Ken Griffin Quotes
102 Ken Griffin Quotes
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[In November 2008.] Today our nation is working through the worst financial crisis since the 1930’s.
Ken Griffin
[In November 2008.] Our broker dealer is the largest market maker in options in the United States. Executing approximately 30 percent of all equity options trades daily. In addition Citadel accounts for nearly 10 percent of the daily trading volume of US equities.
Ken Griffin
[In November 2008.] All businesses take risk. In some industries we refer to risk taking as research and development. At financial institutions we often take risk by investing in securities.
Ken Griffin
[In November 2008.] Failure to understand and manage risk can be severe as we have seen far to often in recent weeks.
Ken Griffin
[In November 2008.] In this crisis the concept of ‘Too interconnected to fail’ has replaced the concept of ‘Too big to fail’.
Ken Griffin
[In November 2008.] The rapid growth in the use of derivatives has created an opaque market who’s outstanding notional value is measured in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. As a result there’s great concern about the systemic effects of the failure of any one financial institution.
Ken Griffin
[In November 2008.] Our financial markets work best when they’re competitive, fair and transparent. Proper regulation is critical.
Ken Griffin
[In November 2008.] Our markets are complex and they must be well understood in if they are to be well regulated.
Ken Griffin
[In December 2008.] I have never seen a market as full of panic as I have seen in the past two months.
Ken Griffin
[In December 2008 on having specifically designing Citadel Capital to be prepared for almost any market calamity after watching the Long Term Capital Management disaster in 1998.] We had planned for a repeat of the crash of '87. We had planned for a repeat of '98… The idea that the largest banks in the world would simultaneously fail, need government support, government guarantees, and/or government intervention to survive was not in my range of realistic scenarios.
Ken Griffin
[In December 2008 on buying a lot of undervalued shares in March 2008 after Bear Sterns collapsed but then being hit when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September 2008.] We were very focused on the collateral damage from Lehman to the overall system. What I was worried about was the money market funds breaking the buck.
Ken Griffin
[In December 2008 on the effect of Lehman Brothers.] An undersea earthquake. In the case of Lehman, it wasn't a few hours later but a few days later when the wave hit the shore. But it wasn't a little wave anymore. It was a giant tsunami.
Ken Griffin
[In December 2008.] We became a story. That's not a good place for a financial institution to be. People may become incentivized to feed the rumors and take the other side of your positions, and some may try to push your portfolio against you.
Ken Griffin
[In December 2008.] We need to face the fact that we need to evolve. We will embrace the changes that are part of that evolution, and we will prosper in the new era of finance.
Ken Griffin
[In January 2010 on running the Citadel Investment Group at the age of 41.] This was not something that I started when I was 55 as a second career after Wall Street. This is something I started when I was 21. So from day one, I've always had a very different perspective on time and what time means and what the end goal might be.
Ken Griffin
[In January 2010 on Citadel Securities.] Citadel Securities is the extension of a set of capabilities rather than a de novo startup. So that gives us a very different perspective on where we're going to take this business.
Ken Griffin
[In January 2010.] As some of the more material needs in life are satisfied, you take a step back and ask, What are my different choices in life? Why am I here, and what can I do? And that was actually quite liberating because, objectively, I thought about all the different things I could do with my time, about how I could spend my life in the business field, and I realized I could not pick a better platform to be a part of than Citadel's , the scale, the relevance, the impact.
Ken Griffin
[In January 2010.] There are not that many meaningful high-yield and investment-grade trading firms out there, so you don't get lost in the clutter. Whereas the world is filled with hundreds of equity sales and trading and research boutiques.
Ken Griffin
[In January 2010.] Right now there's a window of opportunity for firms to enter the securities market. And that window will close again, the barriers to entry will rise again, and it will revert back to the way it was. But right here, right now, there is a need in the marketplace that's unfulfilled, and we hope to fulfill it. And if I didn't do it now, I wouldn't try it in my career. This is it.
Ken Griffin
[In March 2012.] I don't feel I'm at liberty to speak about the actions of any one CEO. That's not fair; given CEOs have duties to their shareholders.
Ken Griffin
[In March 2012 on gambling in casinos and speculation in the stock market.] There's a huge difference. Gambling is entertainment. We have great destinations for that, like Las Vegas. Just not in Chicago. Financial markets, what one often refers to as speculation, is really the force by which we move capital to the best and highest use. Investors who find the best businesses to put their money behind are rewarded for their research. It's not the prettiest way you can ever imagine to allocate capital. But if you look across the entire world, it's the best way we know to allocate capital.
