Capital Management Quotes

We rarely use much debt and, when we do, we attempt to structure it on a long-term fixed rate basis. We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet. This conservatism has penalized our results but it is the only behavior that leaves us comfortable, considering our fiduciary obligations to policyholders, depositors, lenders and the many equity holders who have committed unusually large portions of their net worth to our care.

Like air traffic, the free movement of capital needs controls.

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

I've got $130 million in the bank and a whiteboard full of cool ideas for emerging markets and technologies where we're gonna test the waters and see what happens.

You must take risks, both with your own money or with borrowed money. Risk taking is essential to business growth.

I mean, everyone agrees with stress tests for banks. I mean that's clear. But banks should do that on their own. And they should worry about their own capital functioning. That's what they should do. It shouldn't be a government function.

Oppressive and intolerable as was the regime of the great consolidations of capital, even its victims, while they cursed it, were forced to admit the prodigious increase of efficiency which had been imparted to the national industries, the vast economies effected by concentration of management and unity of organization

Second of all, I don't think Wall Street is doing what it's supposed to be doing, even after the shameful performance of the last two years. They're are not allocating capital.

I think there's an awful lot of twaddle and bullshit on EVA. The whole game is to turn retained earnings into more earnings. EVA has ideas about cost of capital that make no sense. Of course, if a company generates high returns on capital and can maintain this over time, it will do well. But the mental system as a whole does not work.

It seems to me intolerable to allow private people to use public capital in order to make a guaranteed profit for themselves .... If private citizens won’t supply munitions of war at a reasonable profit and take pot luck with the rest of the citizens in the matter of taxation, then the government ought to build its own plants and conscript the necessary managers to run them.

Raising capital is not the toughest part. The toughest part is building a great team and making sure it's growing with the company.

As an investment banker, I'm in the cross-flow of information and the changes that are taking place in capital markets.

The story started over a decade ago when I ran Hermitage Capital Management, the largest investment firm in Russia. I was very successful, but when I started to complain publicly about corruption at the companies in which my fund invested, President Vladimir Putin had me expelled from the country and declared a threat to national security.

CEOs are also chief capital allocators. This is a point Warren Buffett has repeatedly made: that the role management plays in allocating capital across businesses and boosting returns on that capital is a critical yet poorly recognized one.

As long as there is cash, and the economy is running, all is well. But as a bank, we'll have to test, experiment, try a hundred different things. A few may work, a few may fail, but we have to experiment and try.

I think good private equity investors create a lot more economic value than they destroy.

A well-managed business will have a high return on invested capital. But that's a consequence. It's not a way to manage a business.

By means of the banking system the distribution of capital as a special business, a social function, is taken out of the hands of the private capitalists and usurers. But at the same time, banking and credit become the most effective means of driving captialist production beyond its own limits and one of the most effective vehicles of crises and swindle.

A holding company is the people you give your money to while you're being searched.

We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet.

Returns matter a lot. It's our capital.

Unlike a normal venture fund, we never stop raising capital. We can always absorb new capital on the platform and into the next deal as long as we feel it won't distort the allocation and the pricing.

A family business in cinema is not necessarily creative. It is generally about prolonging your family fortune.

Those who start in business with too little money are more likely to succeed than those who start with too much. Energy and imagination are the springboards to wealth creation.

Our virtues live upon our incomes; our vices consume our capital.