Quotes About Banking

#1. At the heart of banking is a suicidal strategy. Banks take money from the public or each other on call, skim it for their own reward and then lock the rest up in volatile, insecure and illiquid loans that at times they cannot redeem without public aid.

James Buchan

#2. The banking business is no favorite of ours. When assets are twenty times equity - a common ratio in this industry - mistakes that involve only a small portion of assets can destroy a major portion of equity. And mistakes have been the rule rather than the exception at many major banks.

Warren Buffett

#3. For my own part, I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.'s - I didn't see any of that coming until it happened.

Janet Yellen

#4. There's more honor in investment management than in investment banking.

Charlie Munger

#5. [T]he first bad bank loan was no doubt made around the time of the opening of the first bank.

James Grant

#6. Banking and Prosperity in the Thirteenth Occupation or even A Child's Treasury of Economics or The Young Person's Illustrated Omnibus of Fiscal Prudence.

Alastair Reynolds

#7. Myth: Feeding the banking sector gobs of welfare cash will bring about a recovery. Fact: Our leaders are only dedicated to preserving power

Ziad K. Abdelnour

#8. Don't do anything stupd. And don't waste money. Let everybody else waste money and do stupid things; then we'll buy them.

Jamie Dimon

#9. The ultimate arbiters of the models of banking and the management of banking are the investors. It's the shareholders.

Bob Diamond

#10. Banks get in trouble for one reason: They make bad loans.

Carl Webb

#11. Heaven, for the Presbyterians, must resemble a banking establishment, with each soul tagged and docketed, and placed in the appropriate pigeonhole.

Margaret Atwood

#12. The viral power of online media has proven how fast creative ideas can be spread and adopted, using tools like cellphones, digital cameras, micro-credit, mobile banking, Facebook, and Twitter. A perfect example? The way the Green Movement in Iran caught fire thanks to social media.

Tina Brown

#13. If all bank loans were paid, there would not be a dollar of coin or currency in circulation. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation. We are absolutely without a permanent money system.

Robert W. Hemphill

#14. Given the extent of the exposures of major banks around the world to A.I.G., and in light of the extreme fragility of the system, there was a significant risk that A.I.G.'s failure could have sparked a global banking panic.

Ben Bernanke

#15. There's such a cynicism about the phrase 'I laughed all the way to the bank.' It's as though money is what you're doing, rather than playing music. If you're playing a money game, why not get into banking?

Artie Shaw

#16. 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

#17. I sincerely believe the banking institutions having the issuing power of money, are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies.

Thomas Jefferson

#18. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

Smedley Butler

#19. You don't run a business hoping you don't have a recession.

Jamie Dimon

#20. I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

Thomas Jefferson

#21. If you look at the banking business over many years, it's always been a huge user of technology. This has been going on my whole life, that people have been adding technology, digitizing services.

Jamie Dimon

#22. I would like to believe in an afterlife; it makes things more palatable. But I'm not banking on it.

Jarvis Cocker

#23. We've got activists all across the country like the members of the Million Mom March organization, some of their leaders are here tonight. We're phone banking congressional offices and pursuing editorial boards.

Michael D. Barnes

#24. One way to make sure you don't lose assets in the future is to streamline your accounts. Consider using one bank for all your banking needs and one brokerage firm for all your investments.

Jean Chatzky

#25. Time and again we've seen that reducing poverty comes down to economic opportunity-not just connecting the poor to services like banking, but ensuring they can be producers on fair terms in the global economy.

Leila Janah

#26. If you want to change the way your banking system is regulated, if you want to learn the mistakes of what's gone wrong, then you have to change your government.

George Osborne

#27. Altough we all realize that monotony is boring, almost every form of industrial work- banking, accounting, mass-producing, service- is monotonous, and most people are paid for simply putting up with monotony

Alan Watts

#28. 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

#29. In many parts of India, chit funds address gaps left by the traditional banking sector.

R. Vaidyanathan

#30. Today, banking assets (that is, loans) in the world's major economies are equivalent to around 150 per cent of those countries' combined GDP.

Niall Ferguson

#31. Chase's was a junkie's banking strategy, shooting speed in the morning and spending all day foraging for the cash to dope down at night, an endless quest to chase the debt dragon.

Matt Taibbi

#32. 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

#33. In Los Angeles on Black Friday, a woman pepper sprayed Wal-Mart shoppers who tried to cut in line. The police acted fast by immediately hiring her to get rid of peaceful protesters outside banking institutions all across the United States.

Craig Ferguson

#34. I've had a lot of different companies. I've been in banking and automobiles and real estate and a lot of things.

Tom Benson

#35. Banking technology has made it simple and efficient to invest in good causes.

