Financial Markets Quotes

They had stumbled either upon a serious flaw in modern financial markets or into a great gambling run. Characteristically, they were not sure which it was. As Charlie pointed out, It's really hard to know when you're lucky and when you're smart. ~ Michael Lewis

Remember that all financial markets are filled with good but not necessarily innocent people looking after their own self-interests before they look after yours. ~ Robert Kiyosaki

People ignore facts which contradict the theory in the mind of the investor. Dis-confirming evidence must be seeked out to beat this theory. ~ Manoj Arora

One could imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. ~ Stephen Hawking

Countries are not like financial markets. Social change cannot be executed as swiftly as credit-default swaps. You cannot sell short on social commitments and practical responsibilities. ~ George Papandreou

In the 1960's, some old-timers on Wall Street-the men who remembered the trauma of the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression-gave me a warning: "When we fade from this business, something will be lost. That is the memory of 1929." Because of that personal recollection, they said, they acted with more caution, than they otherwise might. Collectively, their generation provided an in-built brake on the wildest form of speculation, an insurance policy against financial excess and consequent catastrophe. Their memories provided a practical form of long-term dependence in the financial markets. Is it any wonder that in 1987 when most of those men were gone and their wisdom forgotten, the market encountered its first crash in nearly sixty years? Or that, two decades later, we would see the biggest bull market, and the worst bear market, in generations? Yet standard financial theory holds that, in modeling markets, all that matters is today's news and the expectations of tomorrow's news. ~ Benoit B Mandelbrot

Forecasts vary in horizon, from a few seconds up to a few days in financial markets, compared to from one to several months for macro variables. We have to provide uncertainty intervals around the central forecasts to indicate the extent to which we are unclear about the future. ~ Clive Granger

People with Asperger's couldn't control what they were interested in. It was a stroke of luck that his special interest was financial markets and not, say, collecting lawn mower catalogues. ~ Michael Lewis

Bullish or bearish are terms used by people who do not engage in practicing uncertainty, like the television commentators, or those who have no experience in handling risk. Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

For instance, a new kind of rich person named John Henry bought the Florida Marlins in January 1999. Most baseball owners were either heirs, or empire builders of one sort or another, or both. Henry had made his money in the intelligent end of the financial markets. He had an instinctive feel for the way statistical analysis could turn up inefficiencies in human affairs. Inefficiencies in the financial markets had made Henry a billionaire - and he saw some familiar idiocies in the market for baseball players. ~ Anonymous

I do believe women have different ways of taking risks, of ruminating a bit more before they jump to conclusions. And I think that as a result, particularly on the, on, you know, on the trading floor, in the financial markets in general, the approach would be different. ~ Christine Lagarde

As financial markets continue to broaden and deepen, the behavior of asset prices will play an important role in the formulation of monetary policy going forward, perhaps a more important role than in the past. ~ Timothy Geithner

The government - the ultimate short-term-oriented player - cannot withstand much pain in the economy or the financial markets. Bailouts and rescues are likely to occur, though not with sufficient predictability for investors to comfortably take advantage. The government will take enormous risks in such interventions, especially if the expenses can be conveniently deferred to the future. Some of the price-tag is in the form of back- stops and guarantees, whose cost is almost impossible to determine. ~ Seth Klarman

The principal linkages between Japan and the U.S. global economies are trade, financial markets, and commodity markets. ~ Mark Zandi

The middle and working classes are paying the debt that the financial markets created. ~ Javier Bardem

Upon graduation, believe it or not, I had no job. I had no interviews. I had no prospects. I had no worries. What I did have, I had passion. I had enormous passion. I had passion for financial markets. I had fallen in love with financial markets. ~ Gary Cohn

The fierce battles between New Democrat centrists and old-style liberals that defined the Democratic Party in the 1990s are long gone, with the party unified behind Barack Obama's economic agenda of universal health care, expensive federal programs and more regulation of the financial markets. ~ Nina Easton

