Stephen A. Schwarzman Quotes

I've got a huge, huge position in mortgage-backed securities. I started accumulating them in 2009, when the market was really down and things were really scary.

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.

Financial firms believed that if a crisis developed, the insatiable demand for exotic [financial] products would dissipate only slowly. They were mistaken.

Where you really get in trouble is if the market is dropping and the economy's slowing down and you don't take action.

The Federal Reserve - all of them - could be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, and then pouring gasoline on top of it, and then light a cigar with matches, throw the match into the gasoline, and then not notice that there is any danger.

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.

If you look back to the most spectacular blow ups in history, you can always tie them to a couple things: They were extraordinary complicated strategies that maybe even the practitioners themselves didn't understand, and they were overleveraged.

What's so seductive about the efficient markets hypothesis is that it applies nine years out of ten. A lot of the time it works. But when it stops working, you blow up.

Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business expansion.

Not every financial company toppled during the 2008 crisis, and some seized the opportunity to take advantage of weaker competitors in the midst of the tumult.

When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.

Some things never change - there will be another crisis, and its impact will be felt by the financial markets.

If you're making all your money simply betting on interest rates, that's not a business. Flow is a business. On the outside, they look the same for a while. But when you dig into them, no, they weren't exactly the same.

Every serious deflation I've looked at is preceded by an asset bubble, and then it bursts.

Usually, you measure appetite of investors by their ability or willingness to take a bit of leverage on their positions.

For those properly prepared, the bear market is not only a calamity but an opportunity.

You could lose hundreds or thousands one day on paper and gain it all back the next, and it has literally no effect on your immediate future, provided the money you have in the market is money you're investing for the long haul (meaning at least three to five years).

In a recession, you must be able to call into question everything you've done before.

We're getting hurt, but I'm a long-term investor.

The simple fact of the matter is, as I know everyone in this room knows, that the recession that this country faced when this President took office was the worst since the Great Depression.

I have yet to take capital losses on any company. Then again, it's still early.

The economics profession advances by one confusing financial disaster at a time.

We are watching industries crumble, Wall Street firms disappear, unemployment spike, and unprecedented government intervention. And our designated opinion leaders want to know: Is Obama up this week? Is he down? And is his leadership style more like Bill Clinton's, or Abraham Lincoln's?

If your investing approach requires that you become Nostradamus to succeed, then you are destined to fail.

I know about investment. It's really obvious - you buy property, let it sit for a couple of years and then sell it and reinvest.