Investment Banking Quotes

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." ~ Bethany McLean

ran - at separate times - a boutique investment banking firm and a small mortgage company. He served as the Treasurer for the multinational vitamin manufacturer USANA Health Sciences years before becoming CFO for MonaVie. Devin squeezed in two brief stints in government, including two years working for Jake Garn on the U.S. Senate Banking Committee Staff and another year working for an independent state agency called USTAR, where he helped foster technology entrepreneurship during Governor Jon Huntsman's administration. Devin is proud to be a Ute, having graduated from the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business, which recognized him as a Distinguished Alum in 2006. He also earned an MBA at Cornell University where he ran the student newspaper, Cornell Business. ~ Devin D. Thorpe

Don't wait for better Investment options, Invest and then wait for better time. ~ Ankit Samrat

Early in my investment-banking career, I realized I was on a path that others had set out for me. ~ Vikram Chatwal

The general culture of investment banking has deteriorated over the years. We did a $6 million deal years ago for Diversified Retailing and we were rigorously and intelligently screened. They bankers cared and wanted to protect their clients. The culture now is that anything that can be sold for a profit will be. 'Can you sell it?' is the moral test, and that's not an adequate test. ~ Charlie Munger

Investment banking has, in recent years, resembled a casino, and the massive scale of gambling losses has dragged down traditional business and retail lending activities as banks try to rebuild their balance sheets. This was one aspect of modern financial liberalisation that had dire consequences. ~ Vince Cable

My grandmother got her law degree from Syracuse University in roughly 1911 and later co-founded with her husband an investment banking firm on Wall Street known as Lebenthal & Co. ~ H. G. Bissinger

The associates are the Cro-Magnon men. They live in caves, have trouble walking upright, and have a lot of hair on their backs. Usually, they communicate by grunting. Those are the associates. Finally, there are the analysts. Monkeys. Tons and tons of little monkeys. Not humans, just monkeys crawling all over each other and pulling lice out of each other's fur. Those are the analysts. ~ John Rolfe

There are a lot of ways that investment banking models work, but these risks are not internalized by the people that are taking them. ~ Robert F. Engle

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. ~ Felix Rohatyn

On the Glass-Steagall thing, like I said, if you could demonstrate to me that it was a mistake, I'd be glad to look at the evidence. But I can't blame [the Republicans]. This wasn't something they forced me into. I really believed that given the level of oversight of banks and their ability to have more patient capital, if you made it possible for [banks] to go into the investment banking business as continental European investment banks could always do, that it might give us a more stable source of long-term investment. ~ William J. Clinton

Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves? ~ Peter Thiel

My early work and publications centered around expanding on the analysis of life insurance in my dissertation and its relationship to investment banking. ~ Douglass North

Who is Antonio Weiss? He's the head of global investment banking for the financial giant Lazard. ~ Elizabeth Warren

The 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act will reestablish a wall between commercial and investment banking, make our financial system more stable and secure, and protect American families. ~ Elizabeth Warren

In the 1990s, the ratio of buy to sell recommendations climbed to 100 to 1, particularly for brokerage firms with large investment banking businesses. ~ Burton G. Malkiel

The kids I see are lazy. Nobody wants to work. I teach physics. It takes years to master. But all the kids want to dress like Charlie Sheen and make a million dollars before they're twenty-eight. The only way you can make that kind of money is in law, investment banking, Wall Street. Places where the game is paper profits, something for nothing. But that's what the kids want to do, these days. ~ Michael Crichton

One IT executive in an investment banking company claimed that 80 percent of his company's programming code was dedicated to linking disparate systems, as opposed to creating new capabilities. ~ Jeanne W. Ross

It's natural that you'd have more brains going into money management. There are so many huge incomes in money management and investment banking - it's like ants to sugar. There are huge incentives for a man to take up money management as opposed to, say, physics, and it's a lot easier. ~ Charlie Munger

The only inexplicable aspect of the process was that economic theory (which is, after all, what economics students were supposed to know) served almost no function in an investment bank. The bankers used economics as a sort of standardized test of general intelligence. ~ Michael Lewis

It can be argued that the U.S. brokerage and investment banking industry has transformed the modern American stock market into nothing more than a mechanism for transferring wealth from shareholders to management. ~ Peter Schiff

