Joseph Stiglitz Quotes

Keep a strong balance sheet, don't get over-leveraged, and try to protect the security of your employees.

If you look at the balance sheet, the US is heavily in debt. If you look at the income account - the amount of interest the US pays abroad - it is almost exactly equal to the amount of interest that it receives from abroad. American assets held abroad are earning a higher rate of return than foreign assets held here.

Look for companies with high profit margins.

For most businesses, America is the most important asset on their balance sheet.

Never invest in a company without understanding its finances. The biggest losses in stocks come from companies with poor balance sheets.

Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.

Accounting is the language of business.

The only thing that's doing well in America is the stock market.

America is a country obsessed with appearance. It's a country obsessed with looks.

Basically, financial reporting is this sinking hole at the centre of journalism. You start by swimming around it until finally, reluctantly, you can't fight the pull anymore and you get sucked down the drain into the biz pages.

To see how much a company is truly earning on the capital it deploys in its businesses, look beyond EPS to Return on Invested Capital (ROIC).

With the one eye that is closed, one looks within, with the other eye that is open, one looks without.

You can't really invest in your looks as the only thing because it's a depreciating asset. It's like putting money into a stock that's going down.

Experts kill me. Economic experts, that is. Corporations, foundations, publications and governments pay them by the bucketful, and they fill buckets with forecasts that change more frequently than white-collar, workers do shirts. What Lies Ahead is the usual title. What Lies would often be more appropriate. If women's hemlines changed as rapidly as an economist's forecasts, the fashion people and the textile industry would be more profitable than any other. In fact, if all the country's economists were laid end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion.

In terms of the economy, look, I inherited a recession, I am ending on a recession.

Balance sheets bore me. I suspect if figures had excited me I would have gone into the city and now be a lot wealthier.

If you look at academic studies, you can see that stock prices are most closely correlated with cash flow. It's such a straightforward number. Cash flow is what will drive shareholder returns.

I look forward to the time when the membership of the Supreme Court's more reflective of the country it serves.

If English money was of the same value then as before, Hamburgh money must have risen in value. But where is the proof of this?

The best designers in the world all squint when they look at something. They squint to see the forest from the trees - to find the right balance. Squint at the world. You will see more, by seeing less.

The nation that buys commands, the nation that sells serves; it is necessary to balance trade in order to ensure freedom; the country that wants to die sells only to one country , and the country that wants to survive sells to more than one.

If you just say that, look at all the good stuff and you don't acknowledge the toxic stuff, you're wrong. If you're only looking at toxic stuff and don't recognize there's going to be some good stuff if you're for infrastructure or whatever, you're wrong.

Mixture of assimilation to earlier schemas and adaptation to the actual conditions of the situation is what defines motor intelligence. But and this is where rules come into existence as soon as a balance is established between adaptation and assimilation, the course of conduct adopted becomes crystallized and ritualized. New schemas are even established which the child looks for and retains with care, as though they were obligatory or charged with efficacy.

Marianne Dashwood looks at gray skies and sees blue. That's all very well, and it's not something you ever want entirely to lose. But you must lose a little of it; otherwise you're going to get wet.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You never know what it’s going to look like on the other side, but you’ll see it eventually if you keep your eyes open.