Top 88 Alex Berenson Quotes

In a Ponzi scheme, a promoter pays back his initial investors with money he has raised from new investors. Eventually, the promoter can no longer find enough new investors to pay off the people who have already put up money, and the scheme collapses.

Trailer home borrowers, mostly near the bottom of the economic ladder, often default on their loans.

The most distinguishing element of my novels is that I try as hard as I can – within the context of a popular commercial thriller – to make them feel authentic. Drawing on real locations and real events is part of that authenticity.

For value investors, General Motors is a tempting target. The company’s share of the North American auto market has steadily declined for two decades, and analysts say the company suffers from weak management and unexciting cars.

John W. Snow was paid more than $50 million in salary, bonus and stock in his nearly 12 years as chairman of the CSX Corporation, the railroad company. During that period, the company’s profits fell, and its stock rose a bit more than half as much as that of the average big company.

Lower interest rates are usually considered good for stocks because they lower the cost of borrowing and make bonds a less attractive alternative investment.

Of course, the discounting of future earnings should hurt all stocks. But it should hurt technology stocks more than others, because so many of them are valued at extremely high levels relative to their current earnings.

Even a war zone looks peaceful in most places, most of the time.

It is a truth universally acknowledged on Wall Street that original research is on life support. Serious research can be bad for business, as well as expensive.

Equity is the cushion that protects financial institutions from unexpected changes in the value of their assets. The greater the leverage, the smaller the losses required to wipe out a company’s equity, leaving it without enough money to repay the people who hold its debt.

Accounting rules give financial institutions flexibility about when they choose to recognize venture capital profits.

Big fund companies have many ways to increase the returns of young funds that they want to promote. And at least one of those games involves popular offerings.

Never underestimate the power of Abby Joseph Cohen.

Traditionally, companies have made major announcements before or after the close of trading so that all interested investors and analysts are apprised of the news before trading resumes in their stocks.

Insider trading is hard to prove. To be convicted, a person must have bought or sold a stock based on material information that is both unknown to the general public and likely to have had an important effect on a company’s stock price.

The Fed’s ability to raise and lower short-term interest rates is its primary control over the economy.

For decades, Wall Street has charged companies a standard fee of 7 percent to sell their shares to the public.

Some big banks remain wary of venture capital.

To economists, prices serve as crucial signals to producers and consumers. In a regulated market, the state sets prices high enough for private companies to cover their costs and earn a guaranteed profit for their investors. But in a deregulated market, prices should vary with demand and supply.

Trust the Canadians to produce a game about mutual funds that is actually more boring than the real thing.

At any moment, one company stands in the spotlight of the middle ring in the stock market’s never-ending circus. It may not be the biggest corporation in the world, or the most profitable, but somehow it both mirrors and leads the market’s broader action.

Don’t expect Barton Biggs to be offering his market insights on ‘Bloomberg News’ anytime soon. His plumber, maybe.

Over the years, I’ve spent time in Saudi Arabia, the Bekaa Valley, Afghanistan, Jordan, and Kenya, among other vacation hotspots.

Even so, sometimes I wish I did have a little bit more flair in my language.

HealthWell is just one of several foundations that assist patients in making their insurance co-payments for expensive drugs.

Even technology companies get good news sometimes.

Big banks have long had private equity divisions that put up capital for deals too complex or risky for individual shareholders to finance.

Many legal experts note that prosecutors regularly seek indictments of people or companies for destroying evidence or impeding investigations, even if they cannot prove other charges.

For investors who do want to speculate in high-yield bonds, one alternative may be a junk bond mutual fund, which can offer investors the relative safety of diversification.

For more than two decades, Barry Diller has been among the most respected – and feared – figures in the entertainment industry.

Electronic communications networks match trades between investors directly, without using a market maker or specialist as an intermediary.

Predicting the market is always tough.

With 950 reporters and 79 bureaus, Bloomberg competes to break news with Dow Jones, Reuters and Bridge News along with newspaper Web sites, dozens of smaller Internet sites, and even gossipy chat rooms.

Soldiers willingly, sometimes foolishly, risk their own lives to keep their comrades out of enemy hands.

Enron had already collapsed and filed for bankruptcy protection by the beginning of 2002. But despite complaints from short sellers that corporations had used accounting gimmickry to inflate their profits, many investors thought the crisis at Enron was an isolated case.

Studies show that Avastin can prolong the lives of patients with late-stage breast and lung cancer by several months when the drug is combined with existing therapies.

The credit quality of junk bonds varies widely.

Rising interest rates are considered bad for stocks because they raise the cost of doing business and depress corporate earnings and because higher yields make bonds relatively more attractive than stocks to investors.

Climate change might be disastrous, but does that mean we want carbon taxes that raise the price of a gallon of heating oil to $10? And how exactly will those taxes affect economic growth?

The market always, in theory at least, looks ahead. And it’s always trying to take in every bit of information that it can as quickly as it can. You don’t really care so much if the company made a dollar last year; you want to know what it’s going to make this year.

The fact that we haven’t faced another major terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11 is a very significant achievement, and one that’s easy to forget – it’s the dog that doesn’t bark.

The thing to do with mutual funds is to buy a couple of decent ones, set up an investment plan and then never, ever think about them again, except maybe once a quarter or so when you take a peek at your statements to make sure that you have not accidentally been buying the Fidelity Peace-in-the-Middle-East fund.

In market valuation, Yahoo is worth about as much Walt Disney and the News Corporation combined.

The details of the personal expenses that executives put on the company tab often are not known because loopholes in federal disclosure rules let publicly traded companies generally avoid disclosing the perks they give executives along with pay and stock options.

Big swings in the wholesale price of electricity are not unusual in the summer, when high demand taxes generators’ ability to supply power.

As the Nasdaq soared in 1999 and early 2000, demand for many offerings far exceeded the supply of shares available at the initial offering price.

Stocks in the United States plunged in 2002 amid fears of war and terrorism, a weak economy, rising oil prices and dozens of corporate scandals. It was the third consecutive annual decline, the first time that has happened in 60 years.

To finance deficits, the government must sell bonds to investors, competing for capital that could otherwise be used to invest in stocks or corporate bonds. Government borrowings raise long-term interest rates, stifling economic growth.

Corporate executives often buy or sell shares in their companies, and stocks rarely rise or fall significantly when those transactions are reported.

Companies buy customers when they cannot win new business on their own. They merge when their executives do not have a better idea of what to do.

Macroeconomics is the analysis of the economy as a whole, an examination of overall supply and demand. At the broadest level, macroeconomists want to understand why some countries grow faster than others and which government policies can help growth.

Trust-me companies are companies whose financial results gallop ahead of their businesses, companies with seemingly perfect control over their quarterly sales and profits. Companies whose financial statements are loaded with footnotes: companies that short-sellers often attack but rarely dent.

Sochi started with the same problem as every Winter Olympics. Forget the crass commercialism, the fake amateurism, NBC’s refusal to televise important events live to all its viewers. As an event, the Winter Games fail on the most basic level. They’re lousy to watch.

America Online, of course, is a master of the hard sell, from stuffing mailboxes with free trial offers to forcing subscribers to click through ads before they can get their e-mail.