Top 145 Quotes & Sayings by Alex Berenson - Page 2

When all the plants in a region are running at full steam, there is simply no way to get more power.

For decades, Wall Street has charged companies a standard fee of 7 percent to sell their shares to the public.

For more than two decades, Barry Diller has been among the most respected - and feared - figures in the entertainment industry.

A vote of confidence from Cisco Systems can be very important to fledging technology companies, especially if they have initial public offerings on the horizon.

Good spectator sports share certain fundamentals. Their competitors battle head-to-head. Their winners are determined objectively: fastest runner, most points. They are refereed, not judged.

Whatever the potential pitfalls, banks are increasingly enthusiastic about venture capital, particularly in new companies with strong prospects in fields like health care and technology.

At any moment, one company stands in the spotlight of the middle ring in the stock market's never-ending circus. It may not be the biggest corporation in the world, or the most profitable, but somehow it both mirrors and leads the market's broader action.

In market valuation, Yahoo is worth about as much Walt Disney and the News Corporation combined.

Big fund companies have many ways to increase the returns of young funds that they want to promote. And at least one of those games involves popular offerings.

Short sellers sell stock they have borrowed, hoping to buy it back later when its price has fallen.

The biggest profit center for investment banks is the hefty fees they charge for underwriting stock offerings and giving financial advice, and analysts put those profits at risk if they publish negative conclusions about the companies that pay the fees.

Of all the big Internet companies, Yahoo is the most highly valued on a price-earnings and price-sales basis.

Individual income can grow only as fast as productivity rises.

The lower spreads mean lower costs for investors, because Nasdaq investors generally do not trade directly with one another. Instead, they usually buy and sell from market-makers, brokerage firms that flip shares between buyers and sellers and keep the spread for themselves.

As the Nasdaq soared in 1999 and early 2000, demand for many offerings far exceeded the supply of shares available at the initial offering price.

The world is filled with great sporting events.

Business cycles lengthened greatly during the 20th century, as central banks learned to manage national economies by raising and lowering interest rates.

Big companies, which spend tens of billions of dollars annually on 'call centers' to take orders and provide customer support, increasingly rely on speech recognition not just to handle requests for information but to process customer orders.

Most of America never noticed, but the 1990s were good times for trailer homes, a.k.a. manufactured housing. From 1991 to 1998, annual sales of manufactured homes more than doubled, to 374,000 from 174,000.

Before Jason Bourne, before Jack Ryan, there was Bond, James Bond, the original two-dimensional, world-saving secret agent.

Many newly public companies are able to post a year or two of strong sales growth off a small base, but their growth almost always slows over time, thanks to what investment professionals call 'the law of large numbers.'

Most companies can survive even if their debt ratings are lowered below investment grade, although they will have higher borrowing costs.

Traditionally, companies have made major announcements before or after the close of trading so that all interested investors and analysts are apprised of the news before trading resumes in their stocks.

Even technology companies get good news sometimes.

Big banks have long had private equity divisions that put up capital for deals too complex or risky for individual shareholders to finance.

As they grow, companies saturate their markets, become more complex and difficult to manage, and face larger and more entrenched competitors.

Electronic communications networks match trades between investors directly, without using a market maker or specialist as an intermediary.

Fannie Mae is owned by shareholders but operates under a federal charter that exempts it from paying state or local taxes. As a result, many professional investors think the government would repay the debt that Fannie Mae had issued if the company could not, although Fannie Mae explicitly says that its bonds do not carry a federal guarantee.

Fannie Mae has never publicly disclosed how much money it could lose if interest rates rose 1.5 percentage points in a very short period of time.

Trailer home borrowers, mostly near the bottom of the economic ladder, often default on their loans.

Sochi started with the same problem as every Winter Olympics. Forget the crass commercialism, the fake amateurism, NBC's refusal to televise important events live to all its viewers. As an event, the Winter Games fail on the most basic level. They're lousy to watch.

While Wall Street firms typically underwrite offerings in teams, the lead underwriter, or manager, of the offering has primary responsibility for selling the offering and reaps much of the fees and profit.

