Quotes About Banks

We [US government] have used our taxpayer dollars not only to subsidize these banks but also to subsidize the creditors of those banks and the equity holders in those banks. We could have talked about forcing those investors to take some serious hits on their risky dealings. The idea that taxpayer dollars go in first rather than last - after the equity has been used up - is shocking.

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is what happened on the banks.

No business in the economy has the easy money that banks get to play with.... The existence of banks with single digit amounts of equity is a completely unhealthy existence -- that is not only a risk for the banks, but for all of us.

I mean, everyone agrees with stress tests for banks. I mean that's clear. But banks should do that on their own. And they should worry about their own capital functioning. That's what they should do. It shouldn't be a government function.

Bernie Sanders says that the biggest banks that dominate the economy should be broken up into smaller banks. This would be far more radical than Hillary Clinton's proposals to regulate Wall Street.

My guess is the big Chinese banks will be in 100 countries by then. They will have very sophisticated operations, and they may very well have bought banks around the world in countries that allow it. I mean, I don't think the American government would allow them to buy JPMorgan. But they will be able to buy a sizable big bank in the U.S. at some point. Whether they do or not, or if it's allowed or not, I don't know.

The major studios are by and large banks, and they give you what is by and large a loan to make a movie. Like banks, they want their money back plus.

I admit that one should never underestimate the capacity of banks to destroy enormous amounts of accumulated capital and reduce, temporarily, the supply. After all, capital is the accumulated savings of mankind. And banks are great masters in destroying enormous amounts of capital with great regularity.

My mother was being hounded by a debt collector over a debt that she didn't owe, and she eventually just paid it because she wanted the calls to stop. I was very surprised. It sounded so strange. I started poking around on the internet and found this was extremely common. There was this world where these debts were sold off by the banks for pennies on the dollar and bought and sold.

Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.

Quantitatve easing is NOT going away. Every major country is running a deficit. If they are all net borrowers then who is the lender? The central banks. For this reason – QE is not going away for a long time.

Most banks - with Deutsche Bank at the top of the spectrum here - have decided that they can't make money lending to barrowers anymore, so they're going to the second business plan: They lend money to casino capitalists. That is, to people who want to gamble on derivatives.

The problem of dealing with the financial industry is being addressed today. You can measure it with interest rates coming down. You can measure it with the quantity of loans, and that sort of thing. The problem is, that nobody wants to take the loans. Once the banks are willing to give it, that's only half the problem.

The typical fund company services 401k plan participants in the same way that Baby Face Nelson serviced banks.

I think we've learned that the S.B.A. plays a critical role in providing access and opportunity when the market is not providing that access. We help banks get that money out into the hands of important and viable businesses, particularly those owned by minorities, women, immigrants and veterans.

I don't think I've ever been critical of the money Douglas Adams makes, especially since, as has been tactfully pointed out, I myself have had to change banks having filled the first one up.

President Obama made a big speech. He welcomed the members of the U.N. General Assembly to New York, and he said, 'I'd like to encourage you to do some shopping while you're here.' I think it worked because China immediately bought eight banks, two car companies, and the state of Wyoming.

Rush Limbaugh has answered - it's the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of course run the media, and they don't care about you - they just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on.

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.

At a time when going to college has never been more important, it's never been more expensive, and our nation's families haven't been in this kind of financial duress since the great depression. And so what we have is just sort of a miraculous opportunity simply by stopping the subsidy to banks when we already have the risk of loans. We can plow those savings into our students. And we can make college dramatically more affordable, tens of billions of dollars over the next decade.

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.

Having wallowed in a delightful orgy of anti-French sentiment, having deplored and applauded the villains themselves, having relished the foibles of bankers, railwaymen, diplomats, and police, the public was now ready to see its faith restored in the basic soundness of banks, railroads, government, and police.

The remarks that [Steven] Lerner gave at Pace University: "'Unions are almost dead. We cannot survive doing what we do but the simple fact of the matter is community organizations are almost dead also. And if you think about what we need to do it may give us some direction which is essentially what the folks that are in charge - the big banks and everything - what they want is stability.'" So we have "'to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement'".

What would I have done if I wasn't an actor? Probably rob banks.

The fundamental problem with banks is what it's always been: they're in the business of banking, and banking, whether plain vanilla or incredibly sophisticated, is inherently risky.

I always think of the economy as going down a pretty broad road that has mud on either side - for inflation and deflation. What hurts the market is when we unexpectedly swerve into one of those mud banks.

Our Soviet society is socialist because private ownership of factories, plants, land, banks and means of transportation has been abolished in our country, and replaced by public ownership.