Mark Skousen

#36. Could a literary life be referred to with the iambic pentameter of, say, harnessing wind power, transplanting hearts or saving the whales. Or did it necessitate the sombre and monotonous dirge of software, priority banking or turbine building.

Anita Nair

#37. My father invested his money so securely in the banking business that he was never able to get any of it out again.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

#38. In the simplest sense, the key to the performance of any traditional commercial bank ... is the profitability of the loans it makes.

Robert G. Wilmers

#39. It was only later, in her new, darker rooms above the banking house, that she realized it didn't matter how loud she screamed or how violently she wept. Her parents would never come to her because, being dead, they didn't care anymore.

Daniel Abraham

#40. Growth at an exceptional rate is a red flag in banking. It is hard enough to manage an ordinary bank; to control a sprouting weed is well-nigh impossible. If loans are expanding too quickly, the lending officers have probably been saying 'yes' too frequently.

James Grant

#41. Lawyers make nothing but confusion ... A lawyer is an instrument of the devil. In general, he's a fiendish idiot, banking on the stupidity of people much more stupid than himself, and by God he's always right.

Thomas Bernhard

#42. The stuff that's going on is just so over-the-top, with the banking crisis and destroying the Gulf of Mexico, and the outrage hasn't quite caught up with the people yet. But when it does, I think you're going to see really virulent anti-authoritarian kind of comedy coming out.

Adam McKay

#43. The Federal Reserve bank buys government bonds without one penny ...

John C. Danforth

#44. I take from the poor and give to the rich. They just happen to be the same individuals. Poor and stupid before they learn from me and pay with their time and money, but rich and successful after they do. The truly miserable, however, don't know how poor they are, and I want nothing from them.

Robin Sacredfire

#45. North Carolina is home to some of the largest financial institutions in the country, and a vibrant network of community banks. We're a banking state, and we're proud of that distinction. But we also understand that responsible financial regulation protects consumers and businesses.

Kay Hagan

#46. I think I do regret leaving Kentucky because I took over a team with 15 wins banking everything on the Tim Duncan lottery, and once we didn't get Tim Duncan, I realized that leaving Kentucky was not a good move.

Rick Pitino

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

Vikram Chatwal

#48. For a country, everything will be lost when the jobs of an economist and a banker become highly respected professions.

Baron De Montesquieu

#49. Banking is necessary - banks are not.

Bill Gates

#50. When it comes to making laws that protect the public from the financial services industry, Congress has done a progressively worse job since the Pecora Commission hearings of the early 1930s, which led to Congress taking bold steps to regulate banking and securities firms in 1933 and 1934.

Gary Weiss

#51. [ ... ] from what I'd been able to ascertain online, the Swiss were a reassuringly practical people. They had a long, proud history of staying out of wars, preferring to devote themselves to more constructive endeavours like science, secure banking and building extremely accurate clocks.

Gavin Extence

#52. I've never categorically been a banker. I had two internships while I was at university. The decision was more banking, or magic, and I went with the latter.

Drummond Money-Coutts

#53. The banking collapse was caused, more than anything, by bad government policy and the total failure of bad regulation, rather than by greed.

Nigel Farage

#54. I trust online banking. You know why? Because if somebody hacks into my account and defrauds my credit card company, or my online bank account, guess who takes the loss? The bank, not me.

Kevin Mitnick

#55. Regulation is necessary, particularly in a sector, like the banking sector, which exposes countries and people to a risk.

Christine Lagarde

#56. It should be clear that modern fractional reserve banking is a shell game, a Ponzi scheme, a fraud in which fake warehouse receipts are issued and circulate as equivalent to the cash supposedly represented by those receipts.

Murray Rothbard

#57. Time is a valuable wealth.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#58. The business of banking ought to be simple. If it is hard it is wrong. The only securities which a banker, using money that he may be asked at short notice to repay, ought to touch, are those which are easily saleable and easily intelligible.

Walter Bagehot

#59. Our entire approach to the banking and financial services business is risk-adjusted returns. We believe that in most parts of the world, and including pockets in India, banking tends to mis-price risk.

Uday Kotak

#60. We all rely on technology to communicate, to survive, to do our banking, to shop, to get informed, but none of us knows how to read and write the code.

Will.i.am

#61. I am with the Hot Sexy Banking Corporation. As all the other banks are going bust, they are just getting bustier.

Robert Clark

#62. We are inheriting the worst financial system since the Depression. We're inheriting a situation - when people go back and study major banking crises a quarter century from now, the one that America developed in 2007 and 2008 is going to be one of those crises.

Lawrence Summers

#63. In banking or insurance trust is the only thing you have to sell.

