Willie Sutton

Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering
by Malcolm Gladwell
Published 1 Oct 2024

There’s a puzzle. 4. In the early morning of March 9, 1950, Willie Sutton rose and applied a heavy coat of makeup to his face. The previous evening he had dyed his hair several shades lighter, so that he was almost blond, and now he wanted to pair that with an olive complexion. He applied mascara to his eyebrows to give them some substance. He stuffed bits of cork inside his nostrils to broaden his nose. Then he put on a gray suit, tailored and padded in such a way as to alter his silhouette. Satisfied that he no longer looked like Willie Sutton, Willie Sutton left his house in Staten Island for Sunnyside, Queens, heading to a Manufacturers Trust Company branch at 44th Street and Queens Boulevard in New York City.

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It was a bluff, of course, but it worked every time. He scooped up the money from the vault, ambled out the door to a waiting getaway car, and vanished into the New York City traffic. Willie Sutton was the New York version of Casper—although that doesn’t quite do Willie Sutton justice. Nobody knew much about Casper at the time he was orchestrating his bank-robbery spree. Even his trial barely made a dent in the news. Not so Willie Sutton. Sutton was famous. He dated starlets. He was a master of disguise. He made not one but two daring escapes from prison. He was once asked: “Why do you rob banks?” And he replied: “Because that’s where the money is.”

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Hollywood made a movie about his life. A writer turned his story into a biographical novel. In today’s dollars he claimed to have stolen more than $20 million over the course of his career. Casper wasn’t even in the same tax bracket as Willie Sutton (assuming, of course, that they paid taxes, which neither of them did). The point is that if anyone were to start a bank-robbery epidemic, you’d think it would be Willie Sutton. You would think that the impressionable criminal classes of New York City would look at “Slick Willie” effortlessly slipping into bank branches without firing a shot and making off with a king’s ransom, and say to themselves, I can do that.

Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
by Ted Conover
Published 20 Jan 2010

Burr, A Voice From Sing Sing, giving a general description of the state prison, a short and comprehensive geological history of the Quality of the Stone of the Quarries; and a synopsis of the Horrid Treatment of the Convicts in That Prison, pp. 17–18. More than a hundred blows: Report of the Select Committee [to examine prisons] of the [New York State] Assembly of 1851 … transmitted to the legislature, Jan. 7, 1852, p. 26. Bank robber Willie Sutton: Willie Sutton, with Quentin Reynolds. I, Willie Sutton. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953, p. 92. There are daily: Levi S. Burr, A Voice From Sing Sing, giving a general description of the state prison, a short and comprehensive geological history of the Quality of the Stone of the Quarries; and a synopsis of the Horrid Treatment of the Convicts in That Prison, p. 44.

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There were no windows, no heat, and no running water. A small amount of light and air passed through the pattern of one-inch-square holes in the doors. Inmates slept on straw mattresses atop iron bed frames attached to the wall. (One hundred years after its construction, the original cellblock was still in use. Bank robber Willie Sutton wrote that in 1926, it “had uneven jagged stone walls that sweated moisture all day and all night.”) Inmates ate with their fingers; food was doled into a small bucket, called a kid. They were issued a single set of striped clothes, regarded as a humiliation (as well as a visual aid to assist the pursuit of escapees) and washed once a week.

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Published 11 Sep 2023

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT I’d written an exposé: Zeke Faux, “How Facebook Helps Shady Advertisers Pollute the Internet,” Bloomberg Businessweek, March 27, 2018. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT famed bank robber: Willie Sutton said the quote was invented by a reporter and that he robbed banks because it was thrilling. Willie Sutton, Willie and Edward Linn, Where the Money Was (New York: Viking, 1976), 120. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT $600 million worth: Chainalysis, “The 2022 Crypto Crime Report.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a total of $3.2 billion: Ibid.

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” * * * — IT SEEMED UNLIKELY that someone who tried to rhyme “Razzlekhan’s the name” with “that hot grandma you really wanna bang” could in fact be a master thief. Then again, this was the crypto world, where a lack of experience or competence has never been a barrier to fame and fortune, and where large-scale hacks are a regular occurrence. Asked why he robbed banks, the famed bank robber Willie Sutton supposedly said, “Because that’s where the money is.” But these days, with the rise in electronic payments, the average branch might hold as little as $50,000. And bulletproof barriers, dye packs, timer locks, and high-resolution security cameras have largely made bank robberies a relic of the past.

Bomb Scare
by Joseph Cirincione
Published 24 Dec 2011

Nor is North Korea, a state that probably does have weapons-grade material, likely to give away what its leadership almost certainly sees as the most precious jewel in its security crown. How can we determine where terrorists are likely to steal nuclear materials? When they asked the famous 1930s thief Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, he replied, “That’s where the money is.” If today’s terrorists think like Willie Sutton they will not care about a state’s geopolitical orientation; they will go where the material is. The largest, most accessible supply is in Russia and other former Soviet states. Other states, particularly Pakistan, have a volatile mixture of weapons, instability, and radical fundamentalism that make them attractive targets for terrorists hunting the bomb.

Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game
by Walker Deibel
Published 19 Oct 2018

Anything that ends up on the online marketplaces has already been shown to those buyers known to the listing broker, as well as likely other brokers in the same or neighboring firms. Once no one they know buys it, it can get listed on the internet (perhaps their own site first, then the marketplaces later). 92 BROKER OUTREACH 45 In 1951, the famous criminal “Slick Willie” Sutton reportedly answered the question, “Why do you rob banks?” with, “Because that’s where the money is.” The analogy is not that buying businesses is like robbing banks, but rather that going to the source of what you want is the fastest and most direct method. Indeed, sussing out brokers who manage businesses for sale for a living is the fastest and most direct way to get to the company you will acquire.

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Often, the term is defined by the transaction size that a firm targets, but in every case it is the individual who has the business listed to sell or who helps buyers find potential acquisition targets. In most cases, outside Main Street business brokers, they can also help arrange for capital, thus the term “investment banker.” 45 46 47 48 The Saturday Evening Post 223:30, p.17, January 20, 1951. As an aside, Levitt and Dubner’s fourth book, When to Rob a Bank…could have taught Slick Willie Sutton a lesson. The economic answer is “never,” because the Return on Investment is terrible. Listings, of course, are businesses listed for sale. An equity backer is not a lending institution like a bank who will offer debt for the acquisition, but rather a parent, friend, partner, angel investor, or investment group.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
by Edward L. Glaeser
Published 1 Jan 2011

The first modern police force was formed in Paris during the reign of Louis XIV, when that city was probably Europe’s largest and certainly filled with violent disorder. Indeed, Paris first became a City of Light in the seventeenth century because the man who ran its police force launched a vast street-lighting project to make the city less dangerous at night. Willie Sutton said he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is,” but in most cases, crime means poor people robbing other poor people. Crime victims are more likely to be poor, young, and male—just like criminals. One major reason people join criminal gangs is the promise of protection from other criminals.

