Bernard Levin Quotes

If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.

I was so in debt by the end of 'Dust Devil,' having picked up the tab personally for the post-production of the movie, and having no way to recoup because I didn't own the rights to the movie. There was no way I could see any money back on it, so any money spent was just a dead loss.

I told them I wouldn't sign a blank cheque.

No enterprise, small or large, public or private, can remain self-governing, let alone successful, so deeply in hock to others as we are about to be.

Never cosign a loan. Once you have cosigned, you cannot get out of it - even on your deathbed.

Credit buying is much like being drunk. The buzz happens immediately and gives you a lift... The hangover comes the day after.

Leverage is great when it works, and when it doesn't work, it creates a lot of issues. So I think if you limit the amount of leverage that people can borrow, or that banks can borrow, I think you'll find that you'll have a lot less issues going forward.

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.

With weak balance sheets, banks tend to continue lending unprofitable businesses and leave them existing.

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

Credit cards are like snakes: Handle 'em long enough, and one will bite you.

The farmer may often have suffered from excessive interest and grasping creditors; but it was no less frequently the avarice of the lender that got him into trouble than the fact that he was too sanguine and too prone to believe that he could safely go into debt, on the assumption that crops and prices in the future would equal those in the present.

If the legal rate of interest in Great Britain, for example, was fixed so high as eight or ten per cent. the greater part of the money which was to be lent, would be lent to prodigals and projectors, who alone would be willing to give this high interest. Sober people, who will give for the use of money no more than a part of what they are likely to make by the use of it, would not venture into the competition. A great part of the capital of the country would thus be kept out of the hands which were most likely to make a profitable and advantageous use of it, and thrown into those which were most likely to waste and destroy it. Where the legal interest, on the contrary, is fixed but a very little above the lowest market rate, sober people are universally preferred as borrowers, to prodigals and projectors. The person who lends money, gets nearly as much interest from the former, as he dares to take from the latter, and his money is much safer in the hands of the one set of people than in those of the other.

One of the most important causes of economic crises is “running liabilities”, or short term debt that the government does not insure. The U. S. financial sector holds trillions of dollars of such debt, including uninsured bank deposits and the short-term liabilities of other financial institutions, such as overnight loans…. Amongst the potential causes of the next crisis, the massive amount of short-term debt ranks as the most probable.

I lost my computer business when I was 29 because I gave credit to firms I didn't investigate. I lost my house and had to move back in with my parents and then I lived in an office for six months.

What you want to watch are the lenders, not the borrowers. The borrowers will always be willing to take a great deal for themselves. It's up to the lenders to show restraint, and when they lose it, watch out.

Be careful when you take on debt. If you take on debt personally, make sure it is small. If you take on large debt, make sure someone else is paying for it.

Good debt is a powerful tool, but bad debt can kill you.

He that sells upon Credit expects to lose 5 per Cent. By bad Debts; therefore he charges, on all he sells upon Credit, an Advance that shall make up that Deficiency.

There's nothing as short as short-term debt.

The beauty of a financial institution is that there are a lot of ways to go to hell in a bucket. You can push credit too far, do a dumb acquisition, leverage yourself excessively - it's not just derivatives [that can bring about your downfall].

He that will be surety, shall pay.

The collateralized debt obligation, the CDO, is a structure which allows you to more or less continuously choose how much risk you want to take in a whole batch of securities. And the reason why they got us into so much trouble is that it's hard to figure out how much risk you really are taking.

I say to you never involve yourself in debt, and become no man's surety.

All loans, in the eyes of honest borrowers, must eventually be repaid. All credit is debt. Proposals for an increased volume of credit, therefore, are merely another name for proposals for an increased burden of debt. They would seem considerably less inviting if they were habitually referred to by the second name instead of by the first.