Ken Griffin
[In March 2012.]
Charles and David Koch are huge advocates for free markets. I have a tremendous respect for their intellectual and financial commitment…
Ken Griffin
[In March 2012.] When a company creates a product that directly or indirectly adversely impacts the health of people, that product must be regulated. The process by which it's created must be regulated. No company has the right to injure people. No company.
Ken Griffin
[In March 2012.] No company is entitled to engage in acts that hurt innocent third parties.
Ken Griffin
[In March 2012 on whether the ultrawealthy have too much of an influence on the political process.] I think they actually have an insufficient influence. Those who have enjoyed the benefits of our system more than ever now owe a duty to protect the system that has created the greatest nation on this planet. And so I hope that other individuals who have really enjoyed growing up in a country that believes in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – and economic freedom is part of the pursuit of happiness – (I hope they realize) they have a duty now to step up and protect that.
Ken Griffin
[In March 2012.] I started my career with myself, two employees and a one-room office. Nothing was given to me per se, except for a great education - my college degree - and a country that allows somebody to just go for it.
Ken Griffin
[In March 2012.] We need in Chicago 10 more Groupons, 10 more Citadels, each creating thousands of jobs and tremendous value for their stakeholders. Groupon saves people billions of dollars a year. Citadel provides pension plans with the financial means to make retirement payments to their beneficiaries.
Ken Griffin
[In March 2012.] I think it's very unfortunate that as a culture we were so encouraged by both the past stability of home prices and a litany of government programs to buy homes, to view them as a safe place to put a significant amount of our net worth, so that as a society we pushed home prices way above where they should have been. When that bubble burst, a lot of people got hurt.
Ken Griffin
[In March 2012 on the housing price bubble/sub prime crisis.] The primary source of fuel to that bubble was policies that came out of Washington.
Ken Griffin
[In March 2012.] The development of mortgage-securitization technology, like every other form of technology, had both good and negative attributes. The biggest negative attribute is that we failed to encourage the end lender of money to be as disciplined as we should have been.
Ken Griffin
[In March 2012.] It's very hard to know you're in a bubble until it's gone. The housing bubble hit a lot of people. The dot-com bubble hit a lot of people. And until it burst - and you look back and go, 'What were we thinking?' - it's often really hard to know you're in a bubble.
Ken Griffin
[In March 2012 more on the housing bubble.] Discipline broke down among lenders. Discipline broke down among mortgage brokers. And discipline broke down among consumers.
Ken Griffin
[In March 2012.] If you're 68 years old and you've saved your whole life for retirement, the Federal Reserve's policies are punishing you. At the same time, the policies of the Federal Reserve are punishing people who don't have means. The very low interest-rate environment has encouraged commodity speculation around the world. It's driven up the price of energy. It's driven up the price of food.
Ken Griffin
[In April 2013.] As we've all learned over the years, if you reduce the cost of capital you increase your use of fixed assets and you take out jobs. Corporate America, seeing an ever increasing cost for its employee base and extraordinarily low interest rates, is taking every step it can possibly take to reduce employment, to build factories abroad and domestically to substitute technology and automated processes for people.
Ken Griffin
[In June 2013 on Ben Bernanke even though he wouldn’t have done QE III himself. He] decided to make every decision necessary to mitigate the risk of the US falling into a second Great Depression. History will look back on that pretty positively.
Ken Griffin
[In April 2014.] If we want every American to have a really high standard of living, we need to get ourselves focused back on equality of opportunity. We need to create the incentives for people to take on difficult careers. To succeed in those careers and to be rewarded for taking on those risks.
Ken Griffin
[In April 2014.] We need to bring hope back to our country. That’s really important.
Ken Griffin
[In July 2014.] I think Murdoch… has a history of really willing to go the extra mile to get deals done that are important to him.
Ken Griffin
[In July 2014.] A computer can move faster. In fact, computers do move faster.
Ken Griffin
[In July 2014.] When... [a customer] sends an order to Citadel for execution, we have to leverage our technologic capabilities to provide that customer with the best possible execution. And what happens amongst the retail brokerage firms, they keep firms like us in competition day in and day out to win their business.
Ken Griffin
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