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Van Wyck Dies in Paris Home: First Mayor of Greater New York Had Lived Abroad for 12 Years; He Was Croker’s ‘Choice,’ His Administration Marked by So-Called Ice Trust, Ramapo Water Steal, and Police Scandals,” New York Times, Nov. 16, 1918, p. 13, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, Document ID: 97044205. 103 corruption decreases as education levels rise: Glaeser and Saks, “Corruption In America.” 103 The old model of machine politics ... became the age of the bureaucrat: Wallis et al., “Politics, Relief, and Reform.” 104 vehicle miles traveled increases: Duranton and Turner, “Fundamental Law of Road Congestion.” 104 The best way to reduce traffic congestion: Columbia University, “Practical Economic Solutions.” 105 “users of private cars ... their use imposes”: Vickrey, “New York’s Subway Fare Structure.” 105 congestion pricing ... traffic-jam free: Goh, “Congestion Management.” 105 London adopted its own congestion charge: Leape, “London Congestion Charge.” 106 first modern police force: Schivelbusch, “Policing of Street Lighting.” 106 filled with violent disorder: In 1650, Paris was the fourth-largest city in the world and the largest in Europe. Chandler, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth, 534. 106 vast street-lighting project: Schivelbusch, “Policing of Street Lighting.” 106 “where the money is”: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Famous Cases, “Willie Sutton.” 106 more than 20 percent of people ... people were victims: Glaeser, “Are Cities Dying?” and Glaeser and Sacerdote, “Why Is There More Crime in Cities?” 106 In 1986, murder rates: Glaeser and Sacerdote, “Why Is There More Crime in Cities?” 107 financial returns to an average crime: Ibid. 107 overall crime rate in Mumbai: India, Government of, National Crime Records Bureau, Crime in India 2008, ch. 2, “Crime in Megacities,” 44, 48. 107 two hundred years of murders in New York: Author’s calculation using Monkkonen, Homicides in New York City. 107 Murder fell from 1800 to 1830: Ibid. 107 between three and six murders per hundred thousand: Ibid. 108 a weak link between corruption and homicide: Ibid., using personal judgment regarding the definition of a Tammany mayor. 108 peaked during the Roaring Twenties: Monkkonen, Homicides in New York City. 108 national homicide rate fell by about 29 percent: Ibid. 108 cities became more lawless than ever: Ibid. 108 One might guess ... one fifth of the rise in crime: Levitt, “Changing Age Structure.” 108 The Crips: Estimates are 30,000 to 35,000.

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Financial Times (London), Oct. 31, 2007, Business Life. Farrell, William E. “D.A.’s Assail Rockefeller Drug Penalties.” New York Times, Feb. 7, 1973, p. A4. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crime in the United States, 2008, Sept. 2009, www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/index.html. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Famous Cases. “Willie Sutton,” www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/famcases/sutton/sutton.htm. Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy, eds. Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th ed. New York: Norton, 2005. Ferreira, Francisco H. G., Peter Lanjouwr, and Marcelo Neri. “A Robust Poverty Profile for Brazil Using Multiple Data Sources.”

Strangers on a Bridge: The Case of Colonel Abel and Francis Gary Powers
by James Donovan

He had waited to keep secret meetings, waited to pick up a message at a drop, waited for the right moment to recruit an agent, waited for letters from his family, and waited and feared for the moment when he might be found out. Abel sometimes felt as though everyone he passed on the street was looking at him and knew who he was. He once told me he had enjoyed reading the autobiography of bank robber Willie Sutton, a celebrated fugitive who had suffered nightmares in which hundreds of people pointed at him and screamed, “You’re Willie Sutton.” Abel explained that any undercover fugitive must constantly fight against the feeling that the whole world is on the verge of guessing his secret. The Colonel, who generally was given to underplaying his role, managed to control his phobia for nine years.

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The warden likes my ideas, so he gave me these architectural plans, which I’m redrafting to incorporate my ideas. He’ll send them on to the Bureau of Prisons in Washington.” “If I were Warden Krinsky,” I said, “I would worry that some moonless night, when the guards were looking east, you might go down a newly designed laundry chute and out into the west. Does the warden know you read Willie Sutton’s book?” “Yes, but he also knows I’ll not make my break until you successfully argue your appeal,” said Abel, smiling. The appeal, of course, was the reason for my visit. If we were to challenge the District Court’s rulings, we had only ten days in which to file our notice of appeal. Following this, we had forty days to prepare our full petition to the Circuit Court.

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines
by William Davidow and Michael Malone
Published 18 Feb 2020

“Speed of a Commercial Jet Airplane,” The Physics Factbook, http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/JobyJosekutty.shtml (accessed June 26, 2019). 54. “Cultural Lag,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_lag (accessed June 26, 2019). 55. Ogburn, On Culture and Social Change, 86. 56. Ibid., 61. Chapter Three SUBSTITUTIONAL EQUIVALENCES 1. “Willie Sutton,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Sutton (accessed June 26, 2019). 2. Ibid. 3. Dancho Danchev, “New ZeuS Source Code Based Rootkit Available for Purchase on the Underground Market,” Webroot, March 14, 2013, https://www.webroot.com/blog/2013/03/14/new-zeus-source-code-based-rootkit-available-for-purchase-on-the-underground-market/ (accessed June 26, 2019). 4.

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank
by Chris Skinner
Published 27 Aug 2013

This brings us to the core point that we all believe cash will decline over time, replaced by electronic, digitised transactions. This is why money in the form of cash is less meaningful and demonstrates the importance of banks as secure data processors of money, rather than money transmissions processors. It means that the regularly quoted comment from gangster Willie Sutton “why do you rob banks”, ”because that’s where the money is”, is very last century. Willie Sutton robbed banks physically, taking the cash out at gunpoint. Today, the gangsters take the money out byte by byte. This is why money is meaningless, because the data is meaningful. It’s the data that gangsters need to rob, not the money. Data is where it’s at.

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World
by Jevin D. West and Carl T. Bergstrom
Published 3 Aug 2020

So who else is there to tax? Well, in 2008, there was about $5.65 trillion in total taxable income from all individual taxpayers, and most of that came from middle income earners. The nearby chart shows the distribution, and the big hump in the center is where Democrats are inevitably headed for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks.*7 But take a careful look at this graph. The “bins” that constitute each bar on the graph vary wildly in size. The initial bins are in increments of five or ten thousand dollars. No wonder the bars are low: These are narrow bins! Then right as we get into the middle class—precisely where the author claims the tax base is largest—the bins expand dramatically in size.

