Merton Miller Quotes

My guess is that Apple won't just pass Microsoft in market capitalization, but will go way beyond it.

There is no sense in getting excited by market cap because it is a tool.

I myself saw Yahoo become a $100 billion company and then become a $10 billion company, so you always have to look at valuations with a grain of salt and understand it is a point-in-time measure.

I put heavy weight on certainty. It's not risky to buy securities at a fraction of what they're worth.

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.

In principle, junk bonds are basically useful, but they are used excessively and irrationally, notably in takeovers.

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

Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction.

When you're public, you're at the mercy of the markets. You can be doing extremely well, but if the markets are in the tank or your industry is in the tank, you don't get rewarded for it.

With a private company, you've got to get into who's investing and what's the balance sheet like. So going public is a positive thing from the perspective of the sales organization.

One of our big challenges with the newsletter is that everyone thinks big stocks are safe. That's not true at all. They're only safe if the money is flowing there.

You cannot exist as a $20 billion company with speculation.

Manchester United and Liverpool have been bought with huge leverage, and we've got Roman Abramovich at Chelsea who can turn his loans into shares. It is really important for the Premier League to ask itself: if a club is being bought on such a mountain of debt, isn't that a possible recipe for disaster for the future?

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.

Remember, gold and silver always have had value and never have gone to zero. Can you say the same for stocks and bonds?

Not so long ago, companies that borrowed lots of money were considered risky, appropriate only for daredevil stock pickers. Those with lots of cash on hand and few outstanding debts might be dull stocks, but they were at least safe bets for bondholders.

I think most CEOs think their stock is undervalued, probably.

Power projects are differently placed to road projects. There's difference stress across different companies across different groups based on their leverage levels.

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

We are monitoring the global companies on a daily basis, and their rating continues to be investment grade. We will take immediate action if anything goes wrong.

The usual reason companies are funded or valued on the stock market for not having a current profit is because the investors believe there will be a future profit.

The actions of hedge fund managers in exercising their fiduciary responsibilities to their investors is not the reason why Chrysler is in jeopardy.

I mean, you don't get a chance to buy a company like Gateway, you know, at or near book value very often.

My impression of Wall Street growing up was certainly that it was like the big, bad place where all of the men did the bad things with our money.

In our view, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction carrying dangers that, while latent, are potentially lethal.