Andrew Ross Sorkin: There are those on Wall Street and in the plutocra...

In truth, a leader should either apologize, mean it and do something about it - or not apologize at all.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

apologizing leader mean

Debt, weve learned, is the match that lights the fire of every crisis. Every crisis has its own set of villains - pick your favorite: bankers, regulators, central bankers, politicians, overzealous consumers, credit rating agencies - but all require one similar ingredient to create a true crisis: too much leverage.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

agency light fire

I think you tell the story that has to be told. You tell the story that's the truth. You tell the story that readers will be interested in and should know about.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

should stories thinking

Shareholders are sort of like cats; they get herded around, and they follow the leader. With the exception of a few activist shareholders, there are a very rare number of big, important, influential shareholders that like to step up and say there's a problem here, especially when they're making money.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

cat important leader

The failure of Lehman may have allowed the government to do more to prop up the economy than it otherwise could.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

economy government may

The blowback against a bailout of Lehman would have been fierce. It is often forgotten, but the prevailing wisdom the day after Lehman fell was that its collapse was a good thing.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

fierce good-things forgotten

Unfortunately, I think it's very difficult to separate policy from politics. In a perfect world, in some instances you probably would want to. In other instances you'd probably say that the political element is important because it should, in a perfect world, match what the stakeholders need or want, or what the public is after.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

political perfect thinking

Our collective fascination with money and power has only risen in this post-financial crisis world.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

business

So much of today's national conversation is about the influence of the super wealthy, inequality and whether the American Dream is still attainable.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

business

The moment a large investor doesn't believe a government will pay back its debt when it says it will, a crisis of confidence could develop. Investors have scant patience for the years of good governance - politically fraught fiscal restructuring, austerity and debt rescheduling - it takes to defuse a sovereign-debt crisis.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

good moment confidence patience

In truth, Wall Street is in for a radical makeover. Fewer people, lower margins, lower risk, lower compensation - and ultimately, fewer talented people. It is likely to change the culture of an industry that for nearly a century has been the money center of the world.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

money change truth culture

Bringing back something akin to Glass-Steagall would clearly help limit risk in the system. And that's a very good and worthy goal. Letting banks sell securities and insurance products and services allowed them to grow too big too fast and fueled a culture that put profit and pay over prudence.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

grow back good culture

As a child, I always enjoyed - my parents used to have these little cocktail parties - and I always loved trying to get the adults to tell me things they weren't supposed to say. And in many ways, that's what my job is today; it's getting people to tell me things that they probably are otherwise not supposed to say.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

parents me today people

Tiptoeing on a tightrope past insider trading laws may be deft and clever, but it doesn't make it right.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

right make clever past

The euphoria around economic booms often obscures the possibility for a bust, which explains why leaders typically miss the warning signs.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

miss why economic warning

In truth, in the fairy-tale version of bailing out Lehman, the next domino, A.I.G., would have fallen even harder. If the politics of bailing out Lehman were bad, the politics of bailing out A.I.G. would have been worse. And the systemic risk that a failure of A.I.G. posed was orders of magnitude greater than Lehman's collapse.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

bad failure politics truth

I was always one of those people who would watch the Super Bowl as much for the sports as I did for the ads. I was always just sort of fascinated by the fact that when you turn on the TV, there was motion, there was moving pictures on it.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

pictures you sports people

I got my start in the 'New York Times' because I used to read Stuart Elliot, the advertising columns. I still do. And I read him so religiously, I wanted to work for him before I died.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

new start advertising work

There's a good argument to be made that companies that are private, where they're run by partnerships, where everybody has true stake in them and they're not playing with other people's money, that by default it's a safer system, because you really have skin in the game. You really own the company.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

good you money people

I'm probably a believer in abandoning too-big-to-fail firms or breaking them up in some way so that the system can try to take care of itself. I imagine you're not going to get there, and therefore, I suspect regulation is what's going to be required.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

you take-care care way

There are those on Wall Street and in the plutocracy who feel that Geithner is a hero who deftly steered the country from economic ruin. To many ordinary Americans, however, he is considered a Wall Street puppet and a servant of the so-called banksters.