Quotes About Bankers

#1. Two-thirds of the directors at the New York Fed are hand-picked by the same bankers that the Fed is in charge of regulating.

Bernie Sanders

#2. The history of the last century shows, as we shall see later, that the advice given to governments by bankers, like the advice they gave to industrialists, was consistently good for bankers, but was often disastrous for governments, businessmen, and the people generally.

Carroll Quigley

#3. I recall that one of the first investment bankers I met taught me a poem. God gave you eyes, plagiarize. A

Michael Lewis

#4. If the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) raises the hackles of the conspiracy theorists, the Bilderberg meetings must induce apocalyptic visions of omnipotent international bankers plotting with unscrupulous government officials to impose cunning schemes on an ignorant and unsuspecting world.

David Rockefeller

#5. Bankers, nepotists, contracts and talkies: on four fingers one may count the leeches which have sucked a young and vigorous industry into paresis.

Dalton Trumbo

#6. It has been the bankers' destiny ... to find themselves on the dangerous edge of the world, pointing up the contradictions and cross-purposes. They are not often loved for it.

Anthony Sampson

#7. The last duty of a central banker is to tell the public the truth.

Alan Blinder

#8. I talk to bankers, distributors, marketing people. I used to sit at home in my tracksuit bottoms, and the real excitement of my day would be going out to get a copy of 'Private Eye' and a latte.

Rachel Johnson

#9. It [the depression] was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence worked out as one works out a mathematical equation. The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as the rulers of us all.

Louis Thomas McFadden

#10. I'm referred to, I see, as 'the biggest banker in modern publishing'. Now there's a line that needed the celebrated Guardian proof-reading.

Terry Pratchett

#11. The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency- showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.

Alan Furst

#12. Greed has increasingly become a virtue among Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs in the U.S. Nowhere else in the world do CEOs insist on receiving compensation as high compared to what their employees earn.

Simon Mainwaring

#13. In addition to their power over government based on government financing and personal influence, bankers could steer governments in ways they wished them to go by other pressures.

Carroll Quigley

#14. It's a mistake to think that poor people get the benefit from the welfare system. It's a total fraud. Most welfare go to the rich of this country: the military-industrial complex, the bankers, the foreign dictators, it's totally out of control.

Ron Paul

#15. Bankers - pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.

John Ralston Saul

#16. 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

#17. We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs and price stability.

Alan Greenspan

#18. I think we're in the take-the-money-and-run stage of the economy. So the banks may go under, but the bankers, who make the policy, clean up.

Michael Hudson

#19. A banker is somebody who lends you an umbrella & takes it away as soon as it starts raining.

Mark Twain

#20. I love lawyers and bankers, they are my family, but I don't want to live with them. It doesn't make a city. You need people with brain and heart and soul that give it all. You need young people on skateboards and you need people running around making noise.

Agathe Snow

#21. Everyone needs a small-town banker. Especially in a big town.

Jane Bryant Quinn

#22. There are only seven movie stars in the world whose name alone will induce American bankers to lend money for movie productions, and the only woman on the list is Ingrid Bergman.

Cary Grant

#23. Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead.

Brit Bennett

#24. The prerequisite for a banker is Strait As and no talent.

Grant McLachlan

#25. Every businessman enjoying customer patronage, whether he be a baker, banker, or barber is conferring a public benefit, raising production, and reducing unemployment; businessmen earn their livelihood by producing products and rendering services where ever they are needed.

Hans F. Sennholz

#26. The modern suburb is the product of the car, the five-day week, and the "bankers' hours" of the masses.

David Riesman

#27. Some people had fathers who were bankers or farmers, my father made films, that's how I saw it. As for the movie stars, they were just around, some of them were friends, others weren't, it was all just a part of my everyday life.

Anjelica Huston

#28. Around the district, I've talked to more local bankers who are scared to death.

Alan Nunnelee

#29. All of this talk of recession offends me. I am delighted that bankers have less money.

Chris O'Dowd

#30. The picture of bankers slavering after bonuses soon after they had been rescued by government bailouts was not only outrageous but also pitiable - pitiable because they were clamoring for their primary measure of self-worth and status to be restored

Raghuram G. Rajan

#31. That was my Malawian epiphany. Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. All the others, donors and volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion.

Paul Theroux

#32. They [some countries] borrowed money to go acquire things, Indian power plants and Danish newspapers and British soccer teams. And they did it willy-nilly, and they themselves a story, that Icelandic history and culture and DNA leaves us very well-suited to being investment bankers.

Michael Lewis

#33. These international bankers and Rockefeller Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of public office officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government.

Theodore Roosevelt

#34. No one ever felt sorry for a banker.

Dominic Lawson

#35. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second Lieutenant to a Major General. And during that time, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.

