Top 70 Bankers Quotes

Shopkeepers are not bankers.

Conservatives may believe that impoverished borrowers destroyed Wall Street. But we liberals will not fool ourselves that stupid bankers sank conservatism for good.

Because bankers measure their self-worth in money, and pay themselves a lot of it, they think they’re fine fellows and don’t need to explain themselves.

Despite Labour’s achievements in government, we were too often seen as champions for global capital markets, which worked for bankers but did not seem to be delivering for the rest of Britain.

When I became CEO of Xerox 10 years ago, the company’s situation was dire. Debt was mounting, the stock sinking and bankers were calling. People urged me to declare bankruptcy, but I felt personally responsible for tens of thousands of employees.

I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with.

Greed has increasingly become a virtue among Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs in the U.S. Nowhere else in the world do CEOs insist on receiving compensation as high compared to what their employees earn.

I’ve never voted in my life. I’ve never felt able to put my pen to a ballot paper because there was nobody I believed I could vote for. They were all working for the bankers. There was nobody for the people.

What Wall Street and credit card companies are doing is really not much different from what gangsters and loan sharks do who make predatory loans. While the bankers wear three-piece suits and don’t break the knee caps of those who can’t pay back, they still are destroying people’s lives.

If you’re an original thinker, you are going get told ‘no’ a lot, and you have to be able to hear ‘no’ many times from the bankers and trust that at some point, someone is going to recognize that you are an artist and not a can of soda.

By the 1890s, the leading Wall Street bankers were becoming increasingly disgruntled with their own creation, the National Banking System… while the banking system was partially centralized under their leadership, it was not centralized enough.

I look fashionable every day. And the pendulum swings between more, or less, edgy when I’m with bankers.

Resolution can be in any form – S4A, SDR or restructuring – but we need an enabling environment where bankers feel comfortable to take decisions and where they also feel obliged to implement decisions in a timely manner.

Once an economy reaches a certain level of acceleration… the Fed is no longer with you… The Fed, instead of trying to get the economy moving, reverts to acting like the central bankers they are and starts worrying about inflation and things getting too hot.

There are few industries as defiantly opaque as shipping. Even offshore bankers have not developed a system as intricately elusive as the flag of convenience, under which ships can fly the flag of a state that has nothing to do with its owner, cargo, crew, or route.

The history of the last century shows, as we shall see later, that the advice given to governments by bankers, like the advice they gave to industrialists, was consistently good for bankers, but was often disastrous for governments, businessmen, and the people generally.

Obama had to save the banks, sure, but he didn’t have to save the bankers and the shareholders and the bondholders. We broke the rules of capitalism in order to save those at the top – as we always do.

In the past the analysts were the department you never saw. They were the nerds at school. You went to see the investment bankers and maybe the salesmen but the Chinese walls divided them from the analysts. But new technology and the Internet changed all that.

Politicians attend dinners at hotels with contractors. Bankers discuss interest rates at lunch.

Why did they go to Hollywood? Because they could get access to the American financial sector. The Jews were neither authorized to be bankers or doctors nor lawyers or professors. That’s why they concentrated on something new: cinema.

I travelled round the world giving demonstrations of my talents. In every country, I performed for students, professors, teachers, bankers, accountants, and even laymen who knew very little, or nothing at all, about mathematics.

All of this talk of recession offends me. I am delighted that bankers have less money.

Central bankers got it right in the United States in 1987 when they avoided deflationary pressures as well as serious trouble in the banking system.

Late 19th-century populists saw bankers and industrialists manipulating markets to enrich themselves at the expense of small farmers and labourers and favoured political candidates promising economic relief through free and unlimited coinage of silver.

I talk to bankers, distributors, marketing people. I used to sit at home in my tracksuit bottoms, and the real excitement of my day would be going out to get a copy of ‘Private Eye’ and a latte.

Movie stars today are as greedy for additional kids as bankers are for bonuses. It’s the new badge of authenticity.

In the 1990s, the Democratic Party began to cozy up to their long-time enemies: Wall Street Bankers. They took their money and relaxed their regulations until the Great Recession forced the Democrats via Dodd-Frank to re-regulate the banks.

I’m from a family of bankers and businessmen, and here I am, the artist, the black sheep.

Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I’m angry about bankers. About the government.

Harlem is not a playground for rich bankers and consultants. It’s got students of all colors. It’s got old people who keep history and tell tall tales.

It would not be a bad idea if bankers were to go and sit occasionally with politicians in their political surgeries, where they might get a sense of the injustice that some of the community feel about the banks.

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.

If you want better behavior from bankers, then make their financial incentives more like those in the hedge-fund world – where managers have ‘skin in the game,’ and their net worth is tied to their long-term performance.

Central bankers have had enormous responsibilities thrust on them to compensate, essentially, for the failings of the political system. And my worry is we don’t have sufficient tools to do that, but we’re not willing to say it.

Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields a similar revenue model.

Bankers don’t get to do this. For all the hours, the late nights, lack of sleep and hours of pulling your hair out from dealing with 18- and 19-year-old kids, it’s a pretty cool job.

Tony Blair personified the shift away from democracy, towards control by bankers.

Our supermarkets sell us horsemeat as beef, our politicians fiddle their expenses, and our bankers risk money that isn’t theirs. So it’s not surprising the public don’t trust anyone or anything.

There were times at Harvard when I actually longed to hang out with a few more Trotskyists, rather than yet another set of future consultants and investment bankers. At least the Trotskyists cared about the important stuff.

The way the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed, and taken most of it into their own hands, is as good as Stalin or Hitler.

There’s this idea of bankers retiring and painting watercolours. You can’t dabble in art – it’s a life. Being a writer, an artist… is a whole life.

Nationalization would likely mean wiping out the big banks’ managements and shareholders. It’s because that reckoning has mostly been avoided so far that those bankers may be the Americans in the greatest denial of all.

Economics is not a science; it is a quasi-religion: part superstition, part mystique, part sentimentality. Bankers dream like other men, the only difference being that when their dreams turn to nightmares, we all lose sleep. There can be no trusting the muttering of any prelate when it comes to money.

I’ve never opened a glass of champagne on any acquisition. Bankers do that.

Bankers cannot afford to be concerned with only the economic aspects of projects. There may be serious implications on the natural environment, the urban environment, on human culture.

I won’t dispute that bankers’ privileged treatment in the 2008 crash merits populist scorn. But unfortunately, without a bank bailout, there probably would have been a worldwide depression.

I come from a family of bankers and lawyers, and they joked that they can’t believe I’m the one that gets to go to the White House.

In reality, Senator Shelby’s Financial Regulatory Improvement Act is nothing more than a wish list for the Wall Street bankers that fund his campaign.

We are all socialists now, it seems. John McCain, David Cameron and Gordon Brown attack bankers’ irresponsible behaviour and salaries, and call for state intervention in the financial markets. But these calls will not get them elected or re-elected if they are addressed only to the banking sector.