Chanda Kochhar Quotes

One of the risks for anybody in the lending business is that being conservative can harm your competitiveness.

It is the quality of lending over the quantity of lending.

When you take smaller gambles, no one particular deal can be big enough to have a material adverse effect on the company.

Credit markets were originally created to serve human needs; to provide businesses and individuals with capital to start or expand businesses or fulfill other financial needs.

Suning Appliance has no problem of financial risk. Do you think I'm risky? I'm definitely not risky.

We don't want to give a business that is not going to come through the troubled waters a loan that they can't pay back.

Expertise and judgment in the art of lending for novel ventures must be reacquired.

Banks need to continue to lend to creditworthy borrowers to earn a profit and remain strong.

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.

Start small; get to know the landscape. We take risks but not major risks. We always started with small capital - €4m in Holland, $10m in Russia - and as we get to know the landscape of a country, we think about other businesses.

European and American banks are conservative in the sense that they don't come at their full strength to markets where we are; that leaves us an opportunity to be successful.

If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.

In some industries, we refer to risk taking as 'research and development.' At financial institutions, we often take risk by investing in securities.

My risk tolerance is higher than some people's, but it's not nearly as high as some people's. I don't want to exaggerate my bravado. I haven't been on the front lines. I haven't ever stepped on a land mine.

I come from a state with many sound, responsible banks.

Do not go out first thing after signing a contract and buy assets that are huge compared to the contract signed. Just because you have money for the first time doesn't mean you have to spend it before you know all the ramifications of buying the assets.

By any measure, CapitalSource outperformed both our direct competitors and the financial services industry in general, particularly in the context of the near collapse of the financial services industry where 19 of the 20 largest financial institutions in the country either failed or were bailed out by the government.

Yes, fashion adds more risk, but you don't have to have as much of it to keep the business rolling.

Ultimately the clothing company is a large investment on my part, and I'm taking a huge gamble. But having a focus away from the track is good for you.

When lending people money, be sure their character exceeds their collateral.

I put heavy weight on certainty. It's not risky to buy securities at a fraction of what they're worth.

Berkshire's past record has been almost ridiculous. If Berkshirehad used even half the leverage of, say, Rupert Murdoch, it would be five times its current size.

If you understood a business perfectly and the future of the business, you would need very little in the way of a margin of safety. So, the more vulnerable the business is, assuming you still want to invest in it, the larger margin of safety you'd need. If you're driving a truck across a bridge that says it holds 10,000 pounds and you've got a 9,800 pound vehicle, if the bridge is 6 inches above the crevice it covers, you may feel okay, but if it's over the Grand Canyon, you may feel you want a little larger margin of safety.

You can lose leverage, and it's the only way a smart guy can go broke.

It is a mistake to think that one limits one’s risk by spreading too much between enterprises about which one knows little and has no reason for special confidence.