The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man in the United States great enough to wear his boots and the bankers went anew to grab the riches. I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America and use it to systematically corrupt civilization.
— Otto von Bismarck
Powerful Bankers And Banks quotations
Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws.
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.
You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out.
The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.
Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money and control credit, and with a flick of a pen they will create enough to buy it back.
The bold effort the present (central) bank had made to control the government .
.. are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it.
My agency in promoting the passage of the National Banking Act was the greatest mistake of my life. It has built up a monopoly which affects every interest in the country
And the banks - hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created - are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.
Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess
The issuing power [of money] should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.
Nothing but widespread suffering will produce any effect on Congress
The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing.
The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight-of-hand that was ever invented.
Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good.
I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create money...And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.
But if you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.
Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending
We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world.
When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation
I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe.
The business of banking ought to be simple.
If it is hard it is wrong. The only securities which a banker, using money that he may be asked at short notice to repay, ought to touch, are those which are easily saleable and easily intelligible.
The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government's greatest creative opportunity.
I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again
When your bank account is so overdrawn that it is positively photographic, steps must be taken.
It would not be a bad idea if bankers were to go and sit occasionally with politicians in their political surgeries, where they might get a sense of the injustice that some of the community feel about the banks.
It is no accident that banks resemble temples, preferably Greek, and that the supplicants who come to perform the rites of deposit and withdrawal instinctively lower their voices into the registers of awe. Even the most junior tellers acquire within weeks of their employment the officiousness of hierophants tending an eternal flame.
Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing.
When you say "bank," a bank is a building, a set of computers and chairs and things. The bankers are the people running these banks. They're the chief officers, and they push the loans because they don't care if they go bad. For one thing, they may package these bad loans and sell them off to gullible institutional investors.
Money, yes, it is the new religion. And the moguls of the Money Monarchy have become the priests and popes of this irrational age of corporate planetary domination and destruction. Yes, world bankers and trans-national corporate executives are the true religious leaders. Why? Because the highest, most esteemed calling is high finance. Whole nations are caught up in it. It has become the wishful will of the world and money, the worshipped god. The Wall Street Journal is the Bible, the bank is the cathedral and the people are the parish
The Bankers' New Clothes makes a simple, powerful argument: that banks need to raise more capital. It is entirely persuasive that the extent of their leverage makes the financial system fragile, and it clearly and patiently demolishes all the counter-arguments made by the banks and their lobbyists.
I went to the bank and proposed that they lend money to the poor people.
The bankers almost fell over.
I actually think that the economy has got some positives.
It's got the market. It's got consumer confidence and it's got banks throwing - I mean central bankers throwing money at it around the world.
JPMorgan Chase are among the most successful global investment banks, most successful global asset managers, and, in the United States, one of the most successful retail and commercial bankers. We do a great job for customers.
I think we're in the take-the-money-and-run stage of the economy.
So the banks may go under, but the bankers, who make the policy, clean up.
If bankers can push the loans and make more profits for the bank, they get paid higher bonuses. They often also get stock options. If the bank goes under, they get to keep all of these salaries and options - and the government will bail out the bank. These guys will take their money and run, which is pretty much what they're doing now.