Quotes from the Reuters Wealth Management Summit
BOSTON (Reuters) - The following are some quotes from the Reuters Wealth Management Summit on Monday:
RICHARD KOHAN, NATIONAL PARTNER IN CHARGE OF WEALTH
TRANSFER SOLUTIONS, PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS PWC.UL:
"People who I've worked with who have that Depression touch, from family members or more generally, have always applied that as part of their philosophy of risk tolerance in wealth management."
"They will say, 'I want to make sure that if there's an economic crisis like my father, my uncle, whoever, experienced, or even that I read about and am familiar with, that I'm protected.'"
BRIAN FEURTADO, MANAGING DIRECTOR FOR ALTERNATIVES AND
WEALTH, BLACKROCK INC (BLK.N):
"What's been driven home by this crisis is that it is critical to know what you own. At BlackRock we call knowing what you own risk management.
"We are taking on new accounts that were managed externally, and it is like taking patients into intensive care.
"There is an urgency to clients that I have not seen before. We are now using terms like triage and intensive care. The number one mistake has been the really poor quality assets in portfolios."
ROBERT ELLIOTT, SENIOR MANAGING DIRECTOR, BESSEMER TRUST:
"People are obviously going from nobody caring about risk for the last two or three years to nobody caring about anything but risk."
"The distress out there is pretty real. And that's not counting people who lost money in hedge funds who made bad bets on subprime debt or commodities. There were a lot of ways to lose money these last nine months as you know."
"The No. 1 mistake ... is too much concentration in financials, too much concentration in commodities, although if you've been in commodities the last three years you probably would have been fine, but some people were late to the party in commodities and then went into commodity hedge funds which were levered."
ROBERTON WILLIAMS, PRINCIPAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, TAX POLICY
INSTITUTE:
When asked about the claims presidential candidates are making about each others' intended tax policies: "One of the most egregious claims is from Senator McCain who says that Senator Obama would raise taxes for almost everyone. While that might be marginally true, it is not true in ways that people would recognize."
(For summit blog: summitnotebook.reuters.com/)
(Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss and Scott Malone; Editing by Gary Hill)
