Leveraged Buyouts Quotes

Look, don't congratulate us when we buy a company, congratulate us when we sell it. Because any fool can overpay and buy a company, as long as money will last to buy it.

I have either run private equity funded companies or been a partner in a private equity fund since 1982. I've had a front row view of the vital role private equity continues to play in building and keeping American businesses competitive in the global economy.

I see myself as a private-equity investor that helps rebuild companies. Restructuring is a cottage industry in that there aren't that many serious practitioners.

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

I would just say, if Gov. Romney wants to give back all the money he's earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain, that I would be glad to listen to him. And I would bet you $10 - not $10,000 - that he would not take the offer.

In the '70s and '80s, what private equity did is it changed corporate America. It started holding companies accountable, and for the first time managers started thinking like owners.

VCs like acquisitions as much as IPOs because the acquiring companies often can rationalize paying large multiples over the current valuation of the startup.

I come from the operations side of the business, and I buy companies to operate them, not to flip them.

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

As a CEO, I had significant exposure to private equity, enough that I had in no way bought into the media's caricature: rapacious privateers who destroy companies.

What the mortgage bubble was all about was big banks like Goldman Sachs taking big bundles of subprime mortgages that were lent out largely to low-income, highly risky borrowers, and applying this kind of magic-pixie-dust math to these bundles of securities and slapping AAA ratings on them.

For me, one of the highlights of being in the private equity world is that you need to learn a lot and very quickly about different businesses. So it's always a continuing learning experience where you can apply what you know, of course, by way of judgment and by way of numerical analysis. You're always investing in new businesses, which is a learning experience in itself. I think that is a wonderful thing and I think it makes for intellectual challenge and for continued personal growth. That, for me, is the highlight of this job.

Private equity has been the purview of super wealthy individuals and institutions.

The deal machinations many companies put themselves through, while certainly a bonanza for investment bankers, can confound the typical investor.

Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing.

M&A guidelines need to be liberal.

Among the world's 500 largest companies, not one has completely relied on its own growth to develop.

How do you make money? Spinoffs, split-ups, liquidations, mergers and acquisitions.

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.

I learned about M&A and how to value assets and work with investment bankers.

STG is a combination of a holding company and a private equity model.

Private equity does pay very well, and my counterparts, guys that I grew up with who are still working at a number of firms, all make a lot of money.

If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don't need tax loopholes 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.

When investors, particularly investment bankers, talk about splitting up companies, there's a lot of discussion about multiple expansion, and the reality is multiple expansion is an outcome, not a strategy.