Quotes About Banks

Central banks are choosing to increase their gold holdings as a percentage of total reserves. They obviously think there is a reason to do that. It doesn't make sense to back up one currency with a hoard of other paper currencies. There needs to be a real anchor there. I think that central banks are well behind the curve. If you look at the percentage of above-ground gold controlled by central banks, it's historically low. Hence the fact that central banks are trying to increase their holdings. They've got a long way to go to get where they need to be.

The Germans made just about every bad investment you could have made in the last 10 years. They invested in Icelandic banks. They invested in Greek government bonds. They were heavy into Irish banks, big into Irish banks, and they bought U.S. subprime mortgage bonds.

In a world of businessmen and financial intermediaries who aggressively seek profit, innovators will always outpace regulators; the authorities cannot prevent changes in the structure of portfolios from occurring. What they can do is keep the asset-equity ratio of banks within bounds by setting equity-absorption ratios for various types of assets. If the authorities constrain banks and are aware of the activities of fringe banks and other financial institutions, they are in a better position to attenuate the disruptive expansionary tendencies of our economy.

Both in the US and throughout the world, there needs to be a growing presence of public development banks. These banks would make loans based on social welfare criteria - including advancing a full-employment, climate-stabilization agenda - as opposed to scouring the globe for the largest profit opportunities regardless of social costs.... Public development banks have always played a central role in supporting the successful economic development paths in the East Asian economies.

Banks are so protected from liability they would have to really do something that was their mistake in order for them to be liable for it. Banks don't look at signatures. They're processing millions of checks and they have very little liability.

A couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine are, in real fact, a couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine, not mere particles in motion.

Can you know you can have institutions that put curbs on that in various ways, and actually what the banks, you know, they have various capital ratios and that sort of thing, but the banks got around them, I mean, they set up sieves and that sort of thing just to get more leverage. People love leverage when it's working. I mean, it's so easy to borrow money from a guy at X and put it out at X.

The Fed has a lot of power in the economy because it has a big impact on the supply and cost of credit, that is, interest rates. It also plays a key role in supervising banks and historically has seemed to take it easy on the banks when it shouldn't have, such as in the lead up to the financial crisis.

There's only one thing that all of the central banks control and that is the base, their own liability, and they can control that in various ways. They can control it directly by open market operations, buying and selling government securities or other assets, for example, buying and selling gold, or they can control it indirectly by altering the rate at which banks lend to one another.

The financial crisis has underscored how insufficient attention to fundamental corporate governance concepts can have devastating effects on an institution and its continued viability. It is clear that many banks did not fully implement these fundamental concepts. The obvious lesson is that banks need to improve their corporate governance practices and supervisors must ensure that sound corporate governance principles are thoroughly and consistently implemented.

In my view, this is not extremism on the left. This is what the American people support in poll after poll. Support the right to a job. Support living wages. Support real climate action. Support small community-based banks that make loans available to every day people and small businesses, not these too-big-to-fail banks that rip us off, that crash the economy at taxpayer expense. Support a public-option healthcare system, not Obamacare, which has been a boondoggle for insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Remember that banks aren't markets. The market is amoral. The market doesn't care who you are. You're a trade to the market. The market will sell you if they think you're riskier. Banks didn't do that

Now that rates are moving up, we're seeing more aggressive offerings from banks.

Well, "The Washington post" three weeks ago had this investigation and they said that President Obama has now raised more money from Wall Street and the banks for this election cycle than all - than all eight Republicans combined. I don't want to say that, because if that's the truth, that Wall Street already has their man and his name is Barack Obama, then we've got a much bigger problem.

My banks they are furnish'd with bees, Whose murmur invites one to sleep.

Despite the high salaries involved, employing economists is a cost-effective way for banks, and stockbrokers to secure exposure in the media.

This is the twilight of the banks. It would be a more cheerful spectacle if we could envision the dawn of the institutions that will replace them

I always loved that old song Banks of the Ohio - it was always such a man's song, so I've always wanted to record it.

Negro banks, as a rule, have failed because the people, taught that their own pioneers in business cannot function in this sphere, withdrew their deposits.

The streams of religion run deep or shallow, according as the banks of the Sabbath are kept up or neglected.

We have the Israelis coming to us for equipment. We can say we can't possibly get the Congress to support a program like this. And they say don't worry about the Congress. We will take care of the Congress. This is somebody from another country, but they can do it. They own, you know, the banks in this country. The newspapers. Just look at where the Jewish money is.

