Top 92 Quotes About Derivatives
#1. Derivatives in and of themselves are not evil. There's nothing evil about how they're traded, how they're accounted for, and how they're financed, like any other financial instrument, if done properly.
James Chanos
#2. 'Bush v. Gore' gave us a president who lost the popular vote, eventually appointed two more justices, and led us into a war of choice while failing to regulate a financial system dependent on toxic mortgage-backed derivatives.
Marvin Ammori
#3. We should probably stop trading derivatives, anything more complex than regular options ... I am an options trader, and I don't understand options. How do you want a regulator to understand them?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#4. Maybe if you allowed me to blow off some steam, I wouldn't have been so frustrated when I had to find higher order fucking derivatives.
S.A. Tawks
#5. An unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world.
Matt Taibbi
#6. The Orderly Liquidation Authority prescribed by Dodd-Frank should be repealed and replaced by an amendment to the U.S. Bankruptcy Code which would operate to prevent cross-default provisions from impacting derivatives books so long as mark-to-market payments are being made in a timely fashion.
Paul Singer
#7. After I finished college, I got a job on Wall Street as a derivatives trader, but after a couple years of it, I was calling in sick in order to work on my novel.
Philipp Meyer
#8. I feel that opiates - I include opium and all its derivatives, such as morphine, heroin, pantopon, etc. - are quite useless for any sort of creative work, useful though they may be for routine work. Much of the hard physical work in the Far East is done by opium addicts.
William S. Burroughs
#9. We started giving presentations at practitioner conferences in 1986, and since then all of our derivatives research has been stimulated by contact with practitioners.
John Hull
#10. I think, my generation, it's hard to have hope when you got a $700-trillion derivatives debt to pay and a bubble about to explode and $500 trillion worth of GDP.
Shia Labeouf
#11. A.I.G. was even larger than Lehman, with a substantial presence in derivatives and debt markets, as well as in insurance markets.
Ben Bernanke
#12. Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.
Warren Buffett
#13. There is a simple rule here, a rule of legislation, a rule of business, a rule of life: beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud. You can apply that rule to left-wing social programs, but you can also apply that rule to credit derivatives, hedge funds, all the rest of it.
P. J. O'Rourke
#14. At Berkshire, I both initiate and monitor every derivatives contract on our books ... If Berkshire ever gets in trouble, it will be my fault. It will not be because of the misjudgments made by a risk committee or chief risk officer.
Warren Buffett
#15. Nor can private counterparties restrict supplies of gold, another commodity whose derivatives are often traded over-the-counter, where central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise.
Alan Greenspan
#16. What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn't be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.
Alan Greenspan
#17. The good thing about a dealer's derivatives portfolio is that it is marked to market.
Carol Loomis
#18. I was named Margaret Yvonne. 'Margaret' because my mother was very fond of one of the derivatives of the name. She was fascinated at the time by the movie star Baby Peggy, and I suppose she wanted a Baby Peggy of her own.
Yvonne De Carlo
#19. My first scientific paper in 1961 reported an additivity rule for substituent-induced shifts of proton NMR signals in steroid derivatives.
Jean-Marie Lehn
#20. Clever derivatives broke dozens of companies. It killed them. Bankrupt. We don't need these kinds of innovation in finance. It's OK to be boring in finance. What we want is innovation in widgets.
Charlie Munger
#21. Derivatives trading should be standardized and as much as possible moved to clearinghouses.
Paul Singer
#22. There used to be corporations that produced products. Now there are just banks that produce deals, hedge-fund-driven banks and derivatives and those things.
Cornel West
#23. Analysis takes back with one hand what it gives with the other. I recoil in fear and loathing from that deplorable evil: continuous functions with no derivatives.
Charles Hermite
#24. We've used derivatives for many, many years. I don't think derivatives are evil, per se, I think they are dangerous ... So we use lots of things daily that are dangerous, but we generally pay some attention to how they're used. We tell the cars how fast they can go.
Warren Buffett
#25. The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen). Say you want to write a contract speculating on the number of twins to be born in Nebraska in 2020. No problem-at a price, you will easily find an obliging counterparty.
Warren Buffett
#26. Simply, humans should not be given explosive toys (like atomic bombs, financial derivatives, or tools to create life).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#27. The same oil that gets burned as fuel is also the entire basis for the petrochemical industries, so our clothing, our plastics and our pharmaceuticals all come from oil and its derivatives.
Craig Venter
#28. The world of derivatives is full of holes that very few people are really aware of. It's like hydrogen and oxygen sitting on the corner waiting for a little flame.
