We need the government to force the banks to write down all their bad assets now and then recapitalize themselves, preferably with private capital. Those banks that cannot raise sufficient capital should be seized and their deposits sold off.
— Steve Eisman
I've always felt there was something wrong with Wells Fargo's culture, for a very, very long time.
Daniel Tarullo has more power of the U.S. banking system than anybody since Alexander Hamilton. That's not an exaggeration, by the way.
My parents worked as brokers at Oppenheimer securities. They managed to finagle me a job.
The cultural issues, I think, at Wells Fargo went very, very deep. They have to unwind these cultural issues.
I'm not really worried about England's banks.
Do your own homework. I can't overstate the importance of this.
I'm flattered anybody would call me a legend.
I have no negative stories about Deutsche Bank, period.
The world needs more standardization, less innovation.
I know my Trotskyites well, and I know you don't want to be invested in the U.K. if a Trotskyite is prime minister.
Once in a blue moon, an entire industry is a good short.
The one stock in my portfolio which I say hasn't worked yet but has the potential for a big home run is General Motors.
Nobody is going to invest in the Italian banks unless they trust their balance sheets.
It's very hard to argue with someone who thinks he is God because he makes a lot of money.
If you ever had the misfortune of reading all 2,000 pages of Dodd-Frank, which I have done - and it almost killed me - basically, all it does is create a list of all the things it wants the Fed to fix.
I hated being a lawyer.
People always come up to me and ask what the next 'big short' will be. The truth is I simply do not have an answer, and do not want to have an answer, to this question.
The only thing that I know for sure is that the people who invest in the U.K., those investors, believe strongly that the ramifications of a hard Brexit are very bad, and they believe that a recession will take place in the U.K., and that would clearly be negative for banks of the U.K.
Running my fund in 2008 felt a little like being Noah. Noah builds his ark, and he puts his family on the ark, and off they go. So he and his family are safe, and everybody else is dying.
What value does cryptocurrency actually add? No one's been able to answer that question for me.
Financial innovation is an oxymoron. It's very rare that there is something that's actually financial innovation. It's a euphemism for hiding leverage.
Alan Greenspan is the worst Chairman of the Fed in history.
I'm shorting two stocks in the U.K., but I've got a screen of about 50, and I might short all 50 if I think Jeremy Corbyn is going to be prime minister.
I thought that there would never again be an opportunity to be involved with an industry as socially destructive and morally bankrupt as the subprime mortgage industry. I was wrong. The for-profit education industry has proven equal to the task.
I don't see the value in Tesla.
To say that past managements of Citigroup were poor would be a kindness.
When you're levered 9 to 1, it'd be unreal for a bank to go down.
The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst was after Lomas said they were hedged: 'The Lomas Financial Corporation is a perfectly hedged financial institution: it loses money in every conceivable interest rate environment.' I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.
Citi is the cheapest large bank.
What is very negative is that in every country in Europe, the largest owner of that country's sovereign bonds are that country's banks.
I don't think anybody has any idea what the economic impact of Brexit will be.
It's not hard to have a second act. It's just that the second act's not going to be as exciting.
Deutsche Bank has a very simple problem. It doesn't make money.
When I started out as an equity analyst, we had no securitization data. We relied on company data.
Deutsche Bank is a problem bank.
I'm not short, so I can make a speech and drive the stock down and cover the stock. That's not what I do.
Elon Musk is a very, very smart man, but there are a lot of smart people in this world, and you've got to execute. He's got execution problems.
