Jennifer Granholm Quotes

Is there any fairness in a system where a group of people can borrow a bunch of money to buy a company and pay themselves millions of dollars in dividends and fees, while the company itself ends up bankrupt and its employees lose their jobs, health insurance and pensions?

Manchester United and Liverpool have been bought with huge leverage, and we've got Roman Abramovich at Chelsea who can turn his loans into shares. It is really important for the Premier League to ask itself: if a club is being bought on such a mountain of debt, isn't that a possible recipe for disaster for the future?

Carl Icahn, corporate raider by trade, is creative, a scrambler, and certainly not to be underestimated.

Would I advise early-stage companies against taking debt? One hundred percent yes.

You know, when the cost of capital goes down, when credit becomes cheap, people start taking greater and greater risks.

As a rule, bond funds will not double your money overnight.

It's a sin to have your films not to make money.

I've probably done more venture capital deals and expansion financings than I have done private equity deals. But both are the same. Private equity companies have also built jobs.

If you're running a business for the long term, the last thing you should be doing is borrowing money to buy back stock.

We've got some real greedy hogs who own no interest in the company they're running, whose sole interest is in whatever it takes to be able to get to the point to fly out on their golden parachute and milk the shareholder and take risks that they shouldn't take.

We've always been modestly leveraged, and we've never believed in a great deal of leverage on either our private equity business or on our investment banking business. And I think it really goes back to my uncle and dad growing up in the Depression and just seeing what happened to people who were overly levered.

The people who did the collateralized mortgage obligations, sold them to pension funds, then sold them short, then bought credit default swap insurance on them, are just amazing. They are a law unto themselves.

When you are buying companies, everyone in the company feels very good. Their chests are puffed out. At Blackstone, I used to tell people that there is nothing more fun than buying a company with somebody else's money. The business is growing, which creates more opportunity for your employees.

Private-equity and hedge-fund guys typically come into a situation of mediocrity, where rapid change may result in a profit.

Big banks have long had private equity divisions that put up capital for deals too complex or risky for individual shareholders to finance.

One, I love the creativity. I love the ability to create a capital structure that is appropriate for a company, no matter what field it happens to be in.

I put £150,000 into the stage production of Grease and have got back £1.5 million so far. It has been a fantastic success.

In the 1980s, corporate raiders began mounting unfriendly takeovers of companies that could deliver higher returns to their shareholders - if they abandoned their other stakeholders.

Producers are not gamblers. They want a good return on their investment.

Far too many executives have become more concerned with the 'four P's' - pay, perks, power and prestige - rather than making profits for shareholders.

The activists play the balance sheet by selling a division to buy back stock and leveraging the balance sheet and buying back more stock.

Tech executives have historically been owners of significant portions of their companies' stock so there is a propensity for them to diversify as a rule.

Venture capitalists are professional money managers. We are provided capital to invest as long as we can return it to our investors with a strong return in a reasonable amount of time. A strong return is three times cash on cash. A reasonable amount of time is ten years max.

[Corporate] takeovers are for the public good, but that's not why I do it. I do it to make money.

Banks always want their capital requirements to be as low as possible, so they can take more risks, which can enable them to make more money – and reap bigger bonuses for executives.