Eugene Rotberg

"Try to understand why a transaction makes sense to your counterparty. . . ."

"Banks are unprofitable because they make too many bad loans and their good loans have little profit in them. They also have the dubious advantage of an awful set of accounting conventions—“a rolling l…"

"Sigmund Freud would have been a wonderful witness here. He would have explained the use of derivatives as denial and rationalization—the pretense that we are doing one thing when we really mean to do …"

"Figure out what we are really trying to do. . . ."

"A war takes place; an earthquake occurs; a flood of a magnitude not seen in a hundred years washes over the land; a cartel falls apart; oil prices quadruple; tax laws change, and the market in which y…"

"We design performance measures to cover-up error. They are called benchmarks. We make decisions based on: Will we be found out? Discovered? Identified as the wrongdoer? Do we really want to have to ex…"

"Never penalize those who work for us for mistakes or reward them for being right about markets. It will go to their heads, is counterproductive and, in any event, material compensation will not correl…"

"Freud, Galileo and Darwin told us, at different times and in different ways, that we are not the center of the universe; that we do not have control; that we do not fully understand our motivations; t…"