Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton Quotes

Would I advise early-stage companies against taking debt? One hundred percent yes.

The very nature of finance is that it cannot be profitable unless it is significantly leveraged... and as long as there is debt, there can be failure and contagion.

If you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

The real danger with debt is what happens if lots of people decide, or are forced, to pay it off at the same time.

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.

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.

Whether they run a record company or a grocery store, every boss will tell you you're in big trouble if you're borrowing more than you can ever afford to pay back. Delaying the pain for future generations is suicidal. We've got to start getting the deficit down right now, not next year.

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.

It's almost 10 years since the 2008 crisis, but we all still remember the consequences of ignoring threats to the public finances.

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.

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

All crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.

In engineering, people have a big margin of safety. But in the financial world, people don't give a damn about safety. They let it balloon and balloon and balloon. It's aided by false accounting.

I do have confidence that we're gonna be able to get it right. But it's not gonna be overnight. And there's no silver bullets to this. The fact of the matter is, is that we are suffering from a massive hangover from a binge of risk taking.

Risk managers and investment bankers and actually, all kinds of investors took on more risk than they expected. So there was a failure of risk management. There was a failure to recognize how much risk there was in some of these securities that people bought.

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events "unlikely."

If you've got $25,000, $50,000, $100,000, you're better off paying off any debt you have because that's a guaranteed return.

You can't jump off a cliff when you have already fallen off a bigger one.

When you try to do something big its hard to fail completely.

If at first you do succeed, quit trying on investing.

Promotion should not be more important than accomplishment, or avoiding instability more important than taking the right risk.

Success tends to go not to the person who is error-free, because he also tends to be risk-averse. Rather it goes to the person who recognizes that life is pretty much a percentage business. It isn't making mistakes that's critical; it's correcting them and getting on with the principal task.

Never throw caution to the wind. It could whip back into your eyes and blind you.

It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate.