Quotes & Sayings About Investment Banking

The 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act will reestablish a wall between commercial and investment banking, make our financial system more stable and secure, and protect American families. — Elizabeth Warren

An MBA is a great degree for career paths like investment banking, finance, consulting, and large companies. An MBA is not necessarily the right path for starting a tech company. You should be building a prototype, not getting an MBA in that case. — Guy Kawasaki

I take from the poor and give to the rich. They just happen to be the same individuals. Poor and stupid before they learn from me and pay with their time and money, but rich and successful after they do. The truly miserable, however, don't know how poor they are, and I want nothing from them. — Robin Sacredfire

Let's be honest: the trappings of investment banking are quite tempting. I do miss it sometimes. And to be honest, there was a time I'd read the 'WSJ' in the morning, and for years I have done that. — Chetan Bhagat

The kids I see are lazy. Nobody wants to work. I teach physics. It takes years to master. But all the kids want to dress like Charlie Sheen and make a million dollars before they're twenty-eight. The only way you can make that kind of money is in law, investment banking, Wall Street. Places where the game is paper profits, something for nothing. But that's what the kids want to do, these days. — Michael Crichton

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

As a child, I had no idea that I would end up in the film industry. My ambitions changed from wanting to join the army like my grandfather to taking up merchant navy as a career to running for India, and finally, investment banking while I was a student of economics honour. But during my college days, I began to get offers for modelling. — Arjun Rampal

I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines. — Douglas Rushkoff

There's more honor in investment management than in investment banking. — Charlie Munger

On the Glass-Steagall thing, like I said, if you could demonstrate to me that it was a mistake, I'd be glad to look at the evidence. But I can't blame [the Republicans]. This wasn't something they forced me into. I really believed that given the level of oversight of banks and their ability to have more patient capital, if you made it possible for [banks] to go into the investment banking business as continental European investment banks could always do, that it might give us a more stable source of long-term investment. — William J. Clinton

I make 2+2=5, and I get to keep the remaining 1 that's not really there. I truly am a Master of the Universe. I don't just do "God's work," as our CEO once put it, it's more like I've actually become a god myself. — A.D. Aliwat

We've always been modestly leveraged, and we've never believed in a great deal of leverage on either our private equity business or on our investment banking business. And I think it really goes back to my uncle and dad growing up in the Depression and just seeing what happened to people who were overly levered. — Warren Stephens

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

Investment banks manage to go bankrupt through their investment-banking activities, commercial banks manage to go bankrupt through their commercial-banking activities. — Ben Bernanke

One IT executive in an investment banking company claimed that 80 percent of his company's programming code was dedicated to linking disparate systems, as opposed to creating new capabilities. — Jeanne W. Ross

Brokerage firms and their executives cannot use threats regarding research activities as a way to obtain investment banking business. The threat to drop research coverage if Piper were not selected as the lead underwriter for a secondary offering was totally inappropriate and undermines the integrity of the market. — Mary Schapiro

Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves? — Peter Thiel

My grandmother got her law degree from Syracuse University in roughly 1911 and later co-founded with her husband an investment banking firm on Wall Street known as Lebenthal & Co. — H. G. Bissinger

It's natural that you'd have more brains going into money management. There are so many huge incomes in money management and investment banking - it's like ants to sugar. There are huge incentives for a man to take up money management as opposed to, say, physics, and it's a lot easier. — Charlie Munger

Those who say don't know, those who know don't say — Michael Lewis

Time is a valuable wealth. — Lailah Gifty Akita

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

Who is Antonio Weiss? He's the head of global investment banking for the financial giant Lazard. — Elizabeth Warren

Hollywood is a small, familial place. Everyone does business with everybody else. The same complications occur in investment banking. — Michael Ovitz

Keep your eyes on the price when spending, don't regret later to find that you have nothing for tomorrow. — Auliq Ice

I have been working in male-dominated industries most of my life. When I started my career in investment banking, I was one of two women in my analyst class. — Carol Roth

