Quotes from Andrew Ross Sorkin

What if the slowdown in merger activity isn't cyclical, but secular? What if corporations have learned the lessons of so many companies before them that the odds of a successful merger are no better than 50-50 and probably less? Is it possible that the biggest deals have already been done?

What if lawmakers never spoke to their constituents? Oddly enough, that's exactly how corporate America operates. Shareholders vote for directors, but the directors rarely, if ever, communicate with them.

I have always looked at the world through the prism of money to some degree. If you could follow the money, it explains a lot of things, in all sorts of aspects of the world. You can look at politics through the prism of money. You can look at art through the prism of money. You can look at sports through the prism of money.

Forget about banks that are too big to fail; the focus should be on cities, municipalities and countries that are too big to fail.

Investors are sometimes too busy looking for profits to notice where the truth ends and the deception begins.

In September 2008 - as Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and AIG, the world's biggest insurance company, accepted a federal bailout - Senator John McCain of Arizona, in what was widely viewed as a political move, suspended his presidential campaign and called on Obama to rush back to Washington for a bipartisan meeting at the White House.

Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a company is not allowed to provide a personal benefit to a decision maker in return for business. But hiring the sons and daughters of powerful executives and politicians is hardly just the province of banks doing business in China: it has been a time-tested practice here in the United States.

No one suggested Lehman deserved to be saved. But the argument has been made that the crisis might have been less severe if it had been saved, because Lehman's failure created remarkable uncertainty in the market as investors became confused about the role of the government and whether it was picking winners and losers.

By now, it seems as if everyone has already read Thomas L. Friedman's 'The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.' It changed the way we think about global business, competitiveness and the implication for far-flung economies, governments, education and more.

I think Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner shared the view that they shouldn't be in the business of bailouts, but you know, you're not in the business of bailouts until you frankly think you need to be.

The rating agencies historically actually did a pretty good job rating regular bonds.

The ethos on Wall Street has not changed, and that's not going to come from the corner office. That's going to come, for better or worse, from Washington, and the whole idea of greed is still good, that is still pervasive.

Great stories are still just great yarns. News remains the best human drama ever. Technology is not changing the story; it is just changing the way in which we deliver it.

I don't sleep well. I'm a very nervous - by my nature - anxious, almost paranoid person and reporter.

It's the people who have an incentive to find the problem who usually find the problem.

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.

When you can't lend or trade - and you can't invest with the leverage that juiced returns to support seven- and eight-figure bonuses - how exactly are you going to make money?

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

Since JPMorgan Chase announced its surprise $2 billion-and-growing trading loss, there have been renewed calls from economists, pundits, and politicians to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that prevented commercial banks from participating in investment banking activities.

One of Obama's first major acts as president was to sign the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and some of the money in that bill went to Saft.

I think, with Hank Paulson, the concept of a bailout was anathema to him from day one. He was a Republican; he's a free marketeer. He believes in capitalism, and part of capitalism is believing in failure. And so the idea of bailing out an institution, I think, went against every part of him.

We talk about institutions that are too big to fail - I think the story is as much about people who think they are too big to fail.

Some billionaires like cars, yachts and private jets. Others like newspapers.

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.