John Delaney Quotes

One, I love the creativity. I love the ability to create a capital structure that is appropriate for a company, no matter what field it happens to be in.

Debt is the lifeblood of finance; with the rise of the securities-and-trading portion of the [financial] industry came a rise in all kinds [of debt], both public and private.

The important source of finance is now commercial papers, bonds, and so on.

I have never run a public company. I spent my entire life working for a private company.

We reward people for making money off money, and moving money around and dividing up mortgages a thousand times over, selling it to China... and it becomes this shell game.

We've always been modestly leveraged, and we've never believed in a great deal of leverage on either our private equity business or on our investment banking business. And I think it really goes back to my uncle and dad growing up in the Depression and just seeing what happened to people who were overly levered.

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any.

Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It

The American banking system, which at one time extended productive loans to agriculture and industry, has today become a giant betting machine

Capital structure isn't an eyeshade economic thing: It's about your ability to protect your workforce and your service levels.

Everything is always feasible if you run a corporate finance exercise: you can always try to come out with a justification on how things could work. But the real issue is to say how do you translate that into practice.

Mea culpa, mea culpa. MIT and Wharton and University of Chicago created the financial engineering instruments, which, like Samson and Delilah, blinded every CEO. They didn't realize the kind of leverage they were doing and they didn't understand when they were really creating a real profit or a fictitious one.

When I started out as an equity analyst, we had no securitization data. We relied on company data.

I play with leverage.

In the past the analysts were the department you never saw. They were the nerds at school. You went to see the investment bankers and maybe the salesmen but the Chinese walls divided them from the analysts. But new technology and the Internet changed all that.

I hated being a junior investment banker. I loved the research business, the wealth management business.

I don't see any magic in hedge funds.

One of the big problems we had during the financial crisis was the intermingling of banks and holding companies and complex securities.

Big banks, highly leveraged casinos, do whatever they can to keep the cost of their gambling as cheap as possible. This means keeping interest rates as cheap as possible.

Many significant stock-price inefficiencies can occur when a company is spun off.

I have a quantitative background, but really, derivatives appealed to me because they require so much creativity.

I have long believed the corporate world is plagued by poor capital allocation decisions.

I buy companies I want to own. I buy companies that make a lot of money, that don't have a lot of debt, and that I can understand.

The good thing about a dealer's derivatives portfolio is that it is marked to market.

Professional services industries like finance, consulting, and legal services are, by definition, meta-industries. That is, they serve to help large companies raise money, buy and sell each other, reorganize, implement new systems, conduct complex transactions, and so forth.