Top 35 Andrew Ross Sorkin Quotes

Here’s the perversity of Wall Street’s psychology: The more Wall Street is convinced that Washington will act rationally and raise the debt ceiling, most likely at the 11th hour, the less pressure there will be on lawmakers to reach an agreement. That will make it more likely a deal isn’t reached.

I’m not a real sports guy, but I check ESPN.com just so I know what people are talking about.

Unemployment in Florida peaked at 11.2 percent in 2009, higher than the national average, and the state was a center for home foreclosures.

Some billionaires like cars, yachts and private jets. Others like newspapers.

Bringing back something akin to Glass-Steagall would clearly help limit risk in the system. And that’s a very good and worthy goal. Letting banks sell securities and insurance products and services allowed them to grow too big too fast and fueled a culture that put profit and pay over prudence.

Investors are sometimes too busy looking for profits to notice where the truth ends and the deception begins.

The rating agencies historically actually did a pretty good job rating regular bonds.

There’s something called, ‘resolution authority,’ which gives the government the power to takeover a failing bank – something they didn’t have pre-Lehman Brothers.

When you can’t lend or trade – and you can’t invest with the leverage that juiced returns to support seven- and eight-figure bonuses – how exactly are you going to make money?

I don’t want to put words in Geithner’s mouth, but I think he is generally against the revolving door of government officials taking jobs with companies that they have overseen or in roles that involve lobbying. At minimum, I’m pretty sure he felt that way about himself.

Wall Street is littered with clever plans to use financial instruments to change behavior – carbon trading, for example. Some have changed the world, and others failed miserably.

In many ways, education is a lousy business. Teachers are not normal economic actors; almost all of them work for less money than they might fetch in some other industry, given their skills and advanced degrees.

Let’s start with a basic question: Do we, as a country, want our most highly qualified employees from the private sector to pursue public service? The answer, I would imagine, should be yes.

I would say that my whole career is effectively trying to be a storyteller within the context of financial news.

The lesson of 2008 is that ultimately our markets are driven by confidence.

I’m probably a believer in abandoning too-big-to-fail firms or breaking them up in some way so that the system can try to take care of itself. I imagine you’re not going to get there, and therefore, I suspect regulation is what’s going to be required.

I think, with Hank Paulson, the concept of a bailout was anathema to him from day one. He was a Republican; he’s a free marketeer. He believes in capitalism, and part of capitalism is believing in failure. And so the idea of bailing out an institution, I think, went against every part of him.

The genre of narrative business books that I love so much – the ones that have a you-are-there quality – was invented, or so it is said, in 1982 by David McClintick, who wrote ‘Indecent Exposure,’ a rollicking good read about a Hollywood scandal and the ultimate boardroom power struggle at Columbia Pictures.

Traditionally, we think that people with ideas are innovators – that Silicon Valley is the world of ideas. But within the hedge-fund world, they believe that they are men of ideas – that the trade is unto itself one of ideas.

What if the slowdown in merger activity isn’t cyclical, but secular? What if corporations have learned the lessons of so many companies before them that the odds of a successful merger are no better than 50-50 and probably less? Is it possible that the biggest deals have already been done?

I think you tell the story that has to be told. You tell the story that’s the truth. You tell the story that readers will be interested in and should know about.

The euphoria around economic booms often obscures the possibility for a bust, which explains why leaders typically miss the warning signs.

Tiptoeing on a tightrope past insider trading laws may be deft and clever, but it doesn’t make it right.

The greatest economic power might in fact remain in the hands of the Federal Reserve. Economists credit the Fed’s policy of keeping interest rates at historic lows with helping to pump up the economy and bring unemployment down.

In the age of activism that is clearly not going away, it would seem that some form of engagement from directors with shareholders – rather than directors simply taking their cues from management – would go a long way toward helping boards work on behalf of all shareholders rather just the most vocal.

My training really was at the ‘New York Times,’ you know. When I got there, I was literally supposed to stay there for five weeks, and I got lucky like nobody, you know, like nobody’s business.

One of Obama’s first major acts as president was to sign the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and some of the money in that bill went to Saft.

I was always one of those people who would watch the Super Bowl as much for the sports as I did for the ads. I was always just sort of fascinated by the fact that when you turn on the TV, there was motion, there was moving pictures on it.

It’s the people who have an incentive to find the problem who usually find the problem.

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

What if lawmakers never spoke to their constituents? Oddly enough, that’s exactly how corporate America operates. Shareholders vote for directors, but the directors rarely, if ever, communicate with them.

I started, actually, in journalism when I was – well. I started at the ‘New York Times’ when I was 18 years old, actually, but really got into journalism when I was 15 years old and had started a sports magazine which was trying to become a national sports magazine.

Wall Street’s biggest fight with Obama was over the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Obama signed into law in the summer of 2010.

By now, it seems as if everyone has already read Thomas L. Friedman’s ‘The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.’ It changed the way we think about global business, competitiveness and the implication for far-flung economies, governments, education and more.

As a journalist, a big part of what you do is search for drama and conflict. And a lot of the backstory with ‘Billions’ is grounded in my journalistic background.