Charlie Munger
#29. While we're talking about votes, Bernie Sanders is one who voted to deregulate swaps and derivatives in 2000, which contributed to the over-leveraging of Lehman Brothers, which was one of the culprits that brought down the economy.
Hillary Clinton
#30. To say accounting for derivatives is Americais a sewer is an insult to sewage.
Charlie Munger
#31. The use of a growing array of derivatives and the related application of more-sophisticated approaches to measuring and managing risk are key factors underpinning the greater resilience of our largest financial institutions ... Derivatives have permitted the unbundling of financial risks.
Alan Greenspan
#32. I urge you to sin. But not against these itty-bitty religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism-or their secular derivatives, Marxism, Maoism, Freudianism and Jungianism-whic h are all derivatives of the big religion of patriarchy. Sin against the infrastructure itself!
Mary Daly
#33. Fate' and 'coincidence' are the mythological derivatives authored by those who refuse to see a 'greater purpose', because such a conclusion would naturally suggest a 'Greater Being'.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#34. Derivatives are a huge, complex issue.
Judd Gregg
#35. No writer or speaker who ignores the roots of Latin derivatives is secure from egregious error.
Stuart Sherman
#36. It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade. The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future.
Alan Greenspan
#37. When Charlie and I finish reading the long footnotes detailing the derivatives activities of major banks, the only thing we understand is that we don't understand how much risk the institution is running.
Warren Buffett
#38. In an ideal world, one populated by vegetarians and Esperanto speakers, derivatives would be used for one thing only: reducing levels of risk. The list of individual traders who have lost more than a billion dollars at a time betting on derivatives is not short.
John Lanchester
#39. A futures contract is a derivative, but the futures exchange doesn't call them 'derivatives,' they call them 'futures.'
Myron Scholes
#40. The beauty of a financial institution is that there are a lot of ways to go to hell in a bucket. You can push credit too far, do a dumb acquisition, leverage yourself excessively - it's not just derivatives [that can bring about your downfall].
Charlie Munger
#41. The subprime disaster was a result of financial bombs - derivatives - exploding in financial institutions such as AIG and Lehman Brothers, as well as banks and financial institutions throughout the world.
Robert Kiyosaki
#42. In the 1987 stock market crash, according to the conclusions of the official Brady report, colossal sales of stock index futures by so-called portfolio insurers - whose investment strategies depended entirely on these derivatives - greatly exacerbated the 500-point market decline.
Carol Loomis
#43. Inappropriate macro economic policies in some economies, characterised by [a] low savings rate and high consumption [and] failure of financial supervision and regulation to keep up with innovation which allowed financial derivatives to spread.
Wen Jiabao
#44. The model used by Wall Street to price trillions of dollar's worth of derivatives thought of the financial world as an orderly, continuous process. But the world was not continuous; it changed discontinuously, and often by accident.
Michael Lewis
#45. Overwinding happens when hedge funds destroy companies by attempting to leverage derivatives against otherwise productive long-term assets.
Douglas Rushkoff
#46. Life can be lived at a remove. You trade in futures, and then you trade in derivatives of futures. Banks make more money trading derivatives than they do trading actual commodities.
Sebastian Faulks
#47. With respect to their safety, derivatives, for the most part, are traded among very sophisticated financial institutions and individuals who have considerable incentive to understand them and to use them properly.
Ben Bernanke
#48. I didn't become interested in derivatives until 1982, 1983.
John Hull
#49. Derivatives serve practically no purpose except to enrich bankers through opaque pricing and to deceive investors through off-the-balance-sheet accounting.
James Rickards
#50. Do we have to regulate derivatives? Yes, we do. 'Cause when I did this in my investments, frankly, no one knew who could pay who. But derivatives have an important place in our economy.
Jeff Greene
#51. Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C.
Rob Pike
#52. Derivatives are like sex. It's not who we're sleeping with, it's who they're sleeping with that's the problem.
Warren Buffett
#53. They've been fairly positive, as firm as they could be in regards to the derivatives operations in Montreal. We didn't sense that there was a hesitation about it. But things change.
Jean Charest
#54. The stupid and dishonest accountants allowed the genie of totally inappropriate accounting to descend on derivatives books. And once this has happened - people get status, etc. - it's impossible to get it back into the bottle.
Charlie Munger
#55. Derivatives - The risk never leaves the system - It finds taker who believes the risk is acceptable ... until they lose everything.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
#56. Money never seems to be interested in strengthening regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives trading and in deep-sea oil wells.
Thomas Frank
#57. I turn away with fright and horror from the lamentable evil of functions which do not have derivatives.
