Bethany McLean Quotes

Going to work every day was like my hair was on fire and all I had to put it out was a hammer.

The last and most painful irony is that the two longtime rival armies in the securitization market - the investment banks and the GSEs - would end up magnifying each other's sins rather than keeping each other in check.

No city embraced privatization more eagerly than Chicago, where I live.

Say you have a dog, but you need to create a duck on the financial statements. Fortunately, there are specific accounting rules for what constitutes a duck: yellow feet, white covering, orange beak. So you take the dog and paint its feet yellow and its fur white and you paste an orange plastic beak on its nose, and then you say to your accountants, 'This is a duck! Don't you agree that it's a duck?' And the accountants say, 'Yes, according to the rules, this is a duck.' Everybody knows that it's a dog, not a duck, but that doesn't matter, because you've met the rules for calling it a duck.

Fixing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in isolation, without looking at the big picture, would be short-sighted.

Privatization of assets that most of us consider public goods - like airports and highways - has a long, often-uncontroversial history.

I think synergies are a lot like UFOs: Lots of people claim to have seen them, but few can actually prove they exist.

Back in those less complicated times, there were lots of industries that operated more or less by rote: the old banker's motto, for instance, was "3-6-3": take money in at 3 percent, lend it out at 6 percent, and be on the golf course by 3 P.M.

Home ownership was the fig leaf for the rise in subprime lending. But that was really about cash-out refinancings, not buying homes.

Google worries - and rightly so - about how hard it is for a big company to come up with the next hot thing.

The big banks advise cities about whether privatization is a wise choice. They also control the ability of states and cities to access the market for their financing needs.

Choices of right or wrong are not presented to you in black and white. If they were, I'm sure most people would choose white.

In capital we trust. Capital is our savior, our holy grail, our fountain of youth, or at least health, for banks.

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."