In order for capitalism to evolve from its current toxic expression, I propose the value of international currencies be tied to an Index of Human Productive Output. The emphasis being on human productivity not inanimate machines and virtual assets created by the mirage of the investment banker ~ Said Elias Dawlabani

I have nothing against investment banking, but it's like massaging money rather than creating money. If you're in physics, you create inventions, you create lasers, you create transistors, computers, GPS. ~ Michio Kaku

Investment banks manage to go bankrupt through their investment-banking activities, commercial banks manage to go bankrupt through their commercial-banking activities. ~ Ben Bernanke

It's good to have a special price to pay for the future and it will pay you in return, in the exact way you would wish to be paid. ~ Auliq Ice

As a child, I had no idea that I would end up in the film industry. My ambitions changed from wanting to join the army like my grandfather to taking up merchant navy as a career to running for India, and finally, investment banking while I was a student of economics honour. But during my college days, I began to get offers for modelling. ~ Arjun Rampal

Hollywood is a small, familial place. Everyone does business with everybody else. The same complications occur in investment banking. ~ Michael Ovitz

It's my guess that something like 5% of GDP goes to money management and itsattendant friction. I define it broadly - annuities, incentive pay, all trading, etc. Nobody else has used figures that high, but that's my guess. Worst of all, the people doing this are among the best and the brightest. Hundreds and thousands of engineers, etc. are going into hedge funds and investment banking. That is not an intelligent allocation of the brainpower of the civilization. ~ Charlie Munger

Brokerage firms and their executives cannot use threats regarding research activities as a way to obtain investment banking business. The threat to drop research coverage if Piper were not selected as the lead underwriter for a secondary offering was totally inappropriate and undermines the integrity of the market. ~ Mary Schapiro

Why did investment banking pay so many people with so little experience so much money? Answer: When attached to a telephone, they could produce even more money. How could they produce money without experience? Answer: Producing in an investment bank was less a matter of skill and more a matter of intangibles - flair, persistence, and luck. ~ Michael Lewis

Those who say don't know, those who know don't say ~ Michael Lewis

Let's be honest: the trappings of investment banking are quite tempting. I do miss it sometimes. And to be honest, there was a time I'd read the 'WSJ' in the morning, and for years I have done that. ~ Chetan Bhagat

We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful. ~ Warren Buffett

If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high-leverage investment you can make in human beings. ~ Melinda Gates

Most people suffer in love because of attachment. Attachment means we're interested in a net return on our investment. ~ Frederick Lenz

Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I've been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Passionate investment leaves us vulnerable to loss. And sometimes, no matter how clever we are, we must lose. ~ Judith Viorst

Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking. ~ Walter Bagehot

Yes, prudently invested contributions to the Social Security fund may bring greater dividends, but those contributions would also face a greater risk. It would be like gambling. We should not gamble with the investments and the future of the citizens of this land. ~ Daniel Inouye

When I began reflecting on this law, I saw that it applied again and again to examples of people successfully acquiring more control in their careers. To understand this, notice that the definition of "willing to pay" varies. In some cases, it literally means customers paying you money for a product or a service. But it can also mean getting approved for a loan, receiving an outside investment, or, more commonly, convincing an employer to either hire you or keep writing you paychecks. Once you adopt this flexible definition of "pay for it," this law starts popping up all over. Consider, ~ Cal Newport

Intelligent tax planning calls for changes in approach every few years. It is, therefore, recommended that you must review your investment and tax planning perspective at least every decade and reorient it depending on the facts and circumstances of the situation. ~ Ram Niwas Lakhotia

I wish I would have known that there was no need to wait. I went to college. I went to law school. I worked in law and banking, though not for terribly long. But not until I started PayPal did I fully realize that you don't have to wait to start something. So if you're planning to do something with your life, if you have a 10-year plan of how to get there, you should ask: Why can't you do this in 6 months? Sometimes, you have to actually go through the complex, 10-year trajectory. But it's at least worth asking whether that's the story you're telling yourself, or whether that's the reality. ~ Timothy Ferriss

Every time you have a carrot instead of a cookie, every time you go to the gym instead of going to the movies, that's a costly investment in your health. But how much you want to invest is going to depend on how much longer you expect to live in the future, even if you don't make those investments. ~ Emily Oster