A good way to figure out how likely it is that the directors are sucking money out of a company is to draw a chart with each director's name in a box. Read through the Management section, and each time you identify a professional or personal connection between two directors, connect their boxes with a line. If you also happen to know about other relationships between directors, for instance one director is married to the other director's daughter, or one director is an old college buddy of another director, you can draw a line in there as well. If, upon completion, the chart looks like a spider web then hold on to your wallet. — Peter Troob

It's my guess that something like 5% of GDP goes to money management and itsattendant friction. I define it broadly - annuities, incentive pay, all trading, etc. Nobody else has used figures that high, but that's my guess. Worst of all, the people doing this are among the best and the brightest. Hundreds and thousands of engineers, etc. are going into hedge funds and investment banking. That is not an intelligent allocation of the brainpower of the civilization. — Charlie Munger

Lethargy bordering on sloth remains the cornerstone of our investment style. The exception was Wells Fargo, a superbly-managed, high-return banking operation in which we increased our ownership to just under 10%, the most we can own without the approval of the Federal Reserve Board. — Warren Buffett

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

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

ran - at separate times - a boutique investment banking firm and a small mortgage company. He served as the Treasurer for the multinational vitamin manufacturer USANA Health Sciences years before becoming CFO for MonaVie. Devin squeezed in two brief stints in government, including two years working for Jake Garn on the U.S. Senate Banking Committee Staff and another year working for an independent state agency called USTAR, where he helped foster technology entrepreneurship during Governor Jon Huntsman's administration. Devin is proud to be a Ute, having graduated from the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business, which recognized him as a Distinguished Alum in 2006. He also earned an MBA at Cornell University where he ran the student newspaper, Cornell Business. — Devin D. Thorpe

My early work and publications centered around expanding on the analysis of life insurance in my dissertation and its relationship to investment banking. — Douglass North

In order for capitalism to evolve from its current toxic expression, I propose the value of international currencies be tied to an Index of Human Productive Output. The emphasis being on human productivity not inanimate machines and virtual assets created by the mirage of the investment banker — Said Elias Dawlabani

In the 1990s, the ratio of buy to sell recommendations climbed to 100 to 1, particularly for brokerage firms with large investment banking businesses. — Burton G. Malkiel

Early in my investment-banking career, I realized I was on a path that others had set out for me. — Vikram Chatwal

It can be argued that the U.S. brokerage and investment banking industry has transformed the modern American stock market into nothing more than a mechanism for transferring wealth from shareholders to management. — Peter Schiff

I have nothing against investment banking, but it's like massaging money rather than creating money. If you're in physics, you create inventions, you create lasers, you create transistors, computers, GPS. — Michio Kaku

Investment banking has, in recent years, resembled a casino, and the massive scale of gambling losses has dragged down traditional business and retail lending activities as banks try to rebuild their balance sheets. This was one aspect of modern financial liberalisation that had dire consequences. — Vince Cable

What kind of city are we living in, if we encourage the development or ownership of large, expensive properties for investment and land banking ... while people are sleeping on the streets? — Jeremy Corbyn

It's good to have a special price to pay for the future and it will pay you in return, in the exact way you would wish to be paid. — Auliq Ice

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

A tiny portion of the population controls the lions share of the wealth and most of the command positions of state, manufacturing, banking, investment, publishing, higher education, philanthropy, and media ... these individuals exercise a preponderant influence over what is passed off as public information and democratic discourse. — Michael Parenti

There are a lot of ways that investment banking models work, but these risks are not internalized by the people that are taking them. — Robert F. Engle

The associates are the Cro-Magnon men. They live in caves, have trouble walking upright, and have a lot of hair on their backs. Usually, they communicate by grunting. Those are the associates. Finally, there are the analysts. Monkeys. Tons and tons of little monkeys. Not humans, just monkeys crawling all over each other and pulling lice out of each other's fur. Those are the analysts. — John Rolfe

Why did investment banking pay so many people with so little experience so much money? Answer: When attached to a telephone, they could produce even more money. How could they produce money without experience? Answer: Producing in an investment bank was less a matter of skill and more a matter of intangibles - flair, persistence, and luck. — Michael Lewis