Category: Book Quotes of the Day

When a District Bank president has overstayed his or her welcome, he or she will not be fired but will perhaps receive an employment offer from a university or corporation too enticing to be refused. Wink, wink. A different kind of politics.

It’s a myth that the Federal Reserve is nonprofit. It earns billions of dollars per year through various financial functions; after expenses, most of the profits go straight to the Treasury.

Few buyers realized that the agencies had also helped create the MBS or CDO and stood to gain from its sale. The fine print said “these ratings are just opinions and investors shouldn’t rely on them.” People figured the disclaimers were there to make lawyers happy. After all, it was S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch; they sold trust.

The collateral backing mortgages was stretched precariously thin; one in ten households had zero to negative home equity.

By 2008, the derivatives market had quintupled to $531 trillion, up from $106 trillion in 2002.

Words like “slightly” and “moderately” in Fedspeak did not mean the same thing. Every nuance mattered.

Since 2005, U.S. corporations have disbursed an estimated $296,000 on share buybacks for every single new employee who has been hired.

Ben Lawsky, the former Southern District prosecutor who had risen to become the head New York State financial regulator and had miffed his fellow regulators and the banks with his aggression, did not take a job at a top law firm. One chairman of a major New York firm said the New York bar had blackballed him. Lawsky held out his own shingle as a consultant and attorney.

Their righteousness offends others. Most people act in their own self-interest. They do not. A reputation for toughness was not its own reward.

He asked why prosecutors had not considered charging executives with “willful blindness,” a well-established legal doctrine making it illegal for people to consciously avert their eyes from bad behavior.