When I see people laughing at ideas and companies we have backed, I smile. It means we are going to make a lot of money on that investment. ~ Fred Wilson

You know, Greenwich Village was the traditional bohemia of New York. I wish I could say that was entirely true now. It's, uh ... changed. It's now got, God help us, investment bankers and journalists, but it's still a very beautiful part of New York. ~ Jay McInerney

Prayer is an investment. The time you dedicate to prayer isn't lost; it will return dividends far greater than what a few moments spent on a task ever could. If we fail to cultivate this discipline, prayer winds up being our last resort rather than our first response. ~ Charles R. Swindoll

Our approach to banking is very different from the traditional banks or even some of the new banks. We do not necessarily go out and write single-cheque, large-ticket loans. ~ Uday Kotak

By this means the government may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people, and not one man in a million will detect the theft. ~ John Maynard Keynes

We need to increase the transparency of shadow banking markets so that authorities can monitor for signs of excessive leverage and unstable maturity transformation outside regulated banks. ~ Janet Yellen

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency first by inflation then by deflation the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered ... I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies ... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Look down, not up, when making your initial investment decision. If you don't lose money, most of the remaining alternatives are good ones. ~ Joel Greenblatt

The most treasured asset in investment management is a steady hand at the tiller. ~ Robert D. Arnott

I think Mitt Romney has demonstrated repeatedly he has a penchant for - for secrecy, doesn't seem to have any interest in actually showing the American people his - his finances, decision - important decisions about his investments, refuses to come clean on his time at Bain Capital and when he was really there, and, you know, be held accountable for the outsourcing of jobs and the off-shoring of jobs and shipping jobs overseas. ~ Mitt Romney

Several principles are illustrated by this experience. The value of a program intended to reduce injuries is not necessarily a function of the good intentions of the program's proponents. Skill or behavior change programs can have unintended harmful effects and those effects are often found only by well-designed research. This is particularly true of programs that have the potential to increase exposure to hazards. Once a program becomes institutionalized, it is difficult to remove it no matter how ineffective or harmful its consequences. A major barrier to the scientific evaluation of programs is the reluctance of those who develop, advocate or profit from programs to have them evaluated objectively. In some cases, their investment in the programs is only psychological, but in others it is economic. ~ Leon Robertson

This medical view of an ideal male who was insulated from pathogens was inextricably bound up with a parallel discourse about the maintenance of strong ego boundaries, a psychic investment in one's bodily peripheries that effected a gradual closing (and, one might say, a closing off) of the male body, at once from the outer world of dangerous stimuli and from the inner world of threatening passions. Without a doubt, as Norbert Elias has shown, in the western world both men and women experienced a shift in their sense of personal boundaries during the early modern era where, amid changing social circumstances, rising thresholds of repugnance and shame were manifested among the upper-classes as a growing aversion to their own bodily functions and to the bodies of others. The changes wrought by new developments in table manners and etiquette were extended by the introduction of hygienic practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that endeavored to maximise the order and cleanliness of the social body while futher compartmentalising the bourgeois self as a discrete bodily unit. ~ Christopher Forth

Investment bankers make money for a living. ~ Michael Lewis

The efficient market theory is one of the better models in the sense that it can be taken as true for every purpose I can think of. For investment purposes, there are very few investors that shouldn't behave as if markets are totally efficient. ~ Eugene Fama

The thing that keeps you scrambling over the rocks, risking snakes, and swatting at the flies is the view. It is only your enjoyment of and commitment to what you see, not to what you rationally understand, that balances the otherwise absurd investment of labor. ~ Robert Adams

There is a deep connection between Bernoulli's dictum and John Kelly's 1956 publication. It turns out that Kelly's prescription can be restated as this simple rule: When faced with a choice of wagers or investments, choose the one with the highest geometric means of outcomes. ~ William Poundstone

Any time an investment company has to spend heavily on advertising, it's probably a bad business in which to invest. ~ Robert Kiyosaki

You will come to know that what appears today to be a sacrifice will prove instead to be the greatest investment that you will ever make. ~ Gordon B. Hinckley

The advantage of online banking is that you can pay bills superfast, and your account is automatically credited or debited for each deposit and payment, making it easier to stay on track. ~ Suze Orman

