John W. Henry Quotes

Business is other people's money.

Would I advise early-stage companies against taking debt? One hundred percent yes.

If you're running a business for the long term, the last thing you should be doing is borrowing money to buy back stock.

You can make great money in a utility type of business by borrowing cheaply and lending sensibly but that's not what's being done.

The transaction cost approach maintains that some projects are easy to finance by debt and ought to be financed by debt. These are projects for which physical-asset specificity is low to moderate.

With the world changing fast, we needed capital for investments. There's only so much bandwidth in your own balance sheet.

There’s nothing like doing things with OPM—Other People’s Money. It takes the risk out of it.

The most important word in the world of money is cash flow. The second most important word is leverage.

I am very underleveraged. I have a great company. I have a tremendous income. And the reason I say that is not in a braggadocios way. It's because it's about time that this country had somebody running it that has an idea about money.

Our experience is that most entrepreneurs are able to attract debt, even for risky and early stage investments. There are investors who provide debt, but very few who fund through equity.

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

Whenever we can, we tend to use debt to fund deals, as Aspen is very cash generative, so it doesn't make sense to issue equity. Over time, we can eliminate debt.

Companies typically borrow money at less than their return on equity and therefore compound their return at the expense of lenders.

I am not that good a manager for me to be comfortable borrowing someone else's money.

To Wall Street, a firm like BP isn't just a profitable energy company with lots of assets like oil rigs and pipelines and gas stations - it's also a corporation that routinely borrows hundreds of millions of dollars to keep its business up and running.

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.

In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.

We have a tax code that favors debt over equity.

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

You [Donald Trump] call yourself the King of Debt. You talk about leverage. You even at one time suggested that you would try to negotiate down the national debt of the United States.

People who want to make a million borrow a million first

As well as, we know, as a real estate developer, [Donald Trump] has hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, in loans.

Business? It's quite simple; it's other people's money.

Equity is the cushion that protects financial institutions from unexpected changes in the value of their assets. The greater the leverage, the smaller the losses required to wipe out a company's equity, leaving it without enough money to repay the people who hold its debt.

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.