It is not by augmenting the capital of the country, but by rendering a greater part of that capital active and productive than would otherwise be so, that the most judicious operations of banking can increase the industry of the country.
Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted; one can make no judicious use of this capital while it is new.
For resourceful tech founders, finding capital is rarely a problem; making the best use of it is another story. A few years slinging pepperoni pies and chicken wings - on tiny margins and with minimal investment - might not be the worst fiscal training.
People who want to make a million borrow a million first
The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life.
An increase in the productivity of labour means nothing more than that the same capital creates the same value with less labour, or that less labour creates the same product with more capital.
Empowering innovations require long-term investments, which tie up capital for years and years. So companies are using capital to create more capital, and consequently, the world is awash in capital, but the innovations we need to advance aren't there.
People love leverage when it's working. I mean, it's so easy to borrow money from a guy at X and put it out at X.
capital cannot be more beneficially employed, then in strengthening and aiding the productive powers of nature.
Every week brings to us 10,080 minutes That is our capital. How shall we use it to get the utmost benefit?
It takes almost no capital to open a new See's candy store. We're drowning in capital of our own that has almost no cost. It would be crazy to franchise stores like some capital-starved pancake house. We like owning our own stores as a matter of quality control.
Whether an instrument shall be regarded as productive capital or not depends entirely on its being used, or not, by some productive labourer…
The ideal business is one that earns very high returns on capital and that keeps using lots of capital at those high returns. That becomes a compounding machine.
Who uses funds more productively - private citizens or the government? I dare say that Warren Buffett can use his surplus funds more effectively in private business and creating jobs than the government can.
The proportions, too, in which the capital that is to support labour, and the capital that is invested in tools, machinery and buildings, may be variously combined.
Capital must work, as it were, in concert with industry; and this concurrence is what I call the productive agency of capital.
A peculiarity of capital is that it cannot be employed productively without benefiting the community in which it is used.
We spend billions on international aid annually, but we don't find ways to connect people to dignified work. I realized that if we don't think about ways to harness private capital to solve problems, we're leaving large amounts of money on the table and doing ourselves a disservice.
As an investor with small capital, one should prefer businesses that have high returns on capital and that require little incremental investment to grow.
There is every indication that we are to see new developments of the power of aggregated capital to serve civilization, and that the new developments will be made right here in America.
Wealth in activity--capital with all its friction--is far safer than invested wealth lying dead.
The less money lying idle the greater is the dividend.
THE GENIUS of the industrial system lies in its organized use of capital and technology. This is made possible, as we have duly seen, by extensively replacing the market with planning.
Money is not capital in most of the developing countries. It's just cash. Because it lacks the institutional, organizational, managerial forms to turn it into capital.
Your money should be at work at all times.
