Diane Garnick Quotes

Opacity on extreme levels is not addressed anywhere, including Dodd-Frank.

Basically, financial reporting is this sinking hole at the centre of journalism. You start by swimming around it until finally, reluctantly, you can't fight the pull anymore and you get sucked down the drain into the biz pages.

It sounds extraordinary but it's a fact that balance sheets can make fascinating reading.

Some companies use off-balance-sheet partnerships to raise money or to buy assets without ever telling their shareholders in their financial statements.

You have more independent eyes scrutinizing the decision-making and financial statements of companies.

There's not a whole lot of advantage for a company to be public.

You need a very good financial person to keep you honest, and to keep track of income and outgo.

There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.

A board of directors that cannot produce reliable audited financial statements for almost seven years simply should not remain in office.

The fact is that one of the earliest lessons I learned in business was that balance sheets and income statements are fiction, cash flow is reality.

If you think too-big-to-fail banks are not worthy of investment because of their impossible-to-read balance sheets, well then, don't buy them.

The time is coming when all businesses will have to be done with glass pockets.

I hope we’re on the road to more truth-telling to investors.

Companies always have a balance sheet of its assets, but counties do not.

What happens to a private company that comes out with a quarterly report and an annual report? It gives transparency. It talks of basic issues of governance and transactions with related parties.

I was, as president and chairman of the board, required by law to verify the veracity of the financial figures, the assets under management, the number of outstanding shares, et cetera.

I know that there was a public disclosure mechanism in my financial forms.

As you would expect, I come from a business background, and the idea that a finance director would be somewhat not working closely with the CEO of a company is very strange to anyone in the business world.

You learn a lot from financial disclosure. And you should go down and take a look at that.

In the corporate world, sometimes things aren't exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures.

When I take a look at a company's annual report, if I don't understand it, they don't want me to understand it.

I call it the Rule of Three. If you read a company's financial statements three times, and you still can't figure out how they make their money, that's usually for a reason.

If Saudi Aramco is listed, then it must announce its statements, and it will do that every quarter. It will be under the supervision of all Saudi banks, all analysts, all Saudi thinkers. Even more, all international banks and research and planning centres in the world will monitor it intensively.

Transparency at the Export Import Bank has long been a concern and must be addressed.

I didn't have any work to do, and I had files of my personal and Guns N' Roses financial statements for the previous eight years. I wanted to learn how to read these, but I didn't trust anybody. I just got a lightbulb in my head and said, 'I want to go to school.' That began my journey, taking accountancy and business classes at Seattle.