The generally accepted theory is that financial markets tend towards equilibrium, and ... discount the future correctly. I operate using a different theory, according to which financial markets cannot possibly discount the future correctly because the do not merely discount the future; they help to shape it. ~ George Soros

The more Mr. Putin extends the fighting in eastern Ukraine, the more the financial markets will ratchet up their own pressure on Russia. ~ Roger Altman

The financial markets play an active role in determining what's going to happen, how the economy is going to function. ~ George Soros

If the EU and the US can cooperate successfully on regulating financial markets, everyone else will follow. ~ John Bruton

Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global financial markets, the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide. ~ Susan Sontag

Developments in financial markets can have broad economic effects felt by many outside the markets. ~ Ben Bernanke

It's a familiar truism that at any one moment, financial markets are dominated by either fear or greed. But the healthiest markets are those that are animated by both fear and greed at the same time. ~ James Surowiecki

conventional energy sources (while nonrenewable) will continue to be used for at least 50 years. Thus, if our definition of sustainable goes to 50 years in the future, conventional energy sources are sustainable. Indeed, because of the effects of financial markets, as the cost of conventional fuel increases because of its depletion, we can anticipate that its extraction will slow as it is replaced by renewable energy sources. Thus we can readily see the continued use of conventional fuels for the next 100 years - barring some type of unexpected scientific breakthrough. ~ Betty Simkins

One of the most constant aspects of American life is change - and nowhere is it more evident than in our financial markets. ~ Henry Paulson

I would say that financial markets are very inefficient, and capable of extremes of being completely dysfunctional. ~ Jeremy Grantham

In the financial markets, hindsight is forever 20/20, but foresight is legally blind. And thus, for most investors, market timing is a practical and emotional impossibility. ~ Benjamin Graham

I contend that financial markets never reflect the underlying reality accurately; they always distort it in some way or another and the distortions find expression in market prices. Those distortions can, occasionally, find ways to affect the fundamentals that market prices are supposed to reflect. ~ George Soros

Well, as you know, we're working through a difficult period in our financial markets right now as we work off some of the past excesses. But the American people can remain confident in the soundness and the resilience of our financial system. ~ Henry Paulson

For me, the real thing is make, serve and list in India. Which means we need manufacturing, we need services, and we need financial markets. ~ Uday Kotak

I have anecdotal evidence in my business that MBAs tend to blow up in financial markets, as they are trained to simplify matters a couple of steps beyond their requirement. (I beg the MBA reader not to take offense; I am myself the unhappy holder of the degree.) ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Federal Reserve has a responsibility to ensure the safety and soundness of financial institutions and to contain systemic risks in financial markets. ~ Bernie Sanders

The crisis in Europe has affected the U.S. economy by acting as a drag on our exports, weighing on business and consumer confidence, and pressuring U.S. financial markets and institutions. ~ Ben Bernanke

Lack of ethics is so ingrained in the financial industry that they are not even aware of it any more. It's just business as usual for them. ~ Robert Rolih

Aldinger, collected his $100 million, Eisman was on his way to becoming the financial market's first socialist. "When you're a conservative Republican, you never think people are making money by ripping other people off," he said. His mind was now fully ~ Michael Lewis

In Asia, a lot of successful economies that had been living on their own saving, decided to open up their financial markets to international capital in the early 1990s. So here were countries doing quite well, but they decided they'd borrow a bit more and do even better. ~ Jeffrey Sachs

The stability of global financial markets is a public good. If governments fail to protect this public good, then those who suffer are the working people of the world whose jobs, whose homes, and whose standard of living depends on it. ~ Kevin Rudd

There are good reasons why we don't want everyone to learn nuclear physics, medicine or how financial markets work. Our entire modern project has been about delegating power over us to skilled people who want to do the work and be rewarded accordingly. ~ Evgeny Morozov

Financial markets strive to be forward-looking, but not when it comes to underfollowed small cap stocks in obscure industries. Such stocks remain under the radar of most investors until they report huge acceleration in earnings growth. When a company that used to grow at 5 to 10% suddenly reports a 300% increase in earnings and a 100% increase in sales, it will grab the attention of many investors. ~ Ivaylo Ivanov

