BERT ELY
"Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I'm only impressed by business models that make money."
Independent banking consultant, expressing doubt about whether Simple, a startup that is getting a lot of industry buzz, will fare any better than failed online banks like NetBank
BOB DIAMOND
"You know what a jerk is when you see it."
CEO of Barclays, discussing how he has fired 30 employees under a new "no jerks" rule he imposed at the bank as a way to weed out those who are prima donnas, too greedy, too ostentatious or poor team players
ROBERT SORENSON
"It's like when the tub starts to fill up and then it overflows. We're just trying to control the growth."
President and CEO of First National Bank & Trust Co. in Williston, N.D., discussing how an oil boom created such an influx of deposits that some local banks are refusing to accept any more
PETER SCHIFF
"More than a medieval lord would have taken from a serf."
CEO of the broker- dealer Euro Pacific Capital, who disclosed assets of $64.7 million before losing the Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut and who unabashedly claims to be part of the 1 percent, talking about how much he pays in taxes
DYLAN R. MATTHEWS
"To take a job in finance is to become complicit in a socially useless enterprise that ruins lives. You should feel bad about yourself if you do it."
Member of Harvard University's Class of 2012, in an editorial for the school newspaper Crimson, responding to the finance-minded students who griped about an Occupy Wall Street protest at a Goldman Sachs recruiting session
MARK T. WILLIAMS
"This is like a fire in a 10-story building. It's burning through each floor as investors dump their shares."
Former Federal Reserve bank examiner who now teaches at Boston University, after Bank of America's shares fell below the psychologically important $5 mark
BILL ISAAC
"We are going to rue the day when the next crisis hits and we have no ability to contain it thanks to Dodd-Frank's myopic approach."
Chairman of Fifth Third Bancorp and global head of financial institutions for FTI Consulting, arguing that the government needs to focus less on how to resolve failures and more on preventing them
CHRIS LARSEN
"Say you buy a book on Alzheimer's and then all of a sudden you can't get credit."
CEO of the peer-to-peer lending website Prosper, on the potential danger that could arise if the banking industry uses more radical nontraditional sources of data such as social information to assess creditworthiness
