The Great Gatsby 2013 - Variety 1929 - Webster Tarpley - Dana Spiotta - Niall Ferguson TV - Wall Street 1987 - Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps 2010 - The Wolf of Wall Street 2013 - Adam Curtis TV - The Wall Street Code 2013 - Who Rules America? TV - Drugs Inc TV - Quants: The Alchemists of Wall Street TV - Peter Joseph & Abby Martin - Baby Driver 2017 - The Veneer of Justice in a Kingdom of Crime 2016 - FCIC Financial Crisis Inquiry Report - Robert Peston TV - Frontline TV - Allan Sloan - Alan Greenspan - Bloomberg article - Catherine Austin Fitts - Bernie Sanders - San Francisco Chronicle - Brad Sherman - Charles H Ferguson TV - The Corbett Report - Bankers TV - The Fall of Lehman Brothers TV - Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis - Too Big to Fail 2011 - The Treason Trilogy 2011 - Meltdown: The Secret History of the Financial Global Collapse 2011 - Sky News: History Repeating? Financial Crisis: 10 Years On TV - The 2000s: The Platinum Age of Television TV - Storyville: The PM, the Playboy and the Wolf of Wall Street TV - Storyville: Inside Lehman Brothers: The Whistleblowers TV - Force of Evil 1948 - Empires of New York TV - Gaming Wall Street TV - Gerald Celente - Money, Power, Impunity: The Bankers Who Stole the World TV - Panic: The Untold Story of the 2008 Financial Crisis 2023 - Antony C Sutton - Bernie Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street TV - Goldman Sachs: The Company that Rules the World 2023 - Vanguard: The 8 Trillion Dollar Empire 2023 - The Twisted History of Morgan Stanley 2023 - The Vulture of Wall Street: Howard Marks 2022 - Alan Greenspan: The Man Who Broke America 2023 - Occupy: The Movie 2012 - The Men Who Stole the World 2024 -
Stocks reached record peaks. And Wall Street boomed in a steady golden roar. The parties were bigger. The shows were broader. The buildings were higher. The moral were looser, and the ban on alcohol had backfired, making the liquor cheaper. The Great Gatsby 2013 starring Leonardo di Caprio & Tobey McGuire & Carey Mulligan & Joel Edgerton & Isla Fisher & Jason Clarke & Elizabeth Debicki & Jack Thompson & Amitabh Bachchan et al, director Baz Luhrmann
Wall Street Lays An Egg. Variety 1929
Nobody else counts except the Wall Street money masters. That has made the United States no longer a force for progress but something very different – often a force for destruction in the world. Webster Tarpley
If you look also at the people that Obama has put on his appointments list: it’s all Wall Street. It’s government of Wall Street by Wall Street and for Wall Street. There’s nobody from heavy industry; there’s nobody from the auto sector; nobody from Silicon Valley, nobody from big oil, nobody from defense, no labor, no women, no retirees, no small business, nothing. It’s pure Wall Street. The only people that have a voice in Obama’s councils are Wall Street finance oligarchs. That’s all there is. Webster Tarpley
Left and right mean nothing. The only thing that counts is – are you working for Wall Street or are you trying to defend the people against the financiers? Webster Tarpley
Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up. Dana Spiotta
In today’s world real power lies in the hands of an elite group of anonymous men in open-plan offices. The men who control the world’s bond market … Bonds are the magical link between the world of high finance and the world of political power. Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money e2: Human Bondage, Channel 4 2008
After the rise of banks the birth of the bond market was the next big revolution in the history of finance. It created a whole new way for governments to borrow money. ibid.
There are bonds out there worth around $85 trillion. ibid.
Between around 1810 and 1836 the five sons of Meyer Amschel Rothschild rose from the obscurity of the Frankfurt ghetto to attain a position of unequalled power in international finance. ibid.
The South’s idea was to use cotton as collateral to back its bonds. ibid.
The next step in the story of the ascent of money was the rise of the joint-stock limited-liability company. But the ability of the company to transform our lives would depend on another innovation – the stock market. Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money e3: Blowing Bubbles
Stock markets really can be like soap bubbles – we never quiet know when they’re going to burst. ibid.
Ponzi scheme – after the legendary Italian-American con-man Charles Ponzi: to pay out the generous returns its promised to the first lot of suckers, a Ponzi scheme needed to take in more money from the next lot of suckers. ibid.
The Mississippi bubble of 1719 was the first stock market bubble in history. ibid.
Enron: It pioneered many of the dubious business practices that continue to plague us today. 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, Ascent of Money: Chimerica 2010
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 ten billion dollars. 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 ... Fears 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 leant 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 its 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.
Too much cheap money sloshing round the world. Wall Street 1987 starring Michael Douglas & Charlie Sheen & Daryl Hannah & Martin Sheen & John C McGinley & Terence Stamp & James Karen & Hal Holbrook & Sean Young & James Spader et al, director Oliver Stone, opening scene
I never knew how poor I was until I started making a little money. ibid.
Money is one great pain in the ass if you ask me. ibid. son to father
The main thing about money, Bud: it makes you do things you don’t want to do. ibid. father to son
How much is enough? ibid.
We’re all just one trade away from humility. ibid.
America has become a second-rate power. ibid.
You want to know what the mother of all bubbles was? It came out of no-where by chance. They called it the Cambrian Explosion. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps 2010 starring Michael Douglas & Shia LaBeouf & Josh Brolin & Carey Mulligan & Eli Wallach & Susan Sarandon & Frank Langella & Austin Pendleton & Sylvia Miles & Venessa Ferlito & Jason Clark et al, director Oliver Stone
He’s out with a new book and it is a shocker, believe me. It is called Is Greed Good? ibid.