Yet the Savings & Loan crisis was a mere tremor compared with the property earthquake that would strike the US market twenty years later … The subprime quake would shake the entire world of finance to its very foundations. ibid.
We tend to think of property as a one-way bet. ibid.
In our time we’ve witnessed the zenith of global finance. In 2006 the world’s total economic output was worth around $47 trillion. The total value of stock and bond markets was roughly $119 trillion. More than twice the size. And the amount outstanding of the strange new financial life-form known as derivatives was $473 trillion. Ten times larger ... This is the story of financial globalisation. Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money e6: Chimerica
According to [George] Soros’s Theory of Reflexivity, financial markets can’t possibly be perfectly efficient much less rational ... His biggest coups came from being right about losers not winners. And the greatest of these was among the most momentous speculative hits in all of financial history. On September 16th 1992 with the British £ in big trouble I watched as Soros put out a contract on the Bank of England ... So sure was he that the £ would drop that he bet $10 billion. ibid.
The Nobel Prize in Economics. It seemed as if Intellect had triumphed over Intuition. As if rocket science had taken over from risk-taking. Equipped with their magical black box, the partners in LTCM seemed poised to make money far beyond the wildest imaginings of even George Soros. And then in the summer of 1998 when every self-respecting hedge-fund manager should have been playing with his yacht something happened that threatened to blow the lid right off the Nobel Prize winner’s black box: Reality started to misbehave ... On Monday August 17th 1998 a giant asteroid smashed into Planet Finance. ibid.
The only chance of survival was to find a White Knight to rescue them. And the most powerful Knight in town was none other than George Soros. It was the ultimate humiliation: the Quants from Planet Finance begging for a bail-out from the Prophet of Irrational Unquantifiable Reflexivity ... Fear that Long Term’s failure could trigger a general financial meltdown, the New York Federal Reserve hastily brokered a multi-billion-dollar bailout by fourteen Wall Street banks. ibid.
The Ascent of Money has seldom been smooth. Time and again it’s been punctuated by big painful crises. ibid.
American borrowers have come to rely on Chinese savers, a symbiotic relationship between China and America that I call Chimerica. ibid.
So enormous have Chinese savings become in recent years they’ve enabled globalisation to do the most almighty U-turn. Previously, it was the rich English speakers who lent money to the poor Asian periphery. But now it’s the Chinese who are lending money to the Americans. Welcome to the strange new hybrid country of China and America – I call it Chimerica. ibid.
The People’s Republic of China has become banker to the United States of America. ibid.
What starts with competition for Olympic medals could end in a battle over dollars if the Chinese decide one day to cut off their credit line to the American empire. Maybe as it name suggests Chimerica is nothing more than a chimera ... The really big crises come just seldom enough to be beyond the living memory of the people who run today’s companies, banks and funds. ibid.
The Ascent of Money has been one of the key factors in human progress, an extraordinary story of innovation, intermediation and integration that has done as much as anything to help people escape from the drudgery of subsistence agriculture. And yet Planet Finance can never quite escape from the gravitational force of Planet Earth. Because the Quants can never take full account of the human factor – our tendency to underestimate the probability of black swans. Our propensity to veer from euphoria to despondency. Our chronic inability to learn from History. ibid.
It was presented scientifically. But then they always present it scientifically. As being the only way of doing it; there is no alternative. And this gripped people. But at the same time you must never forget that politics is in pursuit of an interest and an ideological ... So the conflict between as it were Milton Friedman and Keynes was a political conflict. Tony Benn, televised interview
Strong’s intervention really paved the way for the financial system we have today. Thanks to all that credit he created, the Stock Market rose higher and higher. Masters of Money II: Hayek, BBC 2012
Hayek believed Strong’s policy was sowing the seeds of an eventual bust. ibid.
