WILBUR ROSS

Ships are a strange kind of commodity because they're very lumpy, very big individual units, but they're commodities.

The fundamentals are the U.S. is going to end up being a net exporter of natural gas. That's going to be wonderful to help our balance of payments, reduce our dependence on a lot of countries that aren't so crazy about us, and change many, many parts of what goes on here.

Shale gas, if left to flourish, could create several hundred thousand more jobs.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a bank being big. In fact, there are some good arguments about universality of geography that in theory, if you have all your eggs in one little community, and some big employer goes out, that could be your downfall.

Between the Community Redevelopment Act, requiring banks to make what I would call very weak loans, and specific quotas that the Congress imposed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that created the market demand that really led to the subprime phenomenon.

There is no evidence that more regulation makes things better. The most highly regulated industry in America is commercial banking, and that didn't save those institutions from making terrible decisions.

The one term I don't like to be called is a 'vulture.' Because to me, a vulture is a kind of asset-stripper that eats dead flesh off the bones of a dead creature. Our bird should be the phoenix, the bird that reinvents itself, recreates itself from its ashes. And that's much closer to what it is that we really do.

Shipping has a great oversupply of vessels that came from over-ordering a few years back. We think 2014 may be when it turns around.

The typical big Japanese company has somewhere between a third and 40 percent of its revenues coming from developing countries, and about a third of Japan's exports are also to the emerging countries, so in a strange way, Japan, which has very little internal growth, its big companies are a good way to play the emerging markets.

If you want to do something to destroy consumer spending, just eat away at the middle class because the other problem we have is the structural problem of middle class America.

You cannot just keep borrowing more and more and keep spending more and more without eventually having a day of reckoning.

I think at the end of the day, the real sick man of Europe is liable to turn out to be France, not Greece, not Portugal, not Spain, not Italy. The reason is France is very uncompetitive to begin with on a global scale, and the measures that Hollande has been putting in have been very, very negative from the point of view of economic growth.

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.

I think it's natural for any manager to want to grow his business. The question is at what rate, and in what direction, and in what format?

Each weekend I play at least one and maybe two sets of tennis a day. My doubles team was in the finals recently at my tennis club in Palm Beach and lost a tiebreaker after a three-hour match. I must confess, by the end of the three hours, I was relieved it was over.

Banking, I would argue, is the most heavily regulated industry in the world. Regulations don't solve things. Supervision solves things.

My wife Hillary sometimes accuses me of trying to reinvent the 19th century. In some ways she's right because I like things that I can understand and that aren't too complicated.

Generally speaking, companies get into bankruptcy as a kind of meritocracy. Somebody made some sort of big mistake, to get into bankruptcy, and very often, a part of the mistake is too much leverage.

There isn't a bank in the world that could withstand a run. They all borrow short and lend long, regardless of what they say.

The problem with regional trade agreements is you get picked apart by the first country. Then you negotiate with the second country. You get picked apart. And you go with the third one. You get picked apart again.

Everybody talks about tariffs as the first thing. Tariffs are the last thing. Tariffs are part of the negotiation. The real trick is going to be increase American exports. Get rid of some of the tariff and non-tariff barriers to American exports.

The United States is the least protectionist country in the world but has the largest trade deficit, while other countries are highly protectionist and have huge trade surpluses. This cannot continue.

China is the world's biggest exporter, but they're also the people with one of the highest tariffs on imports in the whole world. That seems a little bit oxymoronic.

We'll be aggressive on trade because we know that deals that have been made historically have resulted in the great loss of manufacturing jobs, a great amount of closed manufacturing businesses. We don't want that to continue.

If you add up all the promises any politician makes, the math doesn't work. Hillary Clinton's math doesn't work; Donald's math probably doesn't work. I think you have to listen to their campaign pitches more as symbolic, more as metaphors.