Corporate Finance Quotes

Lending has come back in retail; it has come back in working capital. It has also come back in other forms, like government contract being given out to companies.

In 2013 Citigroup had profits of $6.4 billion in the United States. They paid no federal income tax and, in fact, received a rebate from the IRS of $260 million. That same year J.P. Morgan had $17.2 billion in profits in the U.S. They also paid no federal income tax. Do you think it's time for tax reform?

I think that, every time you saw the word EBITDA, you should substitute the word "bullshit" earnings.

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.

I mean, you may be very mad at some guy that walked away with a huge golden parachute, but that really isn't the important thing.

The actions of hedge fund managers in exercising their fiduciary responsibilities to their investors is not the reason why Chrysler is in jeopardy.

Look, don't congratulate us when we buy a company, congratulate us when we sell it. Because any fool can overpay and buy a company, as long as money will last to buy it.

When you buy a company at an auction, and you are committing yourself to pay some $300 million to the state because it was a privatization deal, and you don't pay it, is it OK? Isn't it something that deserves court procedures?

We don't have any miraculous way of avoiding taxes at Wesco and Berkshire.

The relationship between executive CEO pay, stock performance is tenuous and not easily unscrambled, just one of myriad factors that affect the price of a stock.

I never think about Wall Street - why should I - but to go down there so often while filming 'Working Girl,' to become acquainted with this whole different world, and to find out what goes on behind the scenes, is so interesting. There's so much of the city that you don't really bother to investigate. Ahh... New York.

People talk about Wall Street greed, but one of the things many people don't understand is that there are a lot of organizations that have been the recipient of largess from the same Wall Street.

Corporate share prices should not be driven by political tax games. Profits, not Washington shenanigans, should be the mother's milk of stocks. And this shouldn't be a partisan political issue.

I think a lot can be said for consolidation, but I think it should be done for the right reasons.

An optimised tax structure gives us the possibility of flexibility in using our assets that have already been taxed in one market. They can be used in new markets for further business development without the additional burden of double taxation.

Profits are one of the most important goals of any successful business, and investors are one of the most important constituencies of public businesses.

Wall Street is stronger than ever.

Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead.

The national debt has given rise to joint stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage , in a word to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy .

If they don't go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers.

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

I wasn't on the board of Lehman Brothers. I was a banker, and I was proud of it and I traveled the country and learned how people make jobs.

What happened after publication of our paper was that, for the next 40 years, people said, all right, we now know the answer to the capital structure question under ideal conditions.

Sure, food stamps are occasionally misused, but anyone familiar with business knows that the abuse of food subsidies is far greater in the corporate suite. Every time an executive wines and dines a hot date on the corporate dime, the average taxpayer helps foot the bill.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.