The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.
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Chapter Three, " How Can A Guy Who Can't Speak English Lie?", p. 73Michael Lewis
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Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.
Matthew Arnold
I wanted to explore the new Wall Street. When I was writing SCARFACE in Miami, there was so much coke around and so many lunatics, and I met so many kids from Wall Street who were millionaires. I thought older men were rich, but here were these kids, 25 or 28 or 35 years old, with millions of dollars playing the markets all over the world around the clock. My father would have been shocked by the new electronics that allowed it…. Dad was a stockbroker on Wall Street when there was more integrity and class.
Oliver Stone
All these Wall Street lawyers are running the system according to Buckminster Fuller. After World War II they took most of the money out of the United States, they drained the blood out of the United States and put it abroad, overseas capital…. Fuller calls it Lawyer Capitalism, the lawyers run the show. Tax laws are the key. In the postwar years, tax law allowed US capital to go abroad…. It all fled the country and stayed abroad and America changed tremendously…. We became a world power, yet a rapacious one, with capitalists really doing a major theft of our money…. Nixon took us off the Gold Standard in 1972 because America went bankrupt…. All these recessions in the 70’s, 80’s…. My father got wiped out on Wall Street.
Oliver Stone
No man can control Wall Street. Wall Street is like the ocean. No man can govern it. It is too vast. Wall Street is full of eddies and currents. The thing to do is to watch them, to exercise a little common sense, and … to come out on top.
Jay Gould
You know that there’s been tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall Street. And it is – it’s – people are frightened by these events. Our economy, I think, still, the fundamentals are – of our economy are strong, but these are very, very difficult times. And I promise you, we will never put America in this position again. We will clean up Wall Street. We will reform government.
John McCain
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