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If one actually wanted to argue that a temperature axis should include zero, temperature would have to be measured as a ratio variable, i.e., on a scale with a meaningful zero point. For example, you could use the Kelvin scale, for which absolute zero has a natural physical meaning independent of human cultural conventions. *7 An apocryphal story relates that when asked “Why did you rob all those banks?” the legendary bank robber Willie Sutton replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” *8 Moreover, the error bars show the standard deviation of the mean, not the standard deviation of the observations. Thus they do not directly represent the dispersion of the points within the bin, but rather our uncertainty about a bin’s mean value.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

Our ability to capture and store information is greatly outpacing our ability to understand it or its implications. Though the business costs of storing the world’s information may be driving toward zero, the social costs may be much higher, posing huge future liabilities for society and our world. History here can be instructive. Willie Sutton, the famous American bank robber, stole nearly $2 million over his multi-decade career in crime, which began in the 1920s. After his capture by the FBI, a reporter asked Sutton, “Hey, Willie, why do you rob banks?” His answer, oft repeated, was, “Because that is where the money is.” Though Sutton could have robbed two million people of a dollar each, he chose a more logical and time-efficient approach, deciding instead to rob the currency aggregators (banks).

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Data Brokers Are Poor Stewards of Your Data Too One of the problems with having shadowy and poorly regulated data brokerages amass huge volumes of information on us is that these companies can readily be hacked as well. When firms such as Acxiom store trillions of records on each of us, those records will be targeted by organized crime because, as Willie Sutton reminds us, that’s where the money is. This theft of large-scale data sets from data brokers has been going on for many years, and back in 2002–3 more than 1.6 billion customer records were stolen from Acxiom and its clients. According to court documents, the hacker responsible for the theft, Scott Levine, was able to download more than eight gigabytes of Acxiom files, making it one of the largest ever intrusion cases involving the theft of personal data.

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From a crime and security perspective, the aggregation of all these data, exabytes and exabytes of it, means that our most personal of information is no longer likely stored solely on our local hard drives but now aggregated on computer servers around the world. By aggregating everybody’s important data, financial and otherwise, on cloud-based computer servers, we’ve obviated the need for criminals to target everybody’s hard drive individually and instead put all the jewels in a single place for criminals and hackers to target—think Willie Sutton and his love of banks. The cloud is here to stay, and at this point there is no going back. In early 2014, Google decreased the pricing of its cloud storage offerings by nearly 70 percent, to just $0.026 per gigabyte per month (just under three cents versus the $437,000 it cost in 1980). The move sent shock waves through the industry, and a price war ensued with the cloud storage giants Amazon and Microsoft also joining the fray.

The Little Book That Builds Wealth: The Knockout Formula for Finding Great Investments
by Pat Dorsey
Published 1 Mar 2008

As such, they should always be a core part of your stock-picking process. But remember, you don’t need to invest in every part of the stock market. Feeling the need to follow the herd and be exposed to this or that industry without regard to whether the industry’s economics are attractive is a bad idea. Willie Sutton famously robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.” As an investor, you should strive to remember Willie’s reasoning—some industries are structurally more profitable than others, and that’s where the moats are. Your long-term investment dollars should follow. The Bottom Line 1. It’s easier to create a competitive advantage in some industries than it is in others.

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
by Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Hacker
Published 14 Sep 2010

Given public concerns about tax breaks for the wealthy, politicians have, not surprisingly, opted for more subtle means of achieving similar ends. One is slashing back enforcement of tax law. Call it “do-it-yourself tax cuts.” Roughly one out of every six dollars in owed taxes goes unpaid—literally, hundreds of billions a year.11 Not all of these dollars are owed by the rich, of course. But just as Willie Sutton robbed banks because “that’s where the money is,” tax evasion by the rich is where the money is. Most Americans, after all, have most of their taxes automatically taken out of their wages. Rich people and corporations, by contrast, are largely responsible for reporting their complex earnings and capital gains, and they have the will and the way to use intricate partnerships, offshore tax havens, and other devices that skirt or cross legal lines.

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By 1988, he had helped to cut into the RNC’s traditional financial advantage.28 Yet despite the effort and accommodation, the Democrats’ new initiatives still left them struggling to keep up, and dangerously dependent on the incumbency card. Democrat, Heal Thyself For Democratic politicians, of course, the stark organizational imbalance sent its own kind of Darwinian message: You’re on your own. Each candidate needed to build an independent financial base to succeed. Like Willie Sutton’s answer to the question of why he robbed banks, individual Democrats needed to go where the money was. In practice, this meant two things: the new breed of affluent activists, and the business groups that were gaining political prominence. Understandably, Democrats sought to gain support from the new bastions of affluent activism we discussed in chapter 6—the advocacy groups that had burst onto the scene in the 1960s and 1970s to champion the concerns of upper-middle-class Americans about environmentalism, consumer rights, and other postmaterial causes.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

Meanwhile, super-elites prosper and their spending on what they like to call “thought leadership” grows, with a predictable impact on the climate of the institutions of the New Class. In her inaugural commencement address, Harvard president Drew Faust observed sadly that the obvious reason so few Harvard graduates were pursuing careers in the humanities and so many were going to Wall Street was, “as bank robber Willie Sutton said, that’s where the money is.” Awareness of those changed incentives has wrought a powerful cultural change. In 1969, radical Harvard activists rallied together to force ROTC off campus. But when some Harvard students walked out of former Bush adviser Greg Mankiw’s class, the Harvard Crimson, training ground for the New York Times masthead, condemned the protesters in an editorial titled “Stay in School.”

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“programs and policies, such as social security” Mac Donald, “The Billions of Dollars That Made Things Worse.” the five largest papers Clifford Marks, “In Media Coverage, Deficit Eclipses Unemployment,” National Journal, May 16, 2011. “It just doesn’t make sense for people” David Burt, “Grad School Scrutinized,” Yale Daily News, September 21, 2011. “as bank robber Willie Sutton” Drew Gilpin Faust, “Baccalaureate Address to the Class of 2008,” Cambridge, MA, June 3, 2008. “we love Greg Mankiw” Allison Gofman, “Walking Out on Results,” Harvard Political Review, November 6, 2011. “My first reaction was nostalgia” N. Gregory Mankiw, “Know What You’re Protesting,” New York Times, December 3, 2011.

