Financial Risk Quotes

• The securitisation of mortgages added a new dimension of systemic risk. Financial engineers claimed they were reducing risks through geographic diversification: in fact they were increasing them by creating an agency problem. The agents were more interested in maximising fee income than in protecting the interests of bondholders. That is the verity that was ignored by regulators and market participants alike.

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  George Soros

  Creating   Agency   Risk  

  591

• To be alive at all involves some risk.

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  Harold MacMillan

  Risk   Trying   Alive  

  2547

• I think risk is important. I don't care if it's a great financial risk or a physical risk. You only get out of something what you put into it and the fact that you are willing to risk something means that you are going to get a lot more out of it.

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  Yvon Chouinard

  Mean   Thinking   Climbing  

  4835

• The global financial crisis - missed by most analysts - shows that most forecasters are poor at pricing in economic/financial risks, let alone geopolitical ones.

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  Nouriel Roubini

  Risk   Financial   Economic  

  3527

• The use of a growing array of derivatives and the related application of more-sophisticated approaches to measuring and managing risk are key factors underpinning the greater resilience of our largest financial institutions... Derivatives have permitted the unbundling of financial risks.

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  Alan Greenspan

  Keys   Risk   Resilience  

  Alan Greenspan's address to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's Forty-first Annual Conference on Bank Structure in Chicago, Illinois, www.federalreserve.gov. May 5, 2005.

  1018

• In the financial system we have today, with less risk concentrated in banks, the probability of systemic financial crises may be lower than in traditional bank-centered financial systems

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  Timothy Geithner

  Risk   May   Today  

  4243

• The trouble is that the risks that are being hedged very well by new financial securities are financial risks. And it appears to me that the real things you want to hedge are real risks, for example, risks in innovation. The fact is that you'd like companies to be able to take bigger chances. Presumably one obstacle to successful R&D, particularly when the costs are large, are the risks involved.

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  Kenneth Arrow

  Real   Successful   Risk  

  Source: www.minneapolisfed.org

  1471

• I have a perverse attraction to risk. Not physical risk but emotional, financial risk - anything than can't kill you immediately.

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  Scott Adams

  Emotional   Risk   Financial  

  4276

• Being a startup entrepreneur is not for everybody and it’s not the only desirable career choice. I also know that many people have families and cost obligations that don’t allow the kinds of financial risks associated with starting a company. And for others the hours, stresses and sacrifices in personal relationships are not worth it.

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  Mark Suster

  Stress   Sacrifice   Careers  

  1627

• There is a simple way of avoiding excess risk-taking by the managers of our financial institutions. It is to make it a crime ... had a crime for reckless management of a financial institution been on the books, Northern Rock and RBS would not have blown up.

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  Paul Collier

  Book   Simple   Rocks  

  4306