Growth requires risk-taking. If you want to dampen risk and make sure you never have a problem, you do so, but that also will have an effect on growth. This is a decision that doesn't necessarily belong to financial institutions. It belongs to regulators and legislators who represent the body politic.
There is a tradition in America of people in business not only commenting on the way the government is being run but doing something about it if they don't like it. In fact, they don't just rail about it: they go into government, like some of my ex-colleagues.
The U.S. is not pure capitalism. In fact, there's no place for pure capitalism, unregulated capitalism. We have a regulated system.
I always thought that a prep school was what some people went to after high school to prepare themselves for college.
To the extent I bloomed, I'm a late bloomer.
The best traders are not right more than they are wrong. They are quick adjusters. They are better at getting right when they are wrong.
I always had a lot of confidence in my ability to gauge a situation and people and try to understand them and what they were saying and what their context was.
If you can't legislate, you can't deal with problems.
Too much of the GDP over the last generation has gone to too few of the people.
It's very hard to go out and make big investments to take advantage of the shale energy if we don't know if it's always going to be there, what price it's going to be there, whether the country's going to allow it to be exported, or whether it's going to go and affect subsidized U.S. manufacturing.
I never thought I would tweet - I thought it was too dangerous.
No one at Goldman Sachs gets paid out of his or her own P&L. It matters how your business is doing, but it matters more how the firm as a whole is doing.
You don't know how you'll react to things until you live through them.