No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller
by Harry Markopolos
Published 1 Mar 2010

Any lingering doubts any of us had that Bernie Madoff was running a multibillion-dollar scam, maybe even the biggest fraud in history, had long since disappeared, but the question that Neil, Frank, and I continued to debate was: What kind of scheme was it? Was he front-running, was it a Ponzi scheme, or was it maybe even something else? Obviously we weren’t shocked to find gambling in Casablanca, or swindlers on Wall Street. The famous 1950s bank robber Willie Sutton was quoted as explaining that he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is.” It’s probably a good thing Willie Sutton didn’t know about Wall Street. Throughout history, where there has been money to be made there have been crooks, con artists, and swindlers ready to sell get-rich-quick (or sometimes slowly but consistently) dreams to willing investors.

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
by Robert H. Frank
Published 31 Mar 2016

With tens of millions of baby boomers slated to enter retirement during the coming years, fiscal experts warn that we will not be able to balance our budgets and make essential investments going forward without substantial new revenue. And since most of the income gains during the past four decades have accrued to those atop the earnings ladder, most of that revenue would have to come from the wealthy. As Willie Sutton was said to have responded when asked why he robbed banks, “That’s where the money is.” We may assume that those who are more keenly aware of the importance of luck in their lives are also more likely to feel grateful for any successes they’ve enjoyed. How might such feelings affect their willingness to help maintain the infrastructure that helped them succeed?

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It
by Jonathan Zittrain
Published 27 May 2009

When users make poor decisions about what new software to run, the results can be devastating to their machines and, if they are connected to the Internet, to countless others’ machines as well. To be sure, Microsoft Windows has been the target of malware infections for years, but this in part reflects Microsoft’s dominant market share. Recall Willie Sutton’s explanation for robbing banks: that’s where the money is.95 As more users switch to other platforms, those platforms will become more appealing targets. And the most enduring way to subvert them may be through the front door, asking a user’s permission to add some new functionality that is actually a bad deal, rather than trying to steal in through the back, silently exploiting some particular OS flaw that allows new code to run without the user or her antivirus software noticing.

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For many programs, including FunCade and KaZaA, uninstalling the main program does not uninstall all the undesirable software originally installed along with it. Users must be knowledgeable enough to identify and remove the software manually. 94. See IntelliAdmin, Security Flaw in RealVNC 4.1.1 (last updated June 2006), http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2006/05/security-flaw-in-realvnc-411.html. 95. See WILLIE SUTTON & EDWARD LINN, WHERE THE MONEY WAS: THE MEMOIRS OF A BANK ROBBER (1976). 96. Microsoft TechNet, 10 Immutable Laws of Security, http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/community/columns/security/essays/10imlaws.mspx?mfr=true (last visited June 1, 2007). 97. Id. 98. Id. 99. Cf. MADELINE DREXLER, SECRET AGENTS: THE MENACE OF EMERGING INFECTIONS (2002).

Pocket New York City Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet
Published 27 Sep 2012

(www.hudsonriverpark.org; Manhattan’s west side from Battery Park to 59th St; 1 to Franklin St, 1 to Canal St) 10 New York City Police Museum Museum Offline map Google map Get the brief on ‘New York’s Finest,’ with cool old police vehicles, as well as the mug shots and weapons of notorious New York criminals like Willie Sutton and Al Capone. There’s a collection of NYPD uniforms throughout the decades, insight into anti-terrorism tactics, and a ‘Hall of Heroes’ memorial to officers killed in the line of duty since 1845. The museum itself is housed in a neo-Renaissance palazzo on a landfilled inlet. (www.nycpolicemuseum.org; 100 Old Slip; adult/child $8/5; 10am-5pm Mon-Sat, noon-5pm Sun; 1 to South Ferry, 2/3 to Wall St) 11 Museum of American Finance Museum Offline map Google map Money makes this museum go round, with exhibits focusing on historic moments in American financial history.

A Burglar's Guide to the City
by Geoff Manaugh
Published 17 Mar 2015

She is most well-known for a project called 15 Lombard St., a widely imitated artist’s book that explored what it might take to pull off a bank heist in central London. It was motivated, Kerbel explained to me, by her being, when she made it, a recent arts graduate from Canada living in London and utterly penniless. And, as master bank robber Willie Sutton apocryphally once pointed out, banks are where the money is. Kerbel thus spent several months furtively casing a bank at 15 Lombard Street, noting the layout of the bank itself as well as every detail of its daily schedule. Her observations included when cash deliveries were made and what time of day usually saw the most customers.

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt
by Steven Johnson
Published 11 May 2020

On the one hand, the crimes Every’s men would later commit on board one of those Moorish ships were horrendous ones, ones they might well have refrained from had they captured a ship populated by Christians. But the fact that they were targeting Muslim vessels in the first place had an obvious financial justification. To paraphrase the classic Willie Sutton line about bank robbery, the Muslim ships were where the money was. But the mosque at Maydh was different. There was nothing to be gained by destroying it. Yes, as pirates, you might resort to violence (or the threat of it) to coerce a town that refused to trade with you to hand over whatever you had hoped to barter for.

The Broken Ladder
by Keith Payne
Published 8 May 2017

No one offered accounts about the richest people in their towns, or articles discussing the salaries of baseball stars or bank executives. But inequality is driven as much by the wealth of the wealthy as by the poverty of the poor. It is natural to focus on the poor when considering the effects of the great gap between the wealthy and the impoverished in contemporary societies. Asked why he robbed banks, the famous criminal Willie Sutton supposedly answered, “Because that’s where the money is.” If we asked humanitarians why they help the poor, they might likewise answer, “Because that’s where the need is.” Alleviating poverty is of course an essential goal for both moral and practical reasons. Poverty devastates every aspect of an individual’s life.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 1 Jan 2010

This was because, during 1922, the Germans seriously fell behind the reparation payments demanded of them by the Versailles Treaty, which had concluded the First World War. Had they wanted money, however, the French and the Belgians should have occupied the banks – after all, ‘that’s where the money is’, as the famous American bank robber Willie Sutton allegedly said, when asked why he robbed banks – rather than a bunch of coal mines and steel mills. Why didn’t they do that? It was because they were worried about German inflation. Since the summer of 1922, inflation in Germany had been getting out of control. The cost of living index rose by sixteen times in six months in the second half of 1922.