One day, because they realize for some reason or other that they must stop credit expansion, the banks do stop creating new credit to lend. Then the firms that have expanded cannot get credit to pay for the factors of production necessary for the completion of the investment projects which they have already committed themselves. Because they cannot pay their bills, they sell off their inventories cheap. Then comes the panic, the breakdown. And the depression starts.

News is like the tilefish which appears in great schools off the Atlantic Coast some years and then vanishes, no one knows whither or for how long. Newspapers might employ these periods searching for the breeding grounds of news, but they prefer to fill up with stories about Kurdled Kurds or Calvin Coolidge, until the banks close or a Hitler marches, when they are as surprised as their readers.

Big banks churn out page after page of incomprehensible fine print to obscure the cost and risks of checking accounts, credit cards, mortgages and other financial products. The result is that consumers can't make direct product comparisons, markets aren't competitive, and costs are higher. If the playing field is leveled and the broken market fixed, a lot more money will stay in the pockets of millions of hard-working families. That's real stimulus - money to families, without increasing our national debt.

People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer's slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue.

Writers like Twain, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Russell Banks, Carolyn Chute, Alice Walker, so many others that I read coming up as a writer, that helped form my ideas of what it means to be American - and an American writer. I'm always in conversation with them.

We let a river shower its banks with a spirit that invades the people living there, and we protect that river, knowing that without its blessings the people have no source of soul.

The stock market in Japan was half the world market and where has the Japan economy gone since the 1990s? Nowhere. They've been struggling for two decades in the aftermath of a massive bubble that's collapsed. They've tried to work their way out of it by printing even more money and it hasn't worked. Now, I'm saying this is what all the central banks are doing. There is no honest interest rate in the world today.

Art as an aesthetic principle was supported by thousands of years of discernment and psychic rewards, but art as a commodity was held up by air. The loss of confidence that affected banks and financial instruments was not affecting cherubs, cupids and flattened popes. The objects hadn't changed: what was there before was there after. But a vacancy was created with the clamoring crowds deserted and retrenched.

Tax the rich. End the wars. Break the power of lobbies in Washington. These are the demands of Occupy Wall Street. They are very important. The US corporations dominate Washington. The big oil companies, Wall Street banks and the military-industrial complex - they rule this country and their influence and power has to be broken.

Politicians all over the world cater to domestic vote banks. They will spend only on what their constituents want. So unless there is a grass root green movement in a nation the politicians will not be willing to spend money on curbing emissions. More awareness is needed amongst the people to effect the real change in how governments spend.

Biodiversity can't be maintained by protecting a few species in a zoo, or by preserving greenbelts or national parks. To function properly, nature needs more room than that. It can maintain itself, however, without human expense, without zookeepers, park rangers, foresters or gene banks. All it needs is to be left alone.

I don't agree with Bernie Sanders that the banks should be broken up at this point. But Hillary Clinton's acceptance of huge contributions from Goldman Sachs and others... And we don't debate what Clinton has done. She has a public record. She's been Secretary of State. She's basically a candidate of Wall Street, for Wall Street.

My view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.

Banks are an almost irresistible attraction for that element of our society which seeks unearned money.

Banks are the temples of America. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion.

To have some parts flowing free again . . . with deer grazing on its banks . . . ducks and geese raising their young in the backwaters . . . eddies and twists and turns for canoeists . . . and fishing opportunities such as Lewis and Clark enjoyed . . . would be the finest possible tribute to the men of the Expedition, and a priceless gift for our children.

I think the women in the political positions will push very, very hard to see that there are loans and banks for women in Rwanda.

The image of the bank robber I had in mind was more in the European tradition where you'd rob banks and give to the poor, like Robin Hood. It was that mythology. But very early on, my whole preoccupation was with art-studying it, examining every piece of work.

All are to be men of genius in their degree,--rivulets or rivers, it does not matter, so that the souls be clear and pure; not dead walls encompassing dead heaps of things, known and numbered, but running waters in the sweet wilderness of things unnumbered and unknown, conscious only of the living banks, on which they partly refresh and partly reflect the flowers, and so pass on.

It is more or less clear that one idea which should emerge from the crash, whatever happens with the attempts to save the banks from bankruptcy and people from being evicted from their homes, is that this kind of life is unsustainable. We cannot go on like this... something must be done.

It seems like only yesterday that savers were dorks. They kept piggy banks. They drove last year's cars. They fished in their change purses for nickels while the superstars flashed credit cards. Today, values have changed. The new object of veneration is not money on the hoof but money in the bank - and the dorks all have it.