Joris Luyendijk

Those who take the risks are no longer the same people who bear them

[jokes/blagues] :

What would a banker at Goldman do if he had five million dollars? Ask what had happened to the rest.

There are three kinds of economists: those who can add up and those who can’t.

Economists correctly predicted seven out of the last three crises.

Half of economics is actually very useful – too bad economists can never agree which half.

The American writer Ron Rosenbaum has remarked that deep down most journalists are Freudians. Like the founder of psychoanalysis, journalists believe that the most important things in the world are kept hidden and need to be dug up, be it in therapy or through investigation. Then journalists think, like Freud did, that bringing those hidden and shocking facts to the surface and exposing them leads to improvement

These people don’t belong anywhere and don’t feel beholden to any national project. They want to pay as little in tax as they can, and they want to be safe. That’s it.

Amorality as an organising principle is imposed on us and enforced by shareholders, who look at returns and returns only.

There is a fool in every trade’ is a standard expression. ‘You have to know who the fool is, because if you don’t, then you are the fool.

Things were looking so bad, they said, that some got on the phone to their families: ‘Get as much money from the ATM as you can.’ ‘Rush to the supermarket to hoard food.’ ‘Buy gold.’ ‘Get everything ready to evacuate the kids to the countryside.’ When they talked about those dark days there was often a note of shame in their voices, as if they felt humiliated by the memory of their vulnerability.

That’s the thing with the City. The 95 per cent know that only a small percentage make the huge sums. But you are exposed to that category of people, every day and up close. It plants the idea in your head: this could be me.

They saw me struggle with the fact that in the City all relations are recast as transactions: between shareholders and the bank, between the bank and its employees, between banker and client.

The next global financial blow-up will begin with an IT crash.

Arse-covering is a major element if you want to survive in finance

One of the reasons people are laid off around autumn is that you don’t have to pay them a bonus, and the pool gets bigger for those remaining.

‘The real conspiracy in the financial sector is the sound of silence’ Philip Augar, The Greed Merchants, 2005

First of all, banks must be chopped up into units so that they are no longer too big or too complex to fail – this would mean that they can no longer blackmail us.

All had been brainwashed into thinking that being ill meant weakness. That having emotions was a sign of weakness

We need to get rid of the idea of “the bank”. That term implies a unity of action and purpose, as if there’s an all-encompassing view driving that bank. There is no such thing. What we have is a collection of individuals in positions of power. Each of them manages his or her world.

Overall finance has become much more meritocratic and diverse. On the negative side, the sector as a whole has become relentlessly focused on profit, and out to screw the customer.

You can always make more money, but you can never get more time

Money comes and money goes but lifestyle comes and lifestyle stays

Using loopholes in the tax code to help big corporations and rich families evade taxes is ‘tax optimisation’ with ‘tax-efficient structures’. Financial lawyers and regulators who go along with whatever you propose are ‘business-friendly’, cases of proven fraud or abuse become ‘mis-selling’ and exploiting inconsistencies between two countries’ regulatory systems is ‘regulatory arbitrage’.