Andrew Ross Sorkin Quotes

#1. Wall Street is littered with clever plans to use financial instruments to change behavior - carbon trading, for example. Some have changed the world, and others failed miserably.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#2. I'm probably a believer in abandoning too-big-to-fail firms or breaking them up in some way so that the system can try to take care of itself. I imagine you're not going to get there, and therefore, I suspect regulation is what's going to be required.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#3. It's the people who have an incentive to find the problem who usually find the problem.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#4. In truth, a leader should either apologize, mean it and do something about it - or not apologize at all.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#5. While the financial crisis destroyed careers and reputations, and left many more bruised and battered, it also left the survivors with a genuine sense of invulnerability at having made it back from the brink. Still missing in the current environment is a genuine sense of humility.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#6. When you can't lend or trade - and you can't invest with the leverage that juiced returns to support seven- and eight-figure bonuses - how exactly are you going to make money?

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#7. By now, it seems as if everyone has already read Thomas L. Friedman's 'The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.' It changed the way we think about global business, competitiveness and the implication for far-flung economies, governments, education and more.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#8. I don't sleep well. I'm a very nervous - by my nature - anxious, almost paranoid person and reporter.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#9. Everyone thinks Goldman is so fucking smart," he railed. "Just because Goldman says this is the right valuation, you shouldn't assume it's correct just because Goldman said it. My brother works at Goldman, and he's an idiot!

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#10. There are those on Wall Street and in the plutocracy who feel that Geithner is a hero who deftly steered the country from economic ruin. To many ordinary Americans, however, he is considered a Wall Street puppet and a servant of the so-called banksters.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#11. The failure of Lehman may have allowed the government to do more to prop up the economy than it otherwise could.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#12. In truth, Wall Street is in for a radical makeover. Fewer people, lower margins, lower risk, lower compensation - and ultimately, fewer talented people. It is likely to change the culture of an industry that for nearly a century has been the money center of the world.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#13. I started, actually, in journalism when I was - well. I started at the 'New York Times' when I was 18 years old, actually, but really got into journalism when I was 15 years old and had started a sports magazine which was trying to become a national sports magazine.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#14. We talk about institutions that are too big to fail - I think the story is as much about people who think they are too big to fail.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#15. In many ways, education is a lousy business. Teachers are not normal economic actors; almost all of them work for less money than they might fetch in some other industry, given their skills and advanced degrees.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#16. Tiptoeing on a tightrope past insider trading laws may be deft and clever, but it doesn't make it right.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#17. I was always one of those people who would watch the Super Bowl as much for the sports as I did for the ads. I was always just sort of fascinated by the fact that when you turn on the TV, there was motion, there was moving pictures on it.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#18. Here's the perversity of Wall Street's psychology: The more Wall Street is convinced that Washington will act rationally and raise the debt ceiling, most likely at the 11th hour, the less pressure there will be on lawmakers to reach an agreement. That will make it more likely a deal isn't reached.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#19. What if lawmakers never spoke to their constituents? Oddly enough, that's exactly how corporate America operates. Shareholders vote for directors, but the directors rarely, if ever, communicate with them.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#20. There are no atheists in foxholes or ideologues in a financial crisis. Ben Bernanke

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#21. I don't want to put words in Geithner's mouth, but I think he is generally against the revolving door of government officials taking jobs with companies that they have overseen or in roles that involve lobbying. At minimum, I'm pretty sure he felt that way about himself.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#22. Some billionaires like cars, yachts and private jets. Others like newspapers.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#23. The euphoria around economic booms often obscures the possibility for a bust, which explains why leaders typically miss the warning signs.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#24. My training really was at the 'New York Times,' you know. When I got there, I was literally supposed to stay there for five weeks, and I got lucky like nobody, you know, like nobody's business.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#25. Bitcoin, in the short or even long term, may turn out be a good investment in the same way that anything that is rare can be considered valuable. Like baseball cards. Or a Picasso.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#26. What if the slowdown in merger activity isn't cyclical, but secular? What if corporations have learned the lessons of so many companies before them that the odds of a successful merger are no better than 50-50 and probably less? Is it possible that the biggest deals have already been done?

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#27. I got my start in the 'New York Times' because I used to read Stuart Elliot, the advertising columns. I still do. And I read him so religiously, I wanted to work for him before I died.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#28. I think you tell the story that has to be told. You tell the story that's the truth. You tell the story that readers will be interested in and should know about.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#29. The blowback against a bailout of Lehman would have been fierce. It is often forgotten, but the prevailing wisdom the day after Lehman fell was that its collapse was a good thing.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#30. In truth, the best Bitcoin can hope for is to be a second-rate version of gold, if that.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#31. Forget about banks that are too big to fail; the focus should be on cities, municipalities and countries that are too big to fail.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#32. The ethos on Wall Street has not changed, and that's not going to come from the corner office. That's going to come, for better or worse, from Washington, and the whole idea of greed is still good, that is still pervasive.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#33. There's a good argument to be made that companies that are private, where they're run by partnerships, where everybody has true stake in them and they're not playing with other people's money, that by default it's a safer system, because you really have skin in the game. You really own the company.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#34. Investors are sometimes too busy looking for profits to notice where the truth ends and the deception begins.

Andrew Ross Sorkin