Quotes About Investment

Hewlett-Packard is somewhat riskier than GE; Amazon.com, riskier still.

If you aren't in debt, you can't go broke and can't be made to sell, in which case "liquidity" is irrelevant. But a leveraged firm may be forced to sell, lest fast-accumulating losses put it out of business. Leverage always gives rise to this same brutal dynamic, and its dangers cannot be stressed too often.

As Keynes observed, there cannot be "liquidity" for the community as a whole.6 The mistake is in thinking that markets have a duty to stay liquid or that buyers will always be present to accommodate sellers.

If you aren't in debt, you can't go broke and can't be made to sell, in which case "liquidity" is irrelevant.

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. —JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

The important person in a free economy is not the manager but the entrepreneur – the one who takes risks and meets the cost of them.

As president, he lectured a young relative about to enter college that "every hour misspent is lost forever" and that "future years cannot compensate for lost days at this period of your life.

and they pooled their money to set up the new bank.

Already so flush that he had invested in his first railroad stock, with cash to spare for the firm, Rockefeller was far more receptive.

Standard Oil of New York also made large loans to banks, brokerage houses, railroads, and steel companies.

To bail out these borrowers, Rockefeller had to borrow almost $4 million, and nearly $3 million of that came from Standard of New York.

Goldman, Sachs specialized in commercial paper, Lehman in commodity trading.

Even though he terminated relations with this pair, he could not dispose of their sour investments so easily and thought the most prudent course was to buy total control of the companies and turn them around.

On this last count, Rockefeller was probably sincere, for what he envisioned was less a conspiracy against producers than against consumers, a united effort to ensure steady prices and adequate returns on investment.

Most of these highly speculative investments never panned out.

He believed in Standard Oil and gladly purchased all available stock from other directors.

Gates himself invested in several of the companies he managed for Rockefeller, and in 1902 he cashed in a tidy $500,000 profit.

Rockefeller knew that he was overpaying but couldn't resist a deal that would certify his position as the world's largest oil refiner at age thirty-one.

Rockefeller was fortunate to have applied his money at the precise moment that medical research matured as a discipline and offered unbounded opportunities.

Rockefeller eventually realized that medical research ideally suited his needs.

In a footnote, Lawson further conceded that Rockefeller never put a dime into the Amalgamated flotation.

Thanks to this staggering appreciation, Rockefeller's net worth reached a lifetime peak of $900 million in 1913—more than $13 billion in 1996 dollars.

he mostly hoarded his money in preparation for the next panic.

I feel, therefore, that large sums of money are, in a sense, safer there than in other fields.