If you're going to buy something which compounds for 30 years at 15% per annum and you pay one 35% tax at the very end, the way that works out is that after taxes, you keep 13.3% per annum. In contrast, if you bought the same investment, but had to pay taxes every year of 35% out of the 15% that you earned, then your return would be 15% minus 35% of 15%-or only 9.75% per year compounded. So the difference there is over 3.5%. And what 3.5% does to the numbers over long holding periods like 30 years is truly eye-opening ... ~ Charlie Munger

You cannot do a goal. Long-term planning and goal-setting must therefore be complemented by short-term planning. This kind of planning requires specifying activities. You can do an activity. Activities are steps along the way to a goal. Let's say you desire security. Putting $10.00 in the bank or talking to your stockbroker about your investment plans are activities that will move you toward your goal. ~ Alan Lakein

Network Marketing allows anyone the opportunity, with little investment, to build their own residual income.

http://timanderson.ws/2014/01/04/netw... ~ Tim Anderson

A game that a lot of critics like is not necessarily a game that enough players like to be able to make back an investment of tens of millions of dollars. ~ Steve Gaynor

I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them? ~ Jean Baudrillard

The FBI announced today that they are now looking for Osama bin Laden's financial adviser. You think this guy is in demand. How good can he be? his top client is living in a cave and driving a donkey. It doesn't sound like he is getting the best return on his investments to me. ~ Jay Leno

Experience conclusively shows that index-fund buyers are likely to obtain results exceeding those of the typical fund manager, whose large advisory fees and substantial portfolio turnover tend to reduce investment yields. Many people will find the guarantee of playing the stock-market game at par every round a very attractive one. The index fund is a sensible, serviceable method for obtaining the market's rate of return with absolutely no effort and minimal expense. ~ Burton Malkiel

Savers have to be punished so debtors can be saved.

Why? Because if debtors are rescued, that makes it possible for more debts to be issued in the future.

And why is that important? Because the banking system needs ever more loans in order to survive. ~ Chris Martenson

Player investment design lead' is a role that every single collaborative project or crowd initiative should fill in the future. When the game is intrinsically rewarding to play, you don't have to pay people to participate - with real currency, virtual currency, or any other kind of scarce reward. Participation is its own reward, when the player is properly invested in his or her progress, in exploring the world fully, and in the community's success. ~ Jane McGonigal

We humans, once we have become emotionally invested in a homeplace, a prized personal possession, or, especially, in another person, find it immensely difficult to give them up ... Because they were made at a time of life when we were utterly dependent on them, the love attachments of infancy have inordinate power over us, more than any other emotional investment. ~ Louise J. Kaplan

If I had quietly retired as governor in 2007 and went into banking or something of that nature, I would have been, at most, a footnote in the story and probably never mentioned. ~ Mike Huckabee

For us, from Korea's perspective, China is the number one investment destination as well as number one trading partner. ~ Lee Myung-bak

We all know that 97% of the money in the world doesn't exist and that's thanks to Fractional Reserve Banking, or should I say fictional reserve banking." He grinned at his own joke, his smile partly hidden by his hair, "Money is no longer attached to the Gold Standard, therefore, it isn't based on anything. So when it says, 'I promise to pay the bearer on demand ten pounds,' I have to ask, ten pounds of what?" Silence. "The world is owned by the rich shareholder, the rich superstar, the rich industrialist, the rich aristocracy." He was now marching around the stage, "It doesn't matter who or what they are, if they're rich then they own a part of the world, but they only own it because they've got lots of money. Which means they own part of the 97% of the world's fictional money, the pretend money that only exists on a computer." He stopped abruptly and stared out at the audience, "Which means that if they cashed in their fictional nonexistent money they'd get something like this ten pound note offering to pay the bearer the sum of ten pounds of nothing." He held the note aloft, "Which means the rich have managed to buy the entire world with paper nothing that has a value of nothing and we've let them do it. ~ Arun D. Ellis

Under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth ... The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit ... In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation ~ Alan Greenspan

Never invest in any idea you can't illustrate with a crayon ~ Peter Lynch

I was educated in a private school in England amongst people who had been trained for sort of banking or the Army or business. As I came towards the end of my education, I thought I must find something or I'll never meet any of these people again. ~ Jeremy Irons

In reality, studies show that investments to spur renewable energy and boost energy efficiency generate far more jobs than oil and coal. ~ Jeff Goodell