Smedley Butler

#36. The economic repercussions of a stock market crash depend less on the severity of the crash itself than on the response of economic policymakers, particularly central bankers.

Ben Bernanke

#37. The way the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed, and taken most of it into their own hands, is as good as Stalin or Hitler.

Mario Batali

#38. Bankers play far too great a part in the conduct of industry.

Henry Ford

#39. Compound interest on debt was the banker's greatest invention, to capture, and enslave, a productive society.

Albert Einstein

#40. Why even live? If that's your goal, if you're just clamoring your way to the top, I mean, why even have a life? Somebody was telling me the other day about the lives of investment bankers who work ninety hours a week and how it affects their patterns of consumption.

Larkin Grimm

#41. Central bankers are not seers, not miracle workers. They are government employees.

Seth Lipsky

#42. In other words, the uninsured private bankers had to be bailed out illegally and utterly unethically. But the taxpayers who were forced to carry that can should not even be given better terms for repaying the odious, private debt they were forced to acquire in order to bail the bankers out.

Yanis Varoufakis

#43. Civilizations are not remembered by their business people, their bankers or lawyers. They're remembered by the arts.

Eli Broad

#44. The business world traditionally rewards people for being closer to the top (case in point: outrageous CEO salaries) or for being closer to the transactions (investment bankers, salespeople).

Eric Schmidt

#45. The goose that lays golden eggs has been considered a most valuable possession. But even more profitable is the privilege of taking the golden eggs laid by somebody else's goose. The investment bankers and their associates now enjoy that privilege.

Louis D. Brandeis

#46. But if you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.

Josiah Stamp

#47. Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.

Allen Tate

#48. These were bankers we were talking about, and I owed taxes. They'd hunt me to the ends of the earth!

Mark Lawrence

#49. What Wall Street and credit card companies are doing is really not much different from what gangsters and loan sharks do who make predatory loans. While the bankers wear three-piece suits and don't break the knee caps of those who can't pay back, they still are destroying people's lives.

Bernie Sanders

#50. Every sensible banker understands that Greece should not have received any more money: a bankrupt state that can never be expected to repay loans is not a good debtor.

Yanis Varoufakis

#51. Difference between rich and wealthy? Wall Street bankers are rich but they are no wealthy.Wealthy people are the ones writing their checks.

Ziad K. Abdelnour

#52. Obama's view of the tax code is inherently political: Whom can we hit next? Energy companies, jet owners, bankers? Instead, the question should be how to promote economic efficiency by raising revenue without trying to manipulate corporate or personal behavior.

John Sununu

#53. Books are the carriers of civilization ... They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#54. I'm from a family of bankers and businessmen, and here I am, the artist, the black sheep.

Matthew Quick

#55. The politicians think the journalists have power, the journalists think bankers have power, bankers think lawyers have power. The truth is, nobody has power.

Rory Stewart

#56. Before passage of this [Federal Reserve] Act, the New York Bankers could only dominate the reserves of New York. Now, we are able to dominate the bank reserves of the entire country.

Nelson W. Aldrich

#57. I won't dispute that bankers' privileged treatment in the 2008 crash merits populist scorn. But unfortunately, without a bank bailout, there probably would have been a worldwide depression.

Timothy Noah

#58. We all have banker problems. We all have issues.

Karolyn Grimes

#59. A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

Mark Twain

#60. We don't think of ourselves as a regional investment bank. We think of ourselves as merchant bankers with clients all over the country.

Warren Stephens

#61. Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess

Irving Fisher

#62. Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#63. My father said you can't make a living in birds, my relatives all went into business: bankers, stockbrokers. However, they eventually lost it all and died in wheelchairs. Sometimes you have to be a little aberrant.

Roger Tory Peterson

#64. These days the investment bankers came to Silicon Valley.

Michael Lewis

#65. Nationalization would likely mean wiping out the big banks' managements and shareholders. It's because that reckoning has mostly been avoided so far that those bankers may be the Americans in the greatest denial of all.

Frank Rich

#66. We are all socialists now, it seems. John McCain, David Cameron and Gordon Brown attack bankers' irresponsible behaviour and salaries, and call for state intervention in the financial markets. But these calls will not get them elected or re-elected if they are addressed only to the banking sector.

Noreena Hertz

#67. The world was run by its bankers. The world was run by its investor class. The world was run by its manufacturers. The history of human destiny was money, the men who controlled it, and nothing more. Money, a measure of humiliation, was the only thing that mattered.

Jarett Kobek

#68. The bankers' Satanic Conspiracy is the source of anti Semitism. The sooner Jews rise up to oppose it; the sooner anti-Semitism will end.. Obviously, many Christians are involved. When I criticize Rockefeller, no one says anything about 'anti-Christianism.'

