Financial Leverage Quotes

When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes.

Soros has taught me that when you have tremendous conviction on a trade, you have to go for the jugular. It takes courage to be a pig. It takes courage to ride a profit with huge leverage.

An example of good debt is the debt on the apartment houses I own. That debt is good only as long as there are tenants to pay my mortgages. If tenants stop paying their rent, my good debt turns into bad debt.

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.

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.

He that trades with Money he hath borrowed at 8 or 10 per Cent cannot hold Market with him that borrows his Money at 6 or 4.

Because the rights to possessions are not adequately documented, assets cannot readily be turned into capital, cannot be traded outside of narrow, local circles where people know and trust each other, cannot be used as collateral for a loan, and cannot be used as a share against an investment.

Debt, we've learned, is the match that lights the fire of every crisis. Every crisis has its own set of villains - pick your favorite: bankers, regulators, central bankers, politicians, overzealous consumers, credit rating agencies - but all require one similar ingredient to create a true crisis: too much leverage.

In engineering, people have a big margin of safety. But in the financial world, people don't give a damn about safety. They let it balloon and balloon and balloon. It's aided by false accounting.

Money buys access; access buys influence.

I've nothing against Goldman Sachs. But Goldman Sachs isn't an investment bank. Goldman Sachs is a hedge fund. It's bigger than any hedge fund. It's more leveraged, to the power of three or five, than any hedge fund.

The strategic plan to transform Valeant smartly focuses on rebuilding the company's core franchises in ophthalmology, dermatology, and gastroenterology while simultaneously using the proceeds from the sale of non-core assets and operating cash flow to de-lever the company.

It is certainly for the public good to keep all the banks competitors for our favors by a judicious distribution of them and thus to engage the individuals who belong to them in support of the reformed order of things or at least in an acquiescence under it.

When you buy anything with lots of leverage, it does not require a whole lot to go wrong to lose it all.

I would borrow money all day long, if the cost of borrowing is less than the expected return.

The hand that holds the money cracks the whip.

Equity is the cushion that protects financial institutions from unexpected changes in the value of their assets. The greater the leverage, the smaller the losses required to wipe out a company's equity, leaving it without enough money to repay the people who hold its debt.

Dollar Diplomacy

Companies typically borrow money at less than their return on equity and therefore compound their return at the expense of lenders.

That is, many times we're not risking our own money, we're risking somebody else's money, or maybe that someone is going to back stop or downside, but we still get the upside.

Usually, you measure appetite of investors by their ability or willingness to take a bit of leverage on their positions.

Bubbles are best identified by credit excesses, not valuation excesses. And there's no bigger credit excess than in China.

Let us face it: in the world today, money and economic strength remain more powerful arguments than the number of people you represent.

You must take risks, both with your own money or with borrowed money. Risk taking is essential to business growth.

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.