Heads I Win, Tails I Win
by Spencer Jakab
Published 21 Jun 2016

Samuelson, the Washington Post business columnist, was exceedingly gracious when I used his name in front of a quote by the eminent economist Paul Samuelson, telling me that it’s happened before. “Once, the New York Times had me winning Paul Samuelson’s Nobel Prize. I kept waiting for the $1 million check to arrive, but it never did.” So naturally a reporter like me can be a real pedant when people bring up a quote that “everyone” knows someone made. For example, Willie Sutton never said that he robbed banks because that’s where the money is, Ben Franklin’s famous dictum about thrift wasn’t “A penny saved is a penny earned,” and P. T. Barnum didn’t say, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” I have heard a couple of stockbrokers express that last sentiment, though. A quote one often hears about investing, that Einstein said compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world, is an apocryphal one that I read and hear all the time.

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity
by Currid
Published 9 Nov 2010

“If you’re not in the thirty-mile zone, then you’ve kind of opted out,” one celebrity journalist explained. “LA, New York, London—that’s where you go to show the flag. For the life of me, I can see no other reason to go to Hyde [an LA nightclub].”2 Hence the circular relationship between the media and celebrity, which calls to mind the response of the famous bank robber Willie Sutton when asked why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.” However, one needs more than being in Los Angeles to become a movie star or in London to be considered part of the global jet-setting elite. If celebrity rests significantly on the photo, then being in front of the flashbulb at the right instant is what counts.

A Fine Mess
by T. R. Reid
Published 13 Mar 2017

In total, the ISF is paid by half of 1% of all French families. It raises less than 2% of tax revenues. It could be eliminated with minimal impact on the national budget. “It brings in perhaps €4 billion per year—essentially nothing!” Professor Collet explained. “But if any government were to drop it, you’re sure to lose the next election.” This is a Willie Sutton approach. Sutton, a Depression-era crook, was asked why he kept robbing banks and famously answered, “Because that’s where the money is.” Still, this form of tax has been decidedly out of favor for the last ten years or so. It used to be common for developed countries to have a wealth tax that worked like the French ISF; in 1990, more than half of the members of the rich nations’ group, the OECD, had a wealth tax in place, in addition to the normal income, property, corporate, and sales taxes.

How Doctors Think
by Jerome Groopman
Published 15 Jan 2007

"So cardiologists looked for the part of the heart where you have the smallest chance of meeting a coronary artery," Lock explained, "and that turned out to be under the xiphoid." Lock returned to the lesson of Holly Clark. "Now I teach my trainees not to go by rote under the xiphoid. We should always go where the fluid is. We follow Sutton's law." Sutton's law is named after the 1930s Brooklyn bank robber Willie Sutton, who robbed bank after bank and accumulated a fortune before he was captured. When Sutton was brought into court, the judge asked him why he robbed banks. "Because that's where the money is," he answered. (The tale is probably apocryphal: the reply attributed to Sutton likely was made up by a reporter at the trial to color his story.

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good
by Robert H. Frank
Published 3 Sep 2011

But only a fool could pretend that we will be able to do what needs to be done in the years ahead in the absence of substantial additional revenue. Although I believe it would be a bad idea to raise top marginal income tax rates, we must be prepared to consider other ways of taxing society’s most prosperous members. As Willie Sutton said when asked why he robbed banks, that’s where the money is. If we can’t tax the rich, there’s no hope of raising the revenue we’ll need. But the good news, as we’ll see, is that certain taxes can be levied on top earners without harming their interests in any way. ELEVEN Taxing Harmful Activities A tax on any activity not only generates revenue, it also discourages the activity.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets
by John Plender
Published 27 Jul 2015

For example, interest could be disguised if the lender issued an IOU, or a bill of exchange, at a discount while insisting on being paid back at face value. In some countries, the laws themselves also ceased to be enforced as the pre-Reformation Catholic Church became more lax. So, like the bank robber Willie Sutton, who reputedly said he robbed banks ‘because that’s where the money is’, the asset-rich, cash-poor European feudal elite went to such merchants because they were the only available source of money for the pursuit of war, grand projects or conspicuous consumption. The evolution of a more market-oriented economy, pre-figuring modern market capitalism, thus freed monarchs from dependence on feudal retainers, while making it possible to run paid bureaucracies and standing armies.

The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke
by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi
Published 17 Aug 2004

Just as corporations were downsizing across America, just when a bidding war for decent family housing was heating up, and just when families lost the all-purpose safety net once provided by the stay-at-home mother, easy credit flooded in, looking just like a life raft to the family that was drowning. Where the Money Is “Why do you rob banks?” The question was put to Willie Sutton, famed bank robber of the 1940s. He replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” That’s how most businesses work: They make profits by dealing with customers who have money. And that is how the lending business used to work: Companies made loans to people who had the money (or soon would have the money) to repay them.

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 13 May 2013

Net-savvy, disenfranchised youth fuelled the protests that swept across the Middle East and North Africa during the Arab Spring, toppling dictatorships that most thought were immovable, but there is a more discomforting scenario, especially as the dust settles and the “youth bulge” looking for jobs grows restless. Just as Willie Sutton famously remarked when asked why he robbed banks – “because that’s where the money is” – the temptation to breach servers that host valuable data thousands of kilometres distant but only a mouse click away might be irresistible to scores of computer-literate unemployed youth from Rio, Rangoon, or Marrakesh.

Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy
by Andrew Yang
Published 15 Nov 2021

Let’s say I raised the income tax to something very high, like 75 percent. How much of his money do we see?” They think about it for a second. “Next to nothing. Because he’s not dumb enough to pay himself $10 billion in salary. Instead, most of his wealth is in Amazon stock, and Amazon currently pays zero in federal taxes.” The legendary bank robber Willie Sutton was supposedly once asked, “Why did you rob the bank?” His simple answer? “Because that’s where the money is.” Where is the money now? We need to focus less on the town dentist and more on the Amazons of the world. Right now, our largest and most successful companies are paying next to nothing in taxes.

Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs
by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu
Published 23 Jan 2024

When it realised that Google’s search engine was able to display reduced-sized “thumbnail” images of its goods, it sued for copyright infringement. Why should an artistic photography outfit take a shot at a search engine that simply redirected users towards the paywall protecting its goods? The best guess is the apocryphal answer given by Willie Sutton when asked why he carried on trying to rob banks: “Because that’s where the money is.” Because the outcome of “fair use” defences has such a mixed history, Perfect 10 probably calculated it had an even chance of making a killing. Indeed, the first court to hear the case found in favour of the agency and told Google to stop showing thumbnails of its contents.

