Corporate Failure Quotes

The collapse of Enron and the subsequent collapse of Arthur Andersen were tremendous tragedies. But as I stated at the time of my indictment on July 8, 2004, failure does not equate to a crime.

The collapse of Enron was devastating to tens of thousands of people and shook the public's confidence in corporate America.

1971 … was the year when, for the very first time, the United States bailed out an industrial firm whose own financial management had driven it to the brink of extinction. The company was Lockheed Aircraft Corporation and the bailout was in the form of a loan guarantee worth $250 million.

Ken Lay has, does and will continue to accept responsibility for the fall of Enron. He was the man at the controls. But failure is not a crime.

Any bailout of a private company is a bad decision by our federal government. Private companies have the right to succeed, but they also should have the right to fail.

Most unfortunately, Enron's plunge into bankruptcy court also cost many of its rank-and-file employees their savings.

BP should be Banned Permanently because they are too failed to be big.

It's hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company.

It would be wonderful if the public sector were always great, or always terrible; or if the private sector were always great, or always terrible. Alas, reality is more complicated than comforting caricatures. Governments fail, and corporations fail.

It is the instinctive wish of most American businesspeople, even those unlikely to be directly affected, that General Motors not go bankrupt.

In the business world, we can point to instances when a lack of integrity has bankrupted entire companies - in sectors as different as finance, telecommunications, manufacturing, and energy.

The corporate world is appallingly bad at capitalizing on the strengths of its people.

The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less.

I have no confidence whatsoever in BP. I think that they do not know what they are doing.

With some exceptions, the wrong people are running U.S. companies. It's been that way for years, and it hasn't gotten much better.

Top-rank global corporations are collapsing. That could happen sometime, and somehow even to Samsung.

But if you look at WorldCom, which is the biggest failure to date, they grew dramatically, they were buying companies that were bigger than they were and they were doing it off inflated stock.

Big corporations don't just belong to one person or two persons but to a whole nation. If you let big corporations fail, then a lot of people are going to suffer.

Women will take over the Ford Motor Company someday—and wreck it. That’s what happened at Gulf Oil

I brought one big question with me to Harvard. Why do smart companies fail?

At IBM, if we kept our same leadership for 36 years, we'd be bankrupt.

I don't want to give a lecture to this body that's out there. You know, I mean, having had the heart attack, I want to get it back functioning. And as a practical matter, I mean if you were Bear Stearns, and you were a shareholder, you know, you lost 90 to 95 percent of your money. A good many lost their jobs. They lost very cushy lives, many of them.

When a company gets into trouble, it should basically have to be resolved, in other words, stockholders lose their money, unsecured bondholders lose their money.

If General Motors can't survive and run their business like a business, let them go under.

The voluntary approach to corporate social responsibility has failed in many cases.