Top 90 Alex Berenson Quotes

Predicting the market is always tough.

To finance deficits, the government must sell bonds to investors, competing for capital that could otherwise be used to invest in stocks or corporate bonds. Government borrowings raise long-term interest rates, stifling economic growth.

Determining how many asbestos suits have been filed or how much companies have spent to resolve them is difficult. Cases are filed in state and federal courts, and many companies do not disclose their spending on settlements.

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

From 1983 to 2000, William Goren stole more than $30 million from investors on Long Island and in Queens. His favorite targets were widows and retired couples, like Helga and Simon Novack, Holocaust survivors who gave Mr. Goren their life savings.

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.

Accounting rules give financial institutions flexibility about when they choose to recognize venture capital profits.

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.

Institutions like mutual funds often worry that if they disclose their plans to buy a stock, copycats will move quickly and drive up the stock before the purchase is completed.

Plumbing is usually boring.

Although not well known outside Wall Street, Freddie Mac and its corporate cousin, Fannie Mae, are two of the world’s largest financial institutions and play a crucial role in the housing market.

As a public servant, William H. Webster has an impeccable resume.

For chat-room tyros who expect to make their first million day-trading by age 27, paging through the Sunday newspaper with a pair of scissors just to save a couple of cents on Cheetos seems so, well, old economy.

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.

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

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

The details of the personal expenses that executives put on the company tab often are not known because loopholes in federal disclosure rules let publicly traded companies generally avoid disclosing the perks they give executives along with pay and stock options.

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.

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

Trust-me companies are companies whose financial results gallop ahead of their businesses, companies with seemingly perfect control over their quarterly sales and profits. Companies whose financial statements are loaded with footnotes: companies that short-sellers often attack but rarely dent.

At the end of 2000, most investors were optimistic that a return to quick gains could not be far off.

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

Technology investment drove growth in the 1990s, both directly and by fueling a rising stock market that led to increased consumer spending.

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

Enron Field in Houston, the Trans World Dome in St. Louis and PSINet Stadium in Baltimore are just three of the modern-day coliseums named for companies that have found new homes in bankruptcy court.

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.

Most unfortunately, Enron’s plunge into bankruptcy court also cost many of its rank-and-file employees their savings.

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.

The difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics is a bit like the difference between biology and medicine. Knowing that certain genes increase the risk of cancer is relatively easy. Figuring out exactly which people will get sick, or how to cure them, is a lot more complicated.

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

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.’

Big companies often use their leverage to take stakes in would-be suppliers, especially in the technology business.

In the short run, using militias might be the quickest and easiest way to improve order on Iraq‘s streets and uproot the terrorists and guerrillas who routinely attack American troops and civilian targets.

Corporate executives often buy or sell shares in their companies, and stocks rarely rise or fall significantly when those transactions are reported.

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

As a reporter, I embedded for modest stints with American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. When I’m asked about those experiences, I always say – and mean – that we civilians don’t deserve the soldiers we have.

Climate change might be disastrous, but does that mean we want carbon taxes that raise the price of a gallon of heating oil to $10? And how exactly will those taxes affect economic growth?

Even technology companies get good news sometimes.

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

Benefits are rarely made public in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, where companies must report the pay and options that their five highest-paid executives receive.

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.

Some companies use off-balance-sheet partnerships to raise money or to buy assets without ever telling their shareholders in their financial statements.

For investors who do want to speculate in high-yield bonds, one alternative may be a junk bond mutual fund, which can offer investors the relative safety of diversification.

Also, most people read fiction as an escape – and I wonder whether my books aren’t a bit too grounded in reality to reach the widest possible audience.

Enron had already collapsed and filed for bankruptcy protection by the beginning of 2002. But despite complaints from short sellers that corporations had used accounting gimmickry to inflate their profits, many investors thought the crisis at Enron was an isolated case.

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

For years, critics of Fannie Mae have warned that it does not give them enough information to judge its risks.

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.

If only the human body could handle trauma as well as biotechnology stocks do.

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.

For as long as anyone can remember, reliable, cheap electricity has been taken for granted in the United States.

It’s one of the fundamental principles of the stock market: When interest rates go up, stocks go down. And along with financial companies and cyclicals, technology companies – with their sky-high price-to-earnings multiples – should be among the biggest losers in an environment of rising rates.

For a developing country, average long-run growth of 5 percent a year per capita is excellent, and 7 percent is stellar.

For value investors, General Motors is a tempting target. The company’s share of the North American auto market has steadily declined for two decades, and analysts say the company suffers from weak management and unexciting cars.

In general, investors prefer companies to reward executives for producing recurring income, not one-time gains.

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.

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.

The most distinguishing element of my novels is that I try as hard as I can – within the context of a popular commercial thriller – to make them feel authentic. Drawing on real locations and real events is part of that authenticity.

Rising interest rates are considered bad for stocks because they raise the cost of doing business and depress corporate earnings and because higher yields make bonds relatively more attractive than stocks to investors.

Some big banks remain wary of venture capital.

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

The Wahhabists are the boogeymen, the guys who will chop the head off any American they catch. And they will destroy Iraq without a second thought if they believe that the instability will benefit them.

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

Over the years, I’ve spent time in Saudi Arabia, the Bekaa Valley, Afghanistan, Jordan, and Kenya, among other vacation hotspots.

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

Sergeant Bergdahl may have broken any number of military laws.

Studies show that Avastin can prolong the lives of patients with late-stage breast and lung cancer by several months when the drug is combined with existing therapies.

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.

Bigger spreads mean bigger gaps between what buyers pay and sellers receive. For example, a spread of 10 cents a share means that the buyer pays $100 more for 1,000 shares than the seller receives.

Like many other banks and finance companies, Green Tree used a process called securitization to resell its home loans to outside investors. Green Tree grouped thousands of these small loans into a pool worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Federal laws against kickbacks bar pharmaceutical companies from directly giving money to patients for co-payments on the drugs they make.

An attack on the scale of Sept. 11 would rock the markets and the economy.

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

I think when you have lawyers arguing over whether you can keep a detainee at 46 degrees… for two hours, that’s not torture. It may be unpleasant, it may be coercive… but let’s say what torture actually is, and that’s not it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Individual income can grow only as fast as productivity rises.

Equity is the cushion that protects financial institutions from unexpected changes in the value of their assets. The greater the leverage, the smaller the losses required to wipe out a company’s equity, leaving it without enough money to repay the people who hold its debt.

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

Never underestimate the power of Abby Joseph Cohen.

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.

It has been said that the Fed’s job is to take the punch bowl away just as the party gets going, raising interest rates when the economy is growing too fast and inflation threatens.

Publicly traded United States companies report sales and profits to investors every quarter.

The American pledge not to negotiate with terrorists has been honored more in the breach than the observance from the moment President Ronald Reagan made it.

Information technology departments must spend enormous amounts of time and money worrying about integrating big computer systems with billions of pieces of customer data.

Many legal experts note that prosecutors regularly seek indictments of people or companies for destroying evidence or impeding investigations, even if they cannot prove other charges.

HealthWell is just one of several foundations that assist patients in making their insurance co-payments for expensive drugs.

Big swings in the wholesale price of electricity are not unusual in the summer, when high demand taxes generators’ ability to supply power.