The stock prices of networking equipment companies like Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks sometimes seem as if they are priced for perpetual success.

Volatility may be rising simply because investors must digest more information every day.

Would-be drug companies must either produce medicines that stand up to federal scrutiny, demonstrate that their data has value to other companies, or go out of business.

Trust the Canadians to produce a game about mutual funds that is actually more boring than the real thing.

It is a truth universally acknowledged on Wall Street that original research is on life support. Serious research can be bad for business, as well as expensive.

With 950 reporters and 79 bureaus, Bloomberg competes to break news with Dow Jones, Reuters and Bridge News along with newspaper Web sites, dozens of smaller Internet sites, and even gossipy chat rooms.

One of the Internet's highest-profile companies, Priceline once dreamed of transforming the way consumer goods are bought and sold by offering customers the chance to 'name your own price' for a variety of products, including airline tickets.

Financial news services and other media organizations get press releases 15 minutes before they are distributed to the general public, fueling a furious competition among the news services to rewrite them for their subscribers during their window of exclusivity.

I know it's a cliche, but trust me on this. I once dated a Canadian. Canada = boring.

Normally, banks record profits on loans only as they are repaid, whether they securitize the loans or hold them on their books.

The thing to do with mutual funds is to buy a couple of decent ones, set up an investment plan and then never, ever think about them again, except maybe once a quarter or so when you take a peek at your statements to make sure that you have not accidentally been buying the Fidelity Peace-in-the-Middle-East fund.

Lower interest rates are usually considered good for stocks because they lower the cost of borrowing and make bonds a less attractive alternative investment.

Shareholder meetings are not usually the occasion for utter candor - or for that matter, arch sarcasm - by chief executives.

Even so, sometimes I wish I did have a little bit more flair in my language.

Hedge funds try to produce above-average investment returns using tactics ranging from traditional stock-picking to complex derivative and arbitrage plays. High minimum investments, redemption restrictions and aggressive strategies make them suitable mainly for more sophisticated and well-heeled investors.

Automated call centers are only the most obvious way speech recognition will be used. The software is now becoming sophisticated enough to identify speakers through 'voiceprints,' akin to fingerprints, eventually reducing the need for personal identification numbers.

In a Ponzi scheme, a promoter pays back his initial investors with money he has raised from new investors. Eventually, the promoter can no longer find enough new investors to pay off the people who have already put up money, and the scheme collapses.

Did anyone in the White House or the N.S.A or the C.I.A. consider flying to Hong Kong and treating Mr. Snowden like a human being, offering him a chance to testify before Congress and a fair trial?

Microeconomics is the study of how specific choices made by businesses, consumers and governments affect the markets for different goods and services. For example, a microeconomist might examine how price changes affect sales of apples relative to oranges.

Higher productivity enables companies to increase sales without adding workers. Even if job markets tighten and wages rise, corporate profits can continue to climb as long as worker productivity is growing faster than overall wages.

The notion that employees and companies have a social contract with each other that goes beyond a paycheck has largely vanished in United States business.

Generally, a rally will have staying power, technicians say, if, in addition to price movements, it has heavy trading volume and breadth, meaning that several stocks rise for each stock that falls.

Macroeconomics is the analysis of the economy as a whole, an examination of overall supply and demand. At the broadest level, macroeconomists want to understand why some countries grow faster than others and which government policies can help growth.

African runners regularly work out in the United States and Europe, and the International Olympic Committee sends some of the cash from the Games to Olympic committees in poor nations, which use the money to finance their own programs.

Of course, the discounting of future earnings should hurt all stocks. But it should hurt technology stocks more than others, because so many of them are valued at extremely high levels relative to their current earnings.

The Fed's ability to raise and lower short-term interest rates is its primary control over the economy.

It's no secret that big institutional investors have a lot of advantages on Wall Street. They get the first chance to buy hot initial public offerings. They get to meet in person with companies' managements.

To economists, prices serve as crucial signals to producers and consumers. In a regulated market, the state sets prices high enough for private companies to cover their costs and earn a guaranteed profit for their investors. But in a deregulated market, prices should vary with demand and supply.