Paper Promises
by Philip Coggan
Published 1 Dec 2011

Meanwhile the finance sector’s share of US GDP doubled, rising from 4 per cent in the 1970s to 8 per cent in 2007 – 08. Bank assets and profits were also rising relatively rapidly over this period. Many of the best and brightest of our graduates have headed for the finance sector over the last thirty years. Their reasoning was as simple as that of bank robber Willie Sutton. Asked why he picked on banks, he replied, ‘That’s where the money is.’ The seven-figure bonuses paid to investment bankers get a lot of attention. But the really big fortunes have been earned by those in private equity companies and hedge funds, where a vast number of billionaires have been created.

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics
by Jonathan Aldred
Published 1 Jan 2009

And citizens living in these more distrustful systems are more likely to act selfishly, evading taxation and breaking other laws whenever they expect the benefits to exceed the personal costs.58 Even if the Homo economicus doctrine does not directly affect how people behave, it affects the moral judgements they make. When the legendary American bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he replied, ‘Because that’s where the money is.’59 Sutton misses the moral point in a way that is uncannily echoed by Gary Becker in his Nobel Lecture: I was puzzled by why theft is socially harmful, since it appears merely to redistribute resources, usually from richer to poorer individuals.

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
by Dan Ariely
Published 19 Feb 2007

By 2010, banking analysts say, there will be $50 billion in new electronic transactions, nearly twice the number processed under the Visa and MasterCard brands in 2004.26 The question, therefore, is how we can control our tendency to cheat when we are brought to our senses only by the sight of cash—and what we can do now that cash is going away. Willie Sutton allegedly said that he robbed banks because that’s where the money was. By that logic he might be writing the fine print for a credit card company today or penciling in blackout dates for an airline. It might not be where the cash is, but it’s certainly where you will find the money. CHAPTER 13 Beer and Free Lunches What Is Behavioral Economics, and Where Are the Free Lunches?

The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World
by Michael Marmot
Published 9 Sep 2015

But thinking you need no lock because if you haven’t got much would-be robbers will look elsewhere suggests that Porgy had not been reading the figures from the Department of Justice in the US.7 These show that the lower the household income the higher the risk of property crime. We have a similar situation in the UK: the more deprived the area the higher the crime rate. One civil servant said, sardonically: that’s joined-up government. The public transport is so bad, the poor have to rob where they live. Bank robber Willie Sutton may have explained his penchant for robbing banks as because ‘that’s where the money is’, but more property crime takes place in the US and the UK where the money isn’t.8 The same is largely true for violent crime: higher rates in low-income areas. Both theft and violence lead to fear of crime.

Planet Ponzi
by Mitch Feierstein
Published 2 Feb 2012

The idea that these things somehow function with unique excellence is the precise reverse of the truth. To quote Michael Lewis again: ‘An investor who went from the stock market to the bond market was like a small, furry animal raised on an island without predators removed to a pit full of pythons.’2 So let’s look at the pythons. The sell-side Willie Sutton was one of America’s best-known bank robbers. When asked by a journalist why he robbed banks, Sutton replied simply: ‘Because that’s where the money is.’ A good answer, but wrong. Yes, banks are where the money is, but you need to be an idiot to rob them. If you want to get rich, you need to work in one, ideally on Wall Street or in the City of London.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

This points toward a future where insurance companies become front-line guardians of the health of society, and quite a change from the days of Lloyd, his coffee, and his blackboards. Finance Look at the skyline of São Paulo, Hong Kong, or New York. Check out the tallest buildings, those iron monsters. Who owns that high-flying real estate? Insurance companies and financial firms. Why? For the same reason that Willie Sutton allegedly said he robbed banks—“Because that’s where they keep the money.” Since we’ve already covered insurance, we’ll shift focus to the changes in banking and finance, where exponential technologies are steamrolling both industries, completely altering this business of money. We got a peak at this transformation earlier, when we decoded the dollars pouring into crowdfunding, ICOs, venture capital, and sovereign wealth funds.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence
by John Brockman
Published 5 Oct 2015

This turns moral philosophy into a key industry sector. The output could be quite instructive for the human race as well as for the robots. THE VALUE-LOADING PROBLEM ELIEZER S. YUDKOWSKY Artificial intelligence theorist; research fellow and cofounder, Machine Intelligence Research Institute The prolific bank robber Willie Sutton, when asked why he robbed banks, reportedly replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” When it comes to AI, the most important issues are about extremely powerful, smarter-than-human artificial intelligence (aka superintelligence) because that’s where the utilons are—the value at stake. Minds that are more powerful have bigger real-world impacts.

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 3 Sep 2018

To preserve and enhance their offensive capabilities in this unfamiliar theater of war, they work diligently to perpetuate insecurity. In Chapters 9 and 10, I’ll talk more about how they do this, why their logic is exactly wrong, and what they need to do to reverse course. CRIMINALS BENEFIT FROM INSECURITY Of course criminals prefer an insecure Internet; it’s more profitable for them. Willie Sutton famously robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.” Today, the money is online, and increasingly, criminals are, too. Criminals steal money from our bank accounts. They steal our credit card data and use it to commit fraud, or they steal our identity information and use that. They also lock up our data and then try to coerce us into paying for its return—that’s ransomware.

Hedgehogging
by Barton Biggs
Published 3 Jan 2005

These funds were very successful for us and their investors because we were early, they had an edge of one type or another granted by the host government, and they went to premiums—for a while. A Pakistan fund that Morgan Stanley underwrote in the ebbing days of the emerging-markets bull run was another story. The bank robber,Willie Sutton, appearing in court, was asked by the judge why he robbed banks. He replied simply, “Because that’s where the money is.” I love emerging markets because they are where the money is, which causes me to think of Miles Moreland, the ultimate, heroic emerging-markets investor. Rather than regurgitate all the conventional babble about emerging markets, let me tell you about a man and his firm, Blakeney Management, both of whom are the real thing. 

The Ten Million Dollar Getaway: The Inside Story of the Lufthansa Heist
by Doug Feiden
Published 1 Sep 2014

And it’s been home to two former steak restaurateurs named Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, who went on to make and lose a fortune as co-owners of the notorious Studio 54 discotheque. Later, if you asked them where they were from, they would never say, “from Queens,” but always, “from 54th Street.” Queens has always occupied a special place in the annals of crime. The bank that Willie Sutton finally went to jail for robbing was in Queens. The bar where the multimillion-dollar computer defrauding of Equity Insurance was hatched was in Queens. The largest loan-sharking and bookmaking ring ever cracked in the U.S. was in Queens. Queens was also the Ruth Snyder-Judd Gray story, one of the most celebrated murder trials in U.S. history.