The question is how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network? She's a centralising cog. You've got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis.

Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing.

I don't think if we had been able to make that choice rationally, we would have said that's what we want to do. We would have said: "Can't we save the banks and solve our health care problems?" The answer is yes. You could have.

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.

We have inherited a great music. This music is a holdover. It comes with us like the skin, the texture of our hair. It's our memory banks.

Banks and other providers of credit to households have been competing vigorously to expand or protect their market share. In the process, lending standards have been progressively eroded so that lenders are now engaging in practices that would have been regarded as out of the question five or ten years ago.

Nothing did more to spur the boom in stocks than the decision made by the New York Federal Reserve bank, in the spring of 1927, to cut the rediscount rate. Benjamin Strong, Governor of the bank, was chief advocate of this unwise measure, which was taken largely at the behest of Montagu Norman of the Bank of England....At the time of the Banks action I warned of its consequences....I felt that sooner or later the market had to break.

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.

It has been a masterful fight-back by the big banks. We the paying public can't do anything much except admit defeat and settle back for the next set of bills. In the meantime, perhaps, we should try and think of a name for the new economic system, which certainly isn't capitalism ... The most accurate term would probably be "bankocracy".

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.

Boards of directors are allowed to work together, so are banks and investors and corporations in alliances with one another and with powerful states. That’s just fine. It’s just the poor who aren’t supposed to cooperate.

So, it's pretty crazy. Look, we're bailing out Wall Street, we're bailing out banks, we're bailing out car companies. In fact, did you know there's a special box on your tax form this year you can check if you want a portion of your taxes to actually go to running the government?

We now have power under the Dodd-Frank legislation to break up banks. And I've said I will use that power if they pose a systemic risk.

In America, we need to go forward in nationalizing several large corporations: I think that's possible; we nationalized General Motors; we nationalized several of the big banks, de facto; we nationalized Chrysler; we nationalized AIG. I think there will be more crises, and at some point, rather than being bailed out by the government, the public may keep the corporations it has to rescue.

I love the way I make hip-hop and I refuse to make pop-rap. I don't refuse to make mainstream music, which is why I did a soul record. There was no reason why soul music couldn't get played on the radio and I still wanted to have a relationship with my record label. So, I really enjoyed doing the Strickland Banks album. But there's no point in my trying to release underground hip-hop music on a major label. That part of my talent, or part of my art, had to live somewhere else and feature film was the perfect vehicle for it.

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.

Hillary Clinton has perfected the politics of personal profit and theft. She ran the State Department like her own personal hedge fund, doing favors for oppressive regimes and many others in exchange for cash. Then when she left, she made $21.6 million giving speeches to Wall Street banks and other special interests in less than two years - secret speeches that she does not want to reveal to the public. Lobbyists, CEOs, and foreign governments totally own her, and that will never change if she ever became president.

I have supported candidates whose views are very different than mine on the need the break up Wall Street banks, on the war in Iraq, on trade issues. Of course I have supported those people. My hope is that we're going to see - and I believe it is the case - we're going to see more and more strong progressives running for office. That's my hope. That's my desire. But that is up to - that decision is going to be made by people in 50 states and 435 congressional districts.

Love cannot be held prisoner because it is a river and will overflow its banks.

A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence.

Banks should contribute to the real economy, make a positive contribution to economic growth.

Day was breaking at Plashwater Weir Mill Lock. Stars were yet visible, but there was dull light in the east that was not the light of night. The moon had gone down, and a mist crept along the banks of the river, seen through which the trees were the ghosts of trees, and the water was the ghost of water. This earth looked spectral, and so did the pale stars: while the cold eastern glare, expressionless as to heat or colour, with the eye of the firmament quenched, might have been likened to the stare of the dead.

When were we the most egalitarian country in the world? When we had the Glass/Steagal Act, which prevented the banks from becoming the criminal operations that they've become.

The lack of monetary discipline has become a hallmark of unfettered globalization. Central banks have failed to provide a stable underpinning to world financial markets and to an increasingly asset-dependent global economy.

Left to herself, nature is always more or less civilized, and delights in a certain refinement; but where the axe has encroached upon the edge of the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of the pine, which she had concealed with green banks of verdure, are exposed to sight.

Nobody had a credit card when I was a kid. No one had credit card debt. But these big companies and banks wanted to know how to get more money out of people - get them charging things.