Patrick Dixon

#64. 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

#65. I thought that I would have a huge literary novel coming out when I was, like, 29. I quit my banking job, and I was halfway through my second novel - and I will never publish it, because it's very mediocre.

Philipp Meyer

#66. Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.

Paulo Freire

#67. Without encryption, you and I wouldn't be able to do our banking online. We wouldn't be able to buy things online, because your credit cards - they've probably been ripped off anyway, but they would be ripped off left and right every day if there wasn't encryption.

Tim Cook

#68. We can remove poverty from the surface of the earth only if we can redesign our institutions - like the banking institutions, and other institutions; if we redesign our policies, if we look back on our concepts, so that we have a different idea of poor people.

Muhammad Yunus

#69. Is this complicated, risky [banking] system the best we can have?

Anat R. Admati

#70. What is robbing a bank compared to founding one?

Bertolt Brecht

#71. Von Pein's family was a little known, but highly influential entity within American banking circles. Banking Royalty, some called it. His grandfather had been one of the chief orchestrators of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which effectively took ownership of the bank from the American people.

James Morcan

#72. If you've taken Econ 101, you know that the quantity of money rises only when the banking system makes a net loan.

Kenneth Fisher

#73. Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.

Walter Bagehot

#74. 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

#75. Who is Antonio Weiss? He's the head of global investment banking for the financial giant Lazard.

Elizabeth Warren

#76. An MBA is a great degree for career paths like investment banking, finance, consulting, and large companies. An MBA is not necessarily the right path for starting a tech company. You should be building a prototype, not getting an MBA in that case.

Guy Kawasaki

#77. 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

#78. My basic strategy is to stick to my core business, and to my area of expertise. My businesses are all related - retail, shopping centers, banking, real estate and tourism development. Together they create synergy.

Henry Sy

#79. Anything that benefits the public and not just big banking, that's what I'm with.

Big Boi

#80. Carefully calculate the potential size of your market to make sure you can grow. Before starting Mint, I knew that there were about 20 million people who had purchased 'Quicken' or 'Microsoft Money' over the years, and 80 million people using online banking in the U.S. alone.

Aaron Patzer

#81. The dominion which the banking institutions have obtained over the minds of our citizens ... must be broken, or it will break us.

Thomas Jefferson

#82. Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world.

Paulo Freire

#83. Banking may well be a career from which no man really recovers.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#84. Web banking lets you monitor your spending, tweak your budget, schedule payments, and more, particularly if you marry your online bank with the personal-finance management tools available online.

Jean Chatzky

#85. There was, of course, a global financial crisis. But our Labour predecessors left Britain exceptionally vulnerable and damaged: more personal debt than any other major economy; a dangerously inflated property bubble; and a bloated banking sector behaving as masters, not the servants of the people.

Vince Cable

#86. We don't have a good legal justification for breaking up the banking system. But if I could wave a magic wand, I'd break up the banking system.

Kenneth C. Griffin

#87. Out of the bitter experiences of the panic of 1819 emerged the beginnings of the Jacksonian movement, dedicated to hard money, the eradication of fractional reserve banking in general, and of the Bank of the United States in particular.

Murray Rothbard

#88. I'm not against banking. Banking allowed our modern society to happen, it is essential. It connects the work through finance, so banking is good.

Adam McKay

#89. I don't think you can consistently be a winning trader if you're banking on being right more than 50 percent of the time. You have to figure out how to make money being right only 20 to 30 percent of the time.

Bill Lipschutz

#90. My innovation involved taking an idea from the telecommunications and banking industries, and applying that idea to transportation business.

Frederick W. Smith

#91. You're having government spending on the economy being cut almost everywhere. That means that the only source of spending for growth has to come from borrowing from the banking system.

Michael Hudson

#92. 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

#93. The Chinese banking system is built on quicksand and that's the one thing a lot of people don't realize. Everybody seems to think it is a free and clear open checkbook. It's not. The banking system in China is extremely fragile.

James Chanos

#94. I doubt if there is any occupation which is more consistently and unfairly demeaned, degraded, denounced, and deplored than banking.

William Proxmire

#95. In Mexico, a network of government-operated rural convenience stores is offering banking services to rural communities.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell

#96. The peculiar essence of our banking system is an unprecedented trust between man and man. And when that trust is much weakened by hidden causes, a small accident may greatly hurt it, and a great accident for a moment may almost destroy it.

Walter Bagehot

#97. 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

#98. There's a loss of faith in the banking system that for so long has been the backbone of prosperity and growth.

Lucy Powell

#99. 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

#100. Customers deposit money in a bank for interest; the bank lends that money to other people at a higher rate of interest. This isn't glamorous or interesting, but then banking is not supposed to resemble base jumping or hip-hop.

John Lanchester