Efficiently Inefficient: How Smart Money Invests and Market Prices Are Determined
by Lasse Heje Pedersen
Published 12 Apr 2015

Such macro traders often end up being exposed to the carry trade even when this is not the main objective. TABLE 11.1. PERFORMANCE OF CARRY TRADES ACROSS GLOBAL MARKETS Source: Koijen, Moskowitz, Pedersen, and Vrugt (2012). 11.2. CENTRAL BANK MONITORING Macro traders pay tremendous attention to central banks. Why? Well, because that’s where the money is (to paraphrase Willie Sutton). Central banks control short-term interest rates, which has implications across all markets. For example, the interest rate determines the currency carry and bond prices. Therefore, macro investors monitor central banks, trying to predict their next move. Is the central bank about to raise interest rates or lower them?

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm
Published 10 May 2010

Reforms introduced by President Obama in early 2009 have banned government employees from lobbying activities for two years. That’s a start, but the time frame should be extended to four or five years, if not longer. It’s also necessary to limit the lobbying power of financial firms. That’s obviously a tall order. Politicians batten on the financial sector for the simple reason articulated by bank robber Willie Sutton: because “that’s where the money is.” They insulate the financial system from regulatory meddling and starve agencies of the taxpayer funds necessary to implement regulations. In exchange, financial firms funnel massive amounts of money toward candidates—$311 million in 2008 alone. It’s hard to choke this flow off.

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000
by John Steele Gordon
Published 12 Oct 2009

It was a bit like a doctor declaring a temperature of 102 degrees to be normal so that a sick patient could be declared healthy. And they changed the rules on who could own S&Ls. Instead of local people only, almost anyone could own a thrift and even use noncash assets, such as land, the most illiquid of all assets, as reserves. Latter-day Willy Suttons, sensing opportunity, moved into the industry. In 1982 Congress allowed the S&Ls to write nonresidential mortgages and make consumer loans, just like commercial banks, but without anything like the capital and reserve requirements or accounting strictures of commercial banks. A disaster was now unavoidable.

Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide
by Joshua S. Goldstein
Published 15 Sep 2011

Looking at just the UN costs and focusing on that “ongoing haggling,” the peacekeeping budget is divided with almost half paid by the permanent members of the Security Council, about half by the developed countries, and just 2 percent paid by sixty developing countries and one-fiftieth of one percent of the budget coming from the poorest ninety-seven countries, which are a majority of UN members. Just as the famous bank robber Willie Sutton said he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is,” so the UN’s peacekeeping efforts tap the richer countries because they have the money to pay the bills. In terms of the size of peacekeeping missions—a major determinant of the cost—the number of troops is determined not so much by the objective needs as by what is authorized by a wary Security Council (or the equivalent body for a regional or multinational mission), and by what contributions actually materialize from troop-contributing countries.

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 1 Jan 2000

The attacks will look different—the burglar will manipulate digital connections and database entries instead of lockpicks and crowbars, the terrorist will target information systems instead of airplanes—but the motivation and psychology will be the same. It also means we don’t need a completely different legal system to deal with the future. If the future is like the past—except with cooler special effects—then a legal system that worked in the past is likely to work in the future. Willie Sutton robbed banks because that was where the money was. Today, the money isn’t in banks;it’s zipping around computer networks. Every day, the world’s banks transfer billions of dollars among themselves by simply modifying numbers in computerized databases. Meanwhile, the average physical bank robbery grosses a little over fifteen hundred dollars.

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead
by Alan S. Blinder
Published 24 Jan 2013

Through all of this, one group has kept its eye squarely on the ball. That’s the financial industry and its legions of lobbyists, aided immensely by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 landmark Citizens United decision, which, in effect, allows corporations to make unlimited political contributions. Willie Sutton knew where the money was (in the banks), and it’s still there. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the financial industry ranked behind only the healthcare industry in lobbying expenditures over the years 2009–2012, and they were tops in political contributions in 2012. According to the center’s classification, the vast majority of this cash went to conservatives rather than to liberals.

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking
by Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett
Published 30 Jun 2013

[40] We use targeted marketing here, rather than the churn example, because the expected value framework actually reveals an important complexity to the churn example that we’re not ready to deal with. We will return to that later in Chapter 11 when we’re ready to deal with it. [41] This could be extended to any number of classes, though to keep things simple(r) we’ll use two. [42] They refer to these as Willy Sutton models, after the famed bank robber who robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.” Chapter 8. Visualizing Model Performance Fundamental concepts: Visualization of model performance under various kinds of uncertainty; Further consideration of what is desired from data mining results.

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession
by Peter L. Bernstein
Published 1 Jan 2000

The English agreed to return jean from London to Calais, upon payment of the first installment of six hundred thousand gold crowns on the ransom. At that point, ten of his fellow noble prisoners would also be liberated, but they were to be replaced by forty wealthy members of the Third Estate-the bourgeoisie; like Willy Sutton, Edward III knew where the money was. The remainder of Jean's ransom was due in six semiannual installments of four hundred thousand gold crowns, with one-fifth of the hostages to be released after each payment. The ransom would have been a terrible burden on the French under any circumstances, but especially following the depredations of the Black Death and the havoc and destruction of war.

The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea
by Steve Levine
Published 23 Oct 2007

Keller’s overseas deputy, Silcox, still wasn’t convinced: What Giffen proposed “was a business concept totally alien to any of us.” Chevron seemed to be drifting from its traditional role of hard-driving oil company to one of facilitator for a banking enterprise. Ultimately, however, Chevron executives took comfort from a saying attributed to bank robber Willie Sutton. “They asked him why did he rob banks, and he says, ‘That’s where the money is.’ When you’re an oil company, you’ve gotta go where there is oil,” Derr observed. So it was that Silcox prepared the search for “an oil field that would generate cash in a hurry, something that would be easy to export right away to finance the consortium.”

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism
by Joyce Appleby
Published 22 Dec 2009

Changes in political campaigning promoted the collusion between economic and political leaders. With the emergence of television as the principal medium for election campaigns forty years ago, money—never negligible—took on a new importance. The expense of TV spots threw officeholders and their challengers into the arms of business interests. As slick Willie Sutton once explained, he robbed banks because that’s where the money was. And that’s why candidates of both parties went to the wealthy to seek contributions. A toxic combination of greed and need—greed on the part of the high-flying engineers of finance and need from politicians to pay for their ever more expensive campaigns—made officeholders beholden to business executives who wanted government off their backs.

