Henry Kravis Quotes

The activists play the balance sheet by selling a division to buy back stock and leveraging the balance sheet and buying back more stock.

As an investment banker, I'm in the cross-flow of information and the changes that are taking place in capital markets.

Financing is tough, and you really have to work hard in the businesses you invest in.

You can make great money in a utility type of business by borrowing cheaply and lending sensibly but that's not what's being done.

With the world changing fast, we needed capital for investments. There's only so much bandwidth in your own balance sheet.

Capital structure isn't an eyeshade economic thing: It's about your ability to protect your workforce and your service levels.

Cash flow is a problem for a small and developing company, and the lack of it is the reason why many small businesses fail. Ensure that you have enough money in your bank account to make you able to carry out daily basic needs for your business.

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

I certainly think you could look at the business side of how WWE was run, which was as a conservative company with little debt and strong cash balance.

No matter what business you're in, business is business, and financing and money are critical. I would have made a lot fewer mistakes if I had more schooling in that area.

I've probably done more venture capital deals and expansion financings than I have done private equity deals. But both are the same. Private equity companies have also built jobs.

If you're running a business for the long term, the last thing you should be doing is borrowing money to buy back stock.

You have to manage money. Particularly with market economies. You may have a great product, but if your bottom line goes bust, then that's it.

How do you make money? Spinoffs, split-ups, liquidations, mergers and acquisitions.

All I'm trying to do is manage money and take care of my shareholders.

To Wall Street, a firm like BP isn't just a profitable energy company with lots of assets like oil rigs and pipelines and gas stations - it's also a corporation that routinely borrows hundreds of millions of dollars to keep its business up and running.

Banking gives you a glimpse into what makes companies succeed and what makes companies fail.

People used to think that private equity was basically just a compensation scheme, but it is much more about making companies more efficient.

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any.

American capitalists, enthralled by the doctrines of finance, have put their income statements in service of the balance sheet.

I'm so bored by business and money.

If you don’t balance your budget in business, you go out of business.

I know how to finance something. It's easier today because, as you're more successful, everybody wants to do deals with you. But even in the beginning, when I took Landry's public, I owned 100 percent of it. I never had investors or anything. I was just always able to find a way to do it.

We know what we are. Our business is originating, distributing, and managing capital for individuals and institutions.

If you're just interested in the prestige of banking, that's not what's going to sustain you. You have to be interested in what we do: managing and originating capital, helping issuers and investors come together is great, bringing these companies to life.