it?' is the moral test, and that's not an adequate test. — Charlie Munger

These days the investment bankers came to Silicon Valley. — Michael Lewis

I don't have any particular expertise-I've never been a banker or an investment banker. But I did see an evolution in the system that I thought was problematic. — Eliot Spitzer

The closest most people have ever come to understanding what an investment banker does may have been on October 24, 1995, when they heard the outrageous special interest story of the day. The wire services released the story first. It was quickly picked up and parroted by almost every major media outlet in the country as a classic example of Wall Street excess. A fifty-eight-year-old frustrated managing director from Trust Company of the West, on an airplane trip from Buenos Aires to New York City, downed an excessive number of cocktails, got out of his seat in the first-class cabin of a United Airlines flight, dropped his pants, and took a crap
on the service cart. There you have it. That's what bankers do: consume, process, and disseminate. — Peter Troob

Why even live? If that's your goal, if you're just clamoring your way to the top, I mean, why even have a life? Somebody was telling me the other day about the lives of investment bankers who work ninety hours a week and how it affects their patterns of consumption. — Larkin Grimm

The business world traditionally rewards people for being closer to the top (case in point: outrageous CEO salaries) or for being closer to the transactions (investment bankers, salespeople). — Eric Schmidt

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

So Merrill Lynch has launched its first campaign in years to advertise the accomplishments of its investment banking business. The ads feature things like Merrill's recapitalization of Sierra Pacific. I guess including "helping Enron achieve its earnings goals in 1999" might be a little awkward given that Merrill Lynch bankers are currently on trial in Houston for that "accomplishment." — Bethany McLean

Glass-Steagall was an act of the US Congress, but it worked more like an act of God. It cleaved mankind in two. With it, in 1934, American lawmakers had stripped investment banking out from commercial banking. Investment bankers now underwrote securities, such as stocks and bonds. Commercial bankers, like Citibank, took deposits and made loans. The act, in effect, created the investment banking profession, the single most important event in the history of the world, or so I was led to believe. — Michael Lewis

The goose that lays golden eggs has been considered a most valuable possession. But even more profitable is the privilege of taking the golden eggs laid by somebody else's goose. The investment bankers and their associates now enjoy that privilege. — Louis D. Brandeis

I learned about M&A and how to value assets and work with investment bankers. — Patricia A. Woertz

Now they were lawyers and investment bankers, with faces creased and drawn by the skirmish of daily life. Others I'd known well, and as we inched perilously closer to the casket, our talk evidenced a shared fondness for Rob but also something else shared in our own receding dreams. There was Ty and his dermatology career, me and my struggles to publish a second novel, former history majors who were doing their best to remain in school forever. Nobody, it seemed, was making the money he'd thought he would make, inhabiting the home he'd thought he would inhabit, doing the thing he'd thought he would do in life. Nobody was fulfilling the dreams harbored on graduation day almost ten years earlier. — Jeff Hobbs

June 2011 article in the Financial Times titled "Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Bankers' " noted, "The characteristics that make for good traders and investment bankers are pretty much the same as those that define psychopaths."107 — Thom Hartmann

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

Most business schools are geared toward churning out investment bankers and management consultants. — Vivek Wadhwa

The longing for a very garish kind of success seems as widespread among writers as among investment bankers. — Pankaj Mishra

Investment bankers make money for a living. — Michael Lewis