Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, for the people and by the people, but a government for Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master…Let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware.
The people who watch a movie like 'Wolf of Wall Street' and want to work on Wall Street are exactly the kind of people who shouldn't.
If you think Wall Street has a short memory, you're dead wrong. No, the folks who work on Wall Street, regulate Wall Street - and, above all, invest in its wares, notably its hedge funds - don't have a bad memory. They don't have any memory at all.
I founded SkyBridge - an alternative investment management company focused on seeding and partnering with emerging managers and mentoring Wall Street's next generation of Wall Street's entrepreneurs - in 2005.
The anger from Occupy Wall Street is coming from this simple fact: America no longer seems to be a place where you can work your way up, from rags to riches, from lower class to middle class to upper class.
Wall Street shouldn't be deregulated. I think Wall Street and Main Street need to play by the same set of rules. The middle-class can't carry the burden any longer, that is what happened in the last decade. They had to bail out Wall Street.
Let's talk about why, in the 1990s, Wall Street got deregulated. Did it have anything to do with the fact that Wall Street provided - spent billions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions? Well, some people might think, yeah, that had some influence.
We ought to say, "Occupy Wall Street, not Iraq," "Occupy Wall Street, not Afghanistan," "Occupy Wall Street, not Palestine." The two need to be put together. Otherwise people might not read the signs.
I think Wall Street is very important, especially to tech companies. Wall Street will get in their rhythm and go fund tech companies, and tech companies will go create jobs and employ a lot of people, so there's that aspect of Wall Street.
The way that Wall Street works is most people like very steady quarterly earnings, and they like to be very popular instead of unpopular and they don't like to be the nail that sticks up, as they say.
I've never been on Wall Street. And I care about Wall Street for one reason and one reason only because what happens on Wall Street matters to Main Street.
Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up.
I don't think Wall Street people in general are smart. I think that's one of the biggest myths in American lore. They're tough, aggressive, greedy, quick thinking but I don't think they're particularly smart at all.
Once again, the puppets on Capitol Hill are about to slam the Muppets on Main Street. The country still hasn't recovered from the Wall Street-induced financial cataclysm of 2008, yet Congress is preparing to enact the Orwellian 'JOBS Act' - a bill that should in fact be called the 'Return Fraud to Wall Street in One Easy Step Act.'
Change the way we fund campaigns. Until we do, Wall Street will always be able to blackmail the Dems and GOP to giving them what Wall Street wants.
I do believe that we should substantially lower student debt in this country, which is crushing millions of people. We pay for it, in my view, by a tax on Wall Street speculation. The middle class bailed out Wall Street in their time of need. Now, it is Wall Street's time to help the middle class.