Financial markets ... resent any kind of government interference but they hold a belief deep down that if conditions get really rough the authorities will step in. ~ George Soros

Financial markets are supposed to swing like a pendulum: They may fluctuate wildly in response to exogenous shocks, but eventually they are supposed to come to rest at an equilibrium point and that point is supposed to be the same irrespective of the interim fluctuations. Instead, as I told Congress, financial markets behaved more like a wrecking ball, swinging from country to country and knocking over the weaker ones.It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the international financial system itself constituted the main ingredient in the meltdown process. ~ George Soros

The insurance companies do not refer to the key policy rate when they send their statements. We can only control that rate. Long-term interest rates are determined largely by global financial markets. ~ Mario Draghi

Well, the U.S., of course, is the world's largest economy. It's about a quarter of the world's output. It's also home to many of the largest financial institutions and financial markets. ~ Ben Bernanke

The new social question is: democracy or the rule of the financial markets. We are currently witnessing the end of an era. The neoliberal ideology has failed worldwide. The U.S. movement Occupy Wall Street is a good example of this. ~ Sigmar Gabriel

The key to trading success is emotional discipline. If intelligence were the key, there would be a lot more people making money trading. ~ Victor Sperandeo

Financial markets need to become less, not more, efficient. ~ Ha-Joon Chang

Sometimes it is my impression that most politicians are still not aware of being under the control of the financial markets and are even governed by them. ~ Hans Tietmeyer

If we leave the European Union, there will be an immediate economic shock that will hit financial markets. People will not know what the future looks like. ~ George Osborne

In the financial markets I find it easy to predict what will happen and very difficult to predict when it will happen. I think that things were clear during the bubble as to what would happen eventually. ~ Warren Buffett

Credit is the air that financial markets breathe, and when the air is poisoned, there's no place to hide. ~ Charles R. Morris

A second reason why science cannot replace judgement is the behavior of financial markets. ~ Martin Feldstein

In an economy that already has lost some momentum, one must remain alert to the possibility that greater caution and weakening asset values in financial markets could signal or precipitate an excessive softening in household and business spending. ~ Alan Greenspan

You invite a few players in to start a game of Texas Hold'em by telling them that the deck doesn't have any jacks or queens in it and that you won't tell the other people who come to play with them. How do you get people into the casino? You pay the brokers to bring them there. ~ Michael Lewis

Our financial system is so complicated and so interactive - so many different markets in different countries and so many sets of rules. ~ Ben Bernanke

Financial illiteracy is like being in a rain storm and trying to jump in between the raindrops ... eventually it all catches you at the same time. ~ Johnnie Dent Jr.

Significant changes in the growth rate of money supply, even small ones, impact the financial markets first. Then, they impact changes in the real economy, usually in six to nine months, but in a range of three to 18 months. Usually in about two years in the US, they correlate with changes in the rate of inflation or deflation."
"The leads are long and variable, though the more inflation a society has experienced, history shows, the shorter the time lead will be between a change in money supply growth and the subsequent change in inflation. ~ Milton Friedman

As value investors, our business is to buy bargains that financial market theory says do not exist. We've delivered great returns to our clients for a quarter century-a dollar invested at inception in our largest fund is now worth over 94 dollars, a 20% net compound return. We have achieved this not by incurring high risk as financial theory would suggest, but by deliberately avoiding or hedging the risks that we identified. ~ Seth Klarman

In rising financial markets, the world is forever new. The bull or optimist has no eyes for past or present, but only for the future, where streams of revenue play in his imagination. ~ James Buchan

I put forward a pretty general theory that financial markets are intrinsically unstable. That we really have a false picture when we think about markets tending towards equilibrium. ~ George Soros

