Investment Banking Quotes

• Investment banking has, in recent years, resembled a casino, and the massive scale of gambling losses has dragged down traditional activities as banks try to rebuild their balance sheets.

  Vince Cable

  Loss, Gambling, Years

  "The Storm ... how to survive it (and how to prevent its return)" by Vince Cable, www.theguardian.com. March 24, 2009.

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• If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.

  J. Paul Getty

  Money, Funny Inspirational, Motivation

  "he Five Rules for Successful Stock Investing". Book by Pat Dorsey & ‎Joe Mansueto, p. 234, 2003.

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• There are a lot of ways that investment banking models work, but these risks are not internalized by the people that are taking them.

  Robert F. Engle

  People, Risk, Banking

  Source: bigthink.com

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• The general culture of investment banking has deteriorated over the years. We did a $6 million deal years ago for Diversified Retailing and we were rigorously and intelligently screened. They bankers cared and wanted to protect their clients. The culture now is that anything that can be sold for a profit will be. 'Can you sell it?' is the moral test, and that's not an adequate test.

  Charlie Munger

  Years, Bankers, Culture

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• 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

  Men, Brain, Income

  Charlie Munger's comments on money managers at the 2001 Wesco Financial Annual Meeting, www.tilsonfunds.com. May 2, 2001.

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• Investment banks manage to go bankrupt through their investment-banking activities, commercial banks manage to go bankrupt through their commercial-banking activities.

  Ben Bernanke

  Commercial Banks, Banking, Investment

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

  Vikram Chatwal

  Careers, Banking, Path

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• We're a small part of this ecosystem. When we go to a school and talk about investment banking, they are these monster financial conglomerates, and so we end up in the same pot. That is still an issue for us.

  Ken Moelis

  School, Ecosystems, Issues

  Source: nordic.businessinsider.com

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• There's more honor in investment management than in investment banking.

  Charlie Munger

  Honor, Banking, Management

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• As a matter of fact 25% of our U.S. investment banking business comes out of our commercial bank. So it's a competitive advantage for both the investment bank - which gets a huge volume of business - and the commercial bank because the commercial bank can walk into a company and say, "Oh, if you need X, Y and Z in Japan or China, we can do that for you."

  Jamie Dimon

  Commercial Banks, Japan, Needs

  Source: asia.nikkei.com

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• 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

  Mba, Careers, Degrees

  "Interview with Guy Kawasaki | Entrepreneur, Venture Capitalist, Author (Enchantment)". Interview with Sameer Kamat, www.mbacrystalball.com. June 26, 2011.

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• Hollywood is a small, familial place. Everyone does business with everybody else. The same complications occur in investment banking.

  Michael Ovitz

  Hollywood, Doe, Banking

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• We got a lot of excellent people and businesses from Bear and WaMu. But Bear definitely was more painful. WaMu got us into Florida, California, and other states, which was a huge benefit - to expand and grow and add middle-market, private banking, investment banking, and other products, too.

  Jamie Dimon

  Florida, California, People

  "Jamie Dimon on Finance: 'Who Owns the Future?'". Interview with John Micklethwait, www.bloomberg.com. March 1, 2016.

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• Brokerage firms and their executives cannot use threats regarding research activities as a way to obtain investment banking business. The threat to drop research coverage if Piper were not selected as the lead underwriter for a secondary offering was totally inappropriate and undermines the integrity of the market.

  Mary Schapiro

  Integrity, Offering, Banking

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• It's my guess that something like 5% of GDP goes to money management and itsattendant friction. I define it broadly - annuities, incentive pay, all trading, etc. Nobody else has used figures that high, but that's my guess. Worst of all, the people doing this are among the best and the brightest. Hundreds and thousands of engineers, etc. are going into hedge funds and investment banking. That is not an intelligent allocation of the brainpower of the civilization.

  Charlie Munger

  Intelligent, Gdp, Civilization

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• Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

  Peter Thiel

  Smart, School, Careers

  Peter Thiel, Blake Masters (2014). “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future”, p.31, Crown Business

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• I have nothing against investment banking, but it's like massaging money rather than creating money.

  Michio Kaku

  Creating, Banking, Investment

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• I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines.

  Douglas Rushkoff

  Technology, People, Choices

  Douglas Rushkoff (2013). “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now”, p.162, Penguin

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• So Merrill Lynch has launched its first campaign in years to advertise the accomplishments of its investment banking business. The ads feature things like Merrill's recapitalization of Sierra Pacific. I guess including "helping Enron achieve its earnings goals in 1999" might be a little awkward given that Merrill Lynch bankers are currently on trial in Houston for that "accomplishment."

  Bethany McLean

  Years, Accomplishment, Goal

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• As a child, I had no idea that I would end up in the film industry. My ambitions changed from wanting to join the army like my grandfather to taking up merchant navy as a career to running for India, and finally, investment banking while I was a student of economics honour. But during my college days, I began to get offers for modelling.

  Arjun Rampal

  Running, Children, Ambition

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• My early work and publications centered around expanding on the analysis of life insurance in my dissertation and its relationship to investment banking.

  Douglass North

  Relationship, Analysis, Banking

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• On the Glass-Steagall thing, like I said, if you could demonstrate to me that it was a mistake, I'd be glad to look at the evidence. But I can't blame [the Republicans]. This wasn't something they forced me into. I really believed that given the level of oversight of banks and their ability to have more patient capital, if you made it possible for [banks] to go into the investment banking business as continental European investment banks could always do, that it might give us a more stable source of long-term investment.

  William J. Clinton

  Mistake, Glasses, Long

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• My grandmother got her law degree from Syracuse University in roughly 1911 and later co-founded with her husband an investment banking firm on Wall Street known as Lebenthal & Co.

  Buzz Bissinger

  Wall, Husband, Grandmother

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• 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

  Morning, Years, Missing

  "Q&A: Chetan Bhagat on His New Book". Interview with Diksha Sahni, blogs.wsj.com. September 19, 2011.

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• 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

  Banking, Management, Wealth

  Peter D. Schiff (2011). “Crash Proof 2.0: How to Profit From the Economic Collapse”, p.133, John Wiley & Sons

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