The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It
by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig
Published 15 Feb 2013

A legislative proposal to implement this measure was introduced by the British Government on October 12, 2012 (see http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/icb_banking_reform_bill.pdf, accessed October 21, 2012). 29. The quotation in the heading of this section is a statement that legend incorrectly attributes to the bank robber Willie Sutton when he was answering a reporter who had asked why he robbed banks (Keys 2006). 30. For accounts of pre-1990 Europe, see Borges (1990), Bruni (1990), and Caminal et al. (1990) for Southern Europe, as well as Englund (1990) for Sweden. For 1987, Bruni (1990, 250) lists the shares of governments’ debts in banks’ portfolios as 35.4 percent for Italy and 37.4 percent for Spain; Borges (1990, 330) reports 43 percent for Portugal in 1988.

Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition
by Kindleberger, Charles P. and Robert Z., Aliber
Published 9 Aug 2011

So, however, are the number of concert halls and the extensions of art museums and the student unions on college and university campuses. Many of these cultural centers are financed with gifts from wealthy individuals who have become much richer and more generous when asset prices have soared and economic euphoria was a growth stock. The economic rationale for tall buildings is remindful of the remark of Willie Sutton, America’s most famous bank robber, on his choice of profession. ‘That’s where the money is.’ The surge in wealth in a bubble leads to economic behavior that would appear as exceptional – the squandering of wealth – in normal times. The market for corporate jets soared between 2002 and 2007; there were waiting lists to buy the large Gulfstreams and impatient buyers paid several million dollars to buy the positions in the queue of those with earlier delivery dates.

Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art
by Michael Shnayerson
Published 20 May 2019

Saturation was another: too many artists brandishing their newly minted MFAs, hoping for quick success. Overproduction of art created its own saturation. Fast as the market grew, contemporary artists could turn out art faster. Saturation plagued art fairs: too many fairs, too much art on display. Yet dealers felt they had no choice but to attend five or six a year, if not more—for that, as Willie Sutton had famously said about banks, was where the money was. Or at least where they hoped to find it. And so they came weighted down by lots and lots of art, much of it already familiar to many of the buyers strolling by. In McAndrew’s survey, the dealers’ top concern was finding new clients. All too many went home without them.

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age
by Leslie Berlin
Published 7 Nov 2017

In 1975, with the encouragement of Capital Group, Valentine spun the Sequoia fund into an independent venture capital firm of the same name and with a similar group of investors—not individuals but deep-pocketed institutions such as pension funds and universities with large endowments. (“Go where the money is,” Valentine likes to say, quoting his mentor Bob Kirby and the bank robber Willie Sutton.) The independent Sequoia Capital also retained a focus on high-risk, high-reward investments. Valentine rented an office on Sand Hill Road, near the venture firm Kleiner & Perkins, started by Fairchild cofounder Eugene Kleiner and Hewlett-Packard alumnus Tom Perkins. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner & Perkins were pioneers in a trend that would later prove an essential element of Silicon Valley’s longevity: an older generation of successful tech entrepreneurs and executives mentoring and funding later generations.

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 5 Oct 2020

People decide how it gets distributed by way of laws. So change could happen by changing the laws, as I’ve been saying all along. Or you could just shift some account numbers, as happened in Switzerland. Ah yes. The banks. That reminds me of a fine story. Do you remember what the bank robber Willie Sutton said when a reporter asked him why he did what he did? I do! Good of you to ask. And good of that reporter too. The reporter said, Why do you rob banks? And Sutton replied, Because that’s where the money is. 100 She took an overnight train to Montpellier, slept the sleep of the blessed.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
by Nicole Perlroth
Published 9 Feb 2021

It was now a slow, tiny, and antiquated part of a much larger and faster internet, and the Pentagon decided the time was right to shut ARPANET down for good. ARPANET’s successor, the internet, was quietly growing to 100,000 host machines, each with multiple users, and was nearing its tipping point. As Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer made their way onto PCs, and the world’s infatuation with the web grew, so did the NSA’s. “Why did Willie Sutton rob banks?” Gosler would repeatedly ask his bosses and underlings at the intel agencies. “Because that’s where the money is!” There was still money in brick-and-mortar banks, but the motherlode was moving to the internet, along with everything else. Pulling out critical intelligence would require a complete transformation of the way the NSA did business.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

This is when the “too-big-to-fail” card was played. Policy makers, who were previously persuaded that big and highly leveraged was beautiful in finance, were now convinced that allowing these gargantuan firms to fail would cause an even greater economic disaster. When he was asked by a journalist why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton, an infamous criminal of the Great Depression era, is reputed to have said, “That’s where the money is.” In modern times, titans of finance assiduously build persuasion power because that’s where the money is now. During the 2007‒2008 economic crisis, the heads of big banks were perceived as having considerable expertise because they controlled an important sector of the economy and were fawned over by the media and politicians as highly talented people who were richly rewarded for their specialized knowledge.

The Irrational Bundle
by Dan Ariely
Published 3 Apr 2013

By 2010, banking analysts say, there will be $50 billion in new electronic transactions, nearly twice the number processed under the Visa and MasterCard brands in 2004.30 The question, therefore, is how we can control our tendency to cheat when we are brought to our senses only by the sight of cash—and what we can do now that cash is going away. Willie Sutton allegedly said that he robbed banks because that’s where the money was. By that logic he might be writing the fine print for a credit card company today or penciling in blackout dates for an airline. It might not be where the cash is, but it’s certainly where you will find the money. Chapter 15 Beer and Free Lunches What Is Behavioral Economics, and Where Are the Free Lunches?

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker
Published 24 Sep 2012

Predation may also be called exploitative, instrumental, or practical violence.76 It coincides with Hobbes’s first cause of quarrel: to invade for gain. It is Dawkins’s survival machine treating another survival machine as a part of its environment, like a rock or a river or a lump of food. It is the interpersonal equivalent of Clausewitz’s dictum that war is merely the continuation of policy by other means. It is Willie Sutton’s answer to the question of why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.” It lies beneath the advice of a farmer to increase a horse’s efficiency by castrating it with two bricks. When asked, “Doesn’t that hurt,” the farmer replies, “Not if you keep your thumbs out of the way.”77 Because predatory violence is just a means to a goal, it comes in as many varieties as there are human goals.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder
Published 1 Sep 2008

That Weinberg cared about his opinion mattered more than the opinion itself; Buffett has no recollection of which stock he recommended to Weinberg. 9. Buffett later said, in an interview, that these were the words that ran through his head—“that’s where the money is”—although at the time he was not familiar with the famous quote attributed to bank robber Willie Sutton. 10. Almost a decade later, he would lower the age to 30 while talking to his sister Bertie, who was 14 or 15 at the time. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek. 11. Buffett believes he overheard his father talking about the stock, which traded on the “Curb Exchange,” where brokers gathered in the street (later organized into the American Stock Exchange). 12.