Henry Makow

#69. During the dot-com days, one could take just about any company public and reap fortunes. All you had to do was to make sky-high projections for growth, say you were in the Internet space, and go along with unscrupulous investment bankers and their analysts.

Vivek Wadhwa

#70. I think we're fooling ourselves if we think that regulators are going to be able to outsmart the bankers. So, the task of designing regulatory reform is trying to make more or less foolproof regulation and that's one of the advantages of the systemic category.

Robert F. Engle

#71. Bankers all wanted to be princes. Professors all wanted to be Martin Luther.

Graham Moore

#72. I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of, you know, fat-cat bankers on Wall Street.

Barack Obama

#73. Bankers are just like everybody else, except richer.

Ogden Nash

#74. Actors have given up their clout. Now decision making is in the hands of lighting men, designers, bankers, special-effects people. We need to cut that out and just go with the most able trained actors in the business.

Peter O'Toole

#75. Entrepreneurs are always taking feedback, especially from their customers, bankers, workers, and sales force. Without straightforward feedback, entrepreneurs cannot make sound decisions.

Donald Trump

#76. When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money

Oscar Wilde

#77. Water is an astonishingly complex and subtle force in an economy. It is the single constraint on the expansion of every city, and bankers and corporate executives have cited it as the only natural limit to economic growth.

Margaret Catley-Carlson

#78. There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate; not now! At present they have not only my sympathy but my preference. They are the last representatives of our native industries.

Edith Wharton

#79. Bankers cannot afford to be concerned with only the economic aspects of projects. There may be serious implications on the natural environment, the urban environment, on human culture.

Arthur Erickson

#80. Late 19th-century populists saw bankers and industrialists manipulating markets to enrich themselves at the expense of small farmers and labourers and favoured political candidates promising economic relief through free and unlimited coinage of silver.

Robert Dallek

#81. The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or, what is most important of all, the banker of the backer.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#82. Dogs can't speak English. Nor any human language - save, in one notable exception, Luxembourgish, which is only comprehensible to bankers and Luxembourgers, and therefore hardly of any use at all. No, you've eaten something disagreeable and are having a nightmare, that's all.

Ransom Riggs

#83. Let those other women marry bankers. I've got myself a Marine.

Mollie Gross

#84. I learned about M&A and how to value assets and work with investment bankers.

Patricia A. Woertz

#85. Even a man persuaded that the great powers of the heavens loved him above all else could starve. However powerful a story might be, it had its limits, and the brute material world didn't listen or care what priests and bankers told it.

Daniel Abraham

#86. Some women were appointed to labor positions normally held by men and became trusted confidantes of male numbers bankers, using this affiliation with prominent policy men to thrive in male-dominated arenas.

LaShawn Harris

#87. Banks have never made money in the history of banking, losing the equivalent of all their past profits periodically - while bankers strike it rich.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#88. I actually think that the economy has got some positives. It's got the market. It's got consumer confidence and it's got banks throwing - I mean central bankers throwing money at it around the world.

Jack Welch

#89. One of the things my friends would tell you is that I hang out with a lot of non-writers - just regular people like bankers and teachers, and I actually try to steer our talk away from my work when I get together with them.

Chang-rae Lee

#90. People who sell advertising are called "account executives." People who sell customers work in "business development." People who sell companies are "investment bankers." And people who sell themselves are called "politicians." ==========

Anonymous

#91. The ancient nobility and gentry of the kingdom ... have been thrust out of all public employment ... a race of merchants, and manufacturers and bankers and loan-jobbers and contractors have usurped their place.

William Cobbett

#92. Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.

Terry Pratchett

#93. When you think of the typical Teach For America corps member, soldiers and ex-bankers are probably not the people who come to mind. In fact, there is no such thing as a typical corps member. They can't be neatly pigeonholed or painted with a broad brush.

Wendy Kopp

#94. Merchandise from Wal-Mart has become as ubiquitous as the water supply. Yet, still, the company is rebuked and reviled by anyone claiming a social conscience and is lambasted by legislators as if its bad behavior places it somewhere between investment bankers and the Taliban.

Charles Platt

#95. 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

#96. If you're an original thinker, you are going get told 'no' a lot, and you have to be able to hear 'no' many times from the bankers and trust that at some point, someone is going to recognize that you are an artist and not a can of soda.

Nick Offerman

#97. They say that doing ten sums a day prevents you from becoming senile. But by that argument bankers should be geniuses. That's not right. Thickest heads in the world.

Annie Proulx

#98. How long will it be necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult?

John Maynard Keynes

#99. small-town bankers like Justin Barker

A.W. Gray

#100. Society, magazines, posters, music videos, investment bankers. A lot of times, in my past anyway, looking within wasn't overly encouraged. Pretty much everybody proclaimed that fame would give me power and fortune.

Alanis Morissette