Stanley Druckenmiller Quotes
Good debt growth is when you borrow money, and it goes into the real economy. You do capital spending. You build businesses.
Druckenmiller, Stanley. Interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin. DealBook Conference, The New York Times, 3 Nov. 2015.
See Daniel Webster for an earlier expression of this notion.
Iceland's economy collapsed in the Meltdown of 2008. Their largest banks failed completely as they had engaged in the same kind of risky investments as the American banks had. Their government however did not have the assets to bail their banks out. So they let the banks fail and protected the small depositors with their limited assets. They then devalued their currency drastically, making their fishing and other products a great bargain for other nations of the world and though humiliated the Islanders started getting jobs as demand for Islandic exports grew. Some Icelanders who owned companies were making a great deal of money. Taxes were raised for high income citizens. To prevent the money being taken out of the country and invested so that the jobs would not benefit Icelanders or the earnings were not as taxable in Iceland, the nation imposed Capital Controls—no money was allowed to be taken out of the country except small amounts for business travel expenses. Iceland recovered rapidly and by 2015, at which point the Minister of Finance felt that the country was losing more than it was gaining, so it was time to end the Capital Controls.
Chrysler had gotten into cash flow difficulty and could not borrow enough money to keep open until they could pay their bills. Their credit was not good enough for most lenders. Iacocca approached the Federal Government and asked for a Federal loan guarantee of about $1 billion. Some members of Congress and public critics were outraged that a private company might get a Government bail out in the form of a loan guarantee. Extremists of both parties did not want to set such a precedent of using Federal money to assist private corporations. Iacocca was quite defensive about asking for what seemed to be a precedent setting request. However, he then found out that it would set no precedent at all. Chrysler got the loan, paid all its creditors, paid back the loan with interest, and the company did not go under, but did well for a while.
Trump as a business man was notorious for setting up business deals where his partners would put up the money. If the enterprise failed the partners were at risk and lost their money while either did not or lost very little. If money was made, however, he took a large share. He not only did this many times but actually admitted it and bragged about his ability to do that. Incredibly enough he even extended this technique to his charity giving. The vast majority of the money he did good things with through his foundation came from other people. There were many years where he gave not a penny to his own foundation, but gave away and took the credit for what was done with other people’s money. The recipients of the foundations grants mostly assumed that Trump was being generous with his own money, and he never disabused them.
Stanley Freeman Druckenmiller is an American investor, hedge fund manager and philanthropist. He is the former chairman and president of Duquesne Capital, which he founded in 1981. He closed the fund in August 2010 because he felt unable to deliver high returns to his clients. At the time of closing, Duquesne Capital had over $12 billion in assets.