What always brings empires down to their knees is financial problems, and we are in a financial mess. Ron Paul
Financial education needs to become a part of our national curriculum and scoring systems so that it’s not just the rich kids that learn about money ... it’s all of us. David Bach
I’m quite worried about the fiscal imbalances that we’ve got and what that might mean in terms of financial crises ahead. Bill Gates
It’s always politically popular to impose financial burdens on somebody else. Dr Edwin Vieira
The true terrorists of our world do not meet at the docks at midnight, or scream Allahu Akbar before some violent action; the true terrorists of our world wear $5,000 suits, and work in the highest positions of finance, government, business. Zeitgeist Addendum
At the heart of Empire was the City of London ... Britain took the lead in global banking, finance and insurance. Jeremy Paxman, Empire IV: Making a Fortune, BBC 2012
It can all have been avoided: the report blames Widespread Failures in Financial Regulation including the Federal Reserve’s failure to stem toxic mortgages; Dramatic Breakdowns in Corporate Governance including too many financial firms acting recklessly; an explosive mix of excessive borrowing and risk by households and Wall Street; Key Policy Makers Ill Prepared for the Crisis lacking full understanding of the financial system; Systemic Breaches in Accountability and Ethics at all levels. FCIC Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, cited Sky News January 2011
The hand that is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland. Financiers are without patriotism and without decency. Their sole object is gain. Napoleon Bonaparte
The government claims the power to seize all financial instruments: currency, gold, silver, and everything else if they deem an emergency exists. Treasury Department letter 12th August 2005
In a suicide note left in an envelope for police a forty-five-year-old man wrote that he killed his mother-in-law, wife and three sons ages nineteen, twelve and seven over finances. Andrew Materi, Inconvenient Death of the Working Class
All these financiers, all the little gnomes in Zurich and the other financial centres about whom we keep on hearing. Harold Wilson, speech House of Commons 12th November 1956
One world currency and one world financial system is the end-game. Glenn Beck
Now they’re gone, they’re not to be thought of again. This is your opportunity. Margin Call 2011 starring Paul Bettany & Demi Moore & Kevin Spacey & Jeremy Irons & Zachary Quinto & Penn Badgley & Simon Baker & Stanley Tucci & Mary McDonnell & Ashley Williams et al, director J C Chandor, team pep talk
Over the last thirty-six to forty months the firm has begun packaging new MBS products that combine several different tranches of grading classification in one tradeable security. ibid. Sullivan
It’s just money. It’s made up. ibid. Irons
If we are really serious about preventing another crisis like the 2008 meltdown we should simply ban complex financial instruments, unless they can be unambiguously shown to benefit society in the long run. This is what we do all the time with other products – drugs, cars, electrical products and many others. Ha-Joon Chang, South Korean economist and author
The really scary part is that we don’t have a clue. This has become essentially the dark matter of the financial universe. Chris Wolf, US hedge-fund manager
The Templars were expert financiers, using trading techniques quite unknown in the Europe of the day. They had clearly learned many of these skills from Jewish sources, but would have much more freedom to extend their financial empire in a way that any Jewish financier of the period would have envied greatly. Alan Butler & Stephen Dafoe, The Templar Continuum
The throne of England was seriously indebted to the order. King John had emptied the coffers of the treasury between 1260 and 1266 in order to finance his military operations; and Henry III likewise borrowed heavily from the Knights Templar. Eleanor Ferris, The Financial Relations of the Knights Templar to the English Crown
The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier. George Bernard Shaw
Organised crime has moved into our financial markets. Thousands of victims across Britain have lost their livelihoods. The most vulnerable are the prime targets. Tonight, the city of London police investigated a gang making millions. Fraud Squad I, ITV 2011
Fraud is the new goldmine for criminal gangs. 3.2 million people in Britain have become victims. Organised crime’s latest enterprise is to con people into purchasing shares in companies that don’t exist. ibid.
The City of London police have a specialist department tackling fraudsters nationally and internationally. They have identified 1,200 boiler rooms making criminals over £300 million. ibid.
Criminal gangs share the list of people they have conned. ibid.