Some social or economic upheavals always seem to come out of the blue, but we should nonetheless ask ourselves if we are right to regard them as the result of an impenetrable destiny.
The volume of futures contracts on financial instruments and raw materials has recently exceeded by a factor of twenty times the volume of the goods that they relate to. Just as forty years ago the arms race brought nuclear weapons that had the capacity to exterminate a population twenty times larger than that of the whole world, so today finance is ruled by processes and mechanisms that stand alone and are divorced from reality.
Like the man whose finger hovered just above the red button, the hedge fund managers or traders who follow their orders have no understanding of the effects of their actions on the world population and don't know about its dramas, which are considered as minor inconveniences along the way.
Every time we make a purchase, buy a loaf or a glass of orange juice, we need to know that the flour and juice that we are paying for, even the coins we use to pay for it, have already been bought and sold twenty times before they end up in our hands.
Those who can afford to pay the amount they are asked for don't worry about it: producers are oppressed by the fluctuations in the price of raw materials but nobody listens to them.
The size and range of transactions on the financial markets are increasing and their effects grow ever more violent and unpredicta ~ John Rupert McGregor 1959 -2012

In the past six months, our federal government has devised a dozen strategies to save America's financial markets. Each plan has been more costly, more risky, and less aligned with the principles of our country's free market economy than the last. I am disappointed to say that this latest plan puts all the rest of them to shame. ~ Michael Enzi

Making economic policy isn't a popularity contest, especially when financial markets are in a panic. ~ David Ignatius

What we have seen in financial markets should bring home to us all that the central organising principle of this 21st century is interdependence. For the century just past, interdependence may have been one option among many. For the century that is to come, there is no longer an alternative. ~ Kevin Rudd

Arguably the most substantive domestic issue facing the republic is the fate of Social Security, with privatization the most frequently mentioned option. For the first time in history, a familiarity with the behavior of the financial markets has become a prerequisite for competent citizenship, apart from its obvious pecuniary value. Using ~ William J. Bernstein

Taming the financial markets and winning back democratic control over them is the central condition for creating a new social balance in Germany and Europe. ~ Sigmar Gabriel

Even in financial markets, the concept of market efficiency does not hold. ~ Paul Ormerod

The dark comes before dawn. The financial markets are under great pressure because of the lack of leadership during the transition period. ~ George Soros

the function of the system of financial intermediation (banks and financial markets): to find the best possible uses for capital, such that each available unit of capital is invested where it is most productive (at the opposite ends of the earth, if need be) and pays the highest possible return to the investor. ~ Thomas Piketty

I think it could have real changing effects on the financial markets of our country, it could cause investors to think more about real rates of return and that in turn could spawn new kinds of products, ~ Robert Rubin

The financial markets provide a never-ending continuing education course ~ Edward Yardeni

In the medium term, AI may automate our jobs, to bring both great prosperity and equality. Looking further ahead, there are no fundamental limits to what can be achieved. There is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains. An explosive transition is possible, although it may play out differently than in the movies. As mathematician Irving Good realised in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, in what science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge called a technological singularity. One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders and potentially subduing us with weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all. ~ Stephen Hawking

The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyper-space is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself. ~ Jean Baudrillard

But in the financial markets, without proper institutional rules, there's the law of the jungle - because there's greed! There's nothing wrong with greed, per se. It's not that people are more greedy now than they were 20 years ago. But greed has to be tempered, first, by fear of losses. So if you bail people out, there's less fear. And second, b prudential regulation and supervision to avoid certain excesses. ~ Nouriel Roubini

Things like the financial markets - a proper grounding in mathematics could help the common man. I believe that if people are more familiar with mathematical concepts ... it can help deal with modern life, which is increasingly complex. ~ Viswanathan Anand

Business chief executive officers and their boards succumb to the pressures of the financial markets and their fears of takeovers and pour out their energies to produce quarterly earnings - at the expense of building their companies for the long term. ~ J. Irwin Miller

The current system is organized around financial values over life values. We need to shift that locus of power down to the community level because the financial markets recognize only money and thereby only financial values. ~ David Korten

It is vital for officials and regulators to have input from people within our businesses who understand the intricacies of how financial markets operate and the consequences of certain policy decisions. ~ Jamie Dimon