Charles Hermite
#58. I turn aside with a shudder of horror from this lamentable plague of functions which have no derivatives.
Charles Hermite
#59. In 1844, Karl Marx said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." He said this at a time when opium and opium derivatives were the only painkillers. And he said it helped a little. He might as well have said, "Religion is the aspirin of the people."
Kurt Vonnegut
#60. He wished someone in the course of history had thought of striking that word and all its derivatives from the English Language - happy, happier, happiest, happiness. What the devil did the words really mean anyway? Why not just the word pleasure, which was far more ... well, pleasant.
Mary Balogh
#61. We have to rethink our whole energy approach, which is hard to do because we're so dependent on oil, not just for fuel but also plastic. If plastic vanished, there would be total chaos. We have to think quite carefully about using oil and its derivatives, because it's not going to be around forever.
Margaret Atwood
#62. When they are employed wisely, derivatives make the world simpler because they give their buyers an ability to manage and transfer risk.
Carol Loomis
#63. If you have a traditional view of economics, you're probably thinking of Ben Bernanke making Fed policy, or the guys creating financial derivatives at Goldman Sachs.
Emily Oster
#64. With the derivatives market larger than ever, we need way more regulation of Wall Street, not less.
Adam McKay
#65. Regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.
Alan Greenspan
#66. If there were not derivatives, there would be no bank loans at all today, because people want to get fixed-rate 30-year loans, but banks don't want to keep 30-year loans on their books.
Jeff Greene
#67. By far the most significant event in finance during the past decade has been the extraordinary development and expansion of financial derivatives.
Alan Greenspan
#68. In our view, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction carrying dangers that, while latent, are potentially lethal.
Warren Buffett
#69. The marginal people on the trading desks, there's no skill set. If they don't trade derivatives, I don't know what they can do. The next stop is driving a cab.
James Chanos
#70. The options and futures traded on exchanges are derivatives contracts.
Carol Loomis
#71. The discussion of derivatives in the political world has become a zero sum game.
Jim Himes
#72. I view derivatives as time bombs, both for the parties that deal in them and the economic system.
Warren Buffett
#73. Every regulatory speech on derivatives takes a bow to their hedging 'benefits.' Less publicly, regulators pay their respects to derivative profits, a blessed relief from the banks' troubled loans to less-developed countries, highly leveraged companies, and real estate swingers.
Carol Loomis
#74. There are challenges in terms of the measurement of VAR for what are known as nonlinear derivatives, where things like gamma and vega are important dimensions of the risk.
John Hull
#75. From this irritating reality comes The First Law of Corporate Survival for ambitious CEOs who pile on leverage and run large and unfathomable derivatives books: Modest incompetence simply won't do; it's mindboggling screw-ups that are required.
Warren Buffett
#76. To Marx the claim of the theory of ideology is that all doctrine is a derivative of social circumstance.
Bernard Crick
#77. Change is most sluggish at the extremes precisely because the derivative is zero there.
Steven Strogatz
#78. The harder a government, such as a dictatorship, tries to maintain monetary policy autonomy, the more it must either limit the movement of capital into and outside of the country, or the more it must compromise exchange-rate stability.
Janet M. Tavakoli
#79. What audiences end up with word-wise is a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances, a movie that reeks of phoniness and lacks even minimal originality.
Kenneth Turan
#80. Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.
Alfred North Whitehead
#81. Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.
Larry Wall
#82. Don't worry about where you are. Watch the first derivative.
Fred Green
#83. I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.
Max Planck
#84. With type as with philosophy, music and food, it is better to have a little of the best than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine.
Robert Bringhurst
#85. Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.
Vladimir Nabokov
#86. Most fantasy is incredibly derivative of Tolkien, so when you read a lot of fantasy, it's really just elves and gnomes, and it all goes back to Tolkien.
John Orloff
#88. Capitalism has become systemically risky when a single financial algorithm like the one that David X. Li created brought the entire global economic system close to collapse in 2008.
Said Elias Dawlabani
#89. The power of Kings and Magistrates is nothing else, but what is only derivative, transferrd and committed to them in trust from the People, to the Common good of them all, in whom the power yet remaines fundamentally, and cannot be takn from them, without a violation of thir natural birthright.
John Milton
#91. You'll get more support on a hard, important, project than a derivative one.
Sam Altman
#92. But just as much as it is easy to find the differential [derivative] of a given quantity, so it is difficult to find the integral of a given differential. Moreover, sometimes we cannot say with certainty whether the integral of a given quantity can be found or not.
Johann Bernoulli
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