I got my start in the ‘New York Times’ because I used to read Stuart Elliot, the advertising columns. I still do. And I read him so religiously, I wanted to work for him before I died. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
The euphoria around economic booms often obscures the possibility for a bust, which explains why leaders typically miss the warning signs. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
In the age of activism that is clearly not going away, it would seem that some form of engagement from directors with shareholders – rather than directors simply taking their cues from management – would go a long way toward helping boards work on behalf of all shareholders rather just the most vocal. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
When you can’t lend or trade – and you can’t invest with the leverage that juiced returns to support seven- and eight-figure bonuses – how exactly are you going to make money? – Andrew Ross Sorkin
Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a company is not allowed to provide a personal benefit to a decision maker in return for business. But hiring the sons and daughters of powerful executives and politicians is hardly just the province of banks doing business in China: it has been a time-tested practice here in the United States. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
Wall Street is littered with clever plans to use financial instruments to change behavior – carbon trading, for example. Some have changed the world, and others failed miserably. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
There’s a good argument to be made that companies that are private, where they’re run by partnerships, where everybody has true stake in them and they’re not playing with other people’s money, that by default it’s a safer system, because you really have skin in the game. You really own the company. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
I have always looked at the world through the prism of money to some degree. If you could follow the money, it explains a lot of things, in all sorts of aspects of the world. You can look at politics through the prism of money. You can look at art through the prism of money. You can look at sports through the prism of money. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
The rating agencies historically actually did a pretty good job rating regular bonds. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
I don’t want to put words in Geithner’s mouth, but I think he is generally against the revolving door of government officials taking jobs with companies that they have overseen or in roles that involve lobbying. At minimum, I’m pretty sure he felt that way about himself. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
The moment a large investor doesn’t believe a government will pay back its debt when it says it will, a crisis of confidence could develop. Investors have scant patience for the years of good governance – politically fraught fiscal restructuring, austerity and debt rescheduling – it takes to defuse a sovereign-debt crisis. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
As a child, I always enjoyed – my parents used to have these little cocktail parties – and I always loved trying to get the adults to tell me things they weren’t supposed to say. And in many ways, that’s what my job is today; it’s getting people to tell me things that they probably are otherwise not supposed to say. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
In truth, Wall Street is in for a radical makeover. Fewer people, lower margins, lower risk, lower compensation – and ultimately, fewer talented people. It is likely to change the culture of an industry that for nearly a century has been the money center of the world. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
Forget about banks that are too big to fail; the focus should be on cities, municipalities and countries that are too big to fail. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
The greatest economic power might in fact remain in the hands of the Federal Reserve. Economists credit the Fed’s policy of keeping interest rates at historic lows with helping to pump up the economy and bring unemployment down. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
Unfortunately, I think it’s very difficult to separate policy from politics. In a perfect world, in some instances, you probably would want to. In other instances, you’d probably say that the political element is important because it should, in a perfect world, match what the stakeholders need or want, or what the public is after. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
We talk about institutions that are too big to fail – I think the story is as much about people who think they are too big to fail. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
In truth, the best Bitcoin can hope for is to be a second-rate version of gold, if that. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
There’s something called, ‘resolution authority,’ which gives the government the power to takeover a failing bank – something they didn’t have pre-Lehman Brothers. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
Let’s start with a basic question: Do we, as a country, want our most highly qualified employees from the private sector to pursue public service? The answer, I would imagine, should be yes. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
Several companies have explicit policies against cronyism, with good reason. Hiring a family member simply for a relationship can be troubling and may not necessarily serve a company’s interests. But by and large, financial firms in particular commonly hire people who have certain connections, whether through family or a business relationship. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
The blowback against a bailout of Lehman would have been fierce. It is often forgotten, but the prevailing wisdom the day after Lehman fell was that its collapse was a good thing. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
In truth, in the fairy-tale version of bailing out Lehman, the next domino, A.I.G., would have fallen even harder. If the politics of bailing out Lehman were bad, the politics of bailing out A.I.G. would have been worse. And the systemic risk that a failure of A.I.G. posed was orders of magnitude greater than Lehman’s collapse. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
What if lawmakers never spoke to their constituents? Oddly enough, that’s exactly how corporate America operates. Shareholders vote for directors, but the directors rarely, if ever, communicate with them. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
What if the slowdown in merger activity isn’t cyclical, but secular? What if corporations have learned the lessons of so many companies before them that the odds of a successful merger are no better than 50-50 and probably less? Is it possible that the biggest deals have already been done? – Andrew Ross Sorkin
My training really was at the ‘New York Times,’ you know. When I got there, I was literally supposed to stay there for five weeks, and I got lucky like nobody, you know, like nobody’s business. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
One of Obama’s first major acts as president was to sign the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and some of the money in that bill went to Saft. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
By now, it seems as if everyone has already read Thomas L. Friedman’s ‘The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.’ It changed the way we think about global business, competitiveness and the implication for far-flung economies, governments, education and more. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
I was always one of those people who would watch the Super Bowl as much for the sports as I did for the ads. I was always just sort of fascinated by the fact that when you turn on the TV, there was motion, there was moving pictures on it. – Andrew Ross Sorkin