I had always been interested in markets - specifically, the theory that in financial markets, goods will trade at a fair value only when everyone has access to the same information. ~ Pierre Omidyar

In the financial markets, however, the connection between a marketable security and the underlying business is not as clear-cut. For investors in a marketable security the gain or loss associated with the various outcomes is not totally inherent in the underlying business; it also depends on the price paid, which is established by the marketplace. The view that risk is dependent on both the nature of investments and on their market price is very different from that described by beta. ~ Seth Klarman

The reality is that financial markets are self-destabilizing; occasionally they tend toward disequilibrium, not equilibrium. ~ George Soros

God understands more about the financial markets than many who write about them. ~ Jean-Claude Juncker

You shouldn't be trying to create a system where no bank fails, but you should be creating one that catches a bank and allows it to fail without impacting the financial markets. ~ Bob Diamond

Our economy is increasingly dependent on the success and integrity of the financial markets. ~ Michael Douglas

There are still deep-seated structural problems that threaten the economic balance in the world: Between the United States and China, for example, but also within Europe. We have taken a few steps toward taming the financial markets, but we haven't come nearly far enough to rule out a repetition of the crisis. ~ Peer Steinbruck

THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor. ~ Jonathan Franzen

The process of globalization has now interconnected almost everything ranging from financial markets to transport networks to communication systems in a huge system that no one really understands. ~ John L. Casti

The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios ... The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market. ~ George Soros

Selling drug secrets violates a trust that is fundamental to the integrity of both scientific research and our financial markets. ~ Chuck Grassley

Trillions of dollars every day are being exchanged around the world in all of the financial markets. ~ Kenneth Lay

Creating a regulatory system that reflects the modern-day realities of financial markets is not as difficult as it may appear. ~ Paul Singer

Financial support is one thing, but I always think what becomes really sacrificial is your time. ~ Cliff Richard

Everyone needs peace of mind, inner-happiness and joyful relationships but most people don't prioritize these. Do you set goals or invest in learning to achieve these?
If you focus only on career, social and financial goals then you will never be fulfilled or fully successful! ~ Maddy Malhotra

We have been spending beyond our means, we are going to focus on the projects that we committed to in the election but importantly if there is additional projects or new things that come up they have to have a business case, they have to work and they can't impose financial stress on families and private individuals and businesses. ~ Campbell Newman

Honestly, I think winning changes all of that. It doesn't matter where you are - it could be Timbuktu - if you win, people will watch, they'll follow and they'll support. It's my responsibility to put a team on the floor that will win, and that attracts players. Look at the teams that have been successful in the NBA. Yes, you have big, glamorous cities like L.A. But Miami has won, and so has San Antonio. Oklahoma City is a very successful team. They're not the biggest markets. ~ Masai Ujiri

I have spoken about deficits, and I think deficits are important because they address broad economic and financial stability. We need to talk about that. ~ Ben Bernanke

According to the media and other stock market "experts," the equities bull is forever hiding just around that next corner on Wall Street. But millions of investors who listened to the experts back in 1998-2001 about "the New Economy" get hammered in the stock market and are still trying to get back to even.
The smart investor looks for opportunities to acquire value on the cheap, with one eye out for a dynamic change in the offing that might make that investment even more valuable. ~ Jim Rogers

These two entities - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - are not facing any kind of financial crisis, ~ Barney Frank

Success is relative. We shouldn't compare the financial success between a person born into riches and the one born into abject poverty. ~ Assegid Habtewold

In a world of businessmen and financial intermediaries who aggressively seek profit, innovators will always outpace regulators; the authorities cannot prevent changes in the structure of portfolios from occurring. What they can do is keep the asset-equity ratio of banks within bounds by setting equity-absorption ratios for various types of assets. If the authorities constrain banks and are aware of the activities of fringe banks and other financial institutions, they are in a better position to attenuate the disruptive expansionary tendencies of our economy. ~ Hyman Minsky