Geoffrey West Quotes

When there were fears about the future of this nation's older cities... when a few of the cities teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, all eyes were focused on Chicago for contrast.

Top-rank global corporations are collapsing. That could happen sometime, and somehow even to Samsung.

New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you.

I experienced the year 2000 dot com crash and the 2008 financial crisis, and it almost wiped out the company.

When this crisis began, crucial decisions about what would happen to some of the world's biggest companies - companies employing tens of thousands of people and holding trillions of dollars in assets - took place in hurried discussions in the middle of the night. We should not be forced to choose between allowing a company to fall into a rapid and chaotic dissolution or forcing taxpayers to foot the bill.

By March '87 we're down to seven thousand, by the end of the year we're down to twelve hundred. The whole bottom just fell out of the market. It was bad for me because I was in Australia at the time.

In 1958, my father invested everything he had in a business venture and became the largest automobile dealership in Chicago for Ford's new Edsel line. But Edsel sales plummeted and my father fell into bankruptcy. I watched him struggle; working long hours to protect us from poverty.

No I don't think it was a myth at all, anymore than what the recession that the whole country was experiencing was a myth, which obviously seems like it's going to get worse and worse.

If you had asked people in 1929, 'Here is what is about to happen. How much would you pay to avoid the Great Depression from occurring?' The answer is they would have paid a lot. They would have borrowed money if it could be used to prevent the Great Depression.

In the early '90s, New York was a pretty depressing place.

A city is a crazy concrete jungle whose people at the end of each day somehow make a small step ahead against terrible odds.

When I came to America, there was a lot of decadence in New York in the early '70s because the city was bankrupt and you could do whatever you want!

It is in the genes of cities to bounce back from disasters - whether natural or man made. The denizens of suburbia have no choice but to survive and move on. But it is the manner in which different cities respond to emergencies that sets them apart.

The experience of the '90s, whether it's the '94 peso crisis or the '97 crisis in Asia, the '98 crisis, even the 2001 crisis, is that we recovered pretty readily. There wasn't great consequence.

We haven't had an agenda for American cities probably since at least Jimmy Carter. We have left cities to fend for themselves.

We sunk everything into it. It came close to going under several times.

I had come out of retirement into a very difficult situation with the PeopleSoft takeover, got through it, and was having a good time, frankly. We just ran out of runway at PeopleSoft. Had we had another year, maybe two years, I think we would have made it.

People in all walks of life, and especially business, do not want to experience the collapse of cities like New York along with global finance and economy in chaos, but this is what business faces if we continue to attribute climate change to fossil fuels alone.

The collapse of Enron was devastating to tens of thousands of people and shook the public's confidence in corporate America.

No great nation that ever went off the gold standard ever remained great.

There is one iron law of history. When a country’s economy starts to decline, if it continues to decline, it will lose its greatness.

Let Detroit go bankrupt.

Not every town can or should be saved.

Remember Circuit City? Bear Stearns? Lehman Brothers? Sports Authority? Once, all were billion-dollar companies - then gone in a moment. The fatal problem might be fraud or corruption, but more often, it's simply that management didn't see 'over the other side of the hill.'

Big corporations don't just belong to one person or two persons but to a whole nation. If you let big corporations fail, then a lot of people are going to suffer.