Balance Sheets Quotes Page 2

It sounds extraordinary but it?s a fact that balance sheets can make fascinating reading.

We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet.

In my view we have nothing to show for it. We haven't invested in our roads, our bridges, our waste-water systems, our sewer systems. We haven't even maintained the assets that our parents and grandparents built for us.

Investment banking has, in recent years, resembled a casino, and the massive scale of gambling losses has dragged down traditional business and retail lending activities as banks try to rebuild their balance sheets. This was one aspect of modern financial liberalisation that had dire consequences.

We are tasked to rebuild not just a damaged economy, and a debt-ridden balance sheet, but to do so by drawing forth the best that is in our fellow citizens. If we would summon the best from Americans, we must assume the best about them. If we don't believe in Americans, who will?

It sounds extraordinary but it's a fact that balance sheets can make fascinating reading.

I look for the hotels that have figured out the comfortable balance - a modern room that is well designed, and really clean sheets.

Goldman Sachs now has the biggest oil position in America and probably one of the biggest oil positions in the world. They're long oil. So the banks have aggressively been buying oil on their balance sheets. I think they might see this as a way to bail themselves out of this mortgage crisis.

When economists speak of money, they neglect that all money and credit is debt.

That is the essence of bookkeeping and accounting. There are always two sides to the balance sheet. And one party’s money or savings is another party

Everybody is talking about synergies.

You've got to take out every cost you possibly can. You have to position yourself as your services change.You have to think about in five years from now what is going to happen technologically to you. And then you do have to think about M&A or your balance sheet, and you have to think about everything in the context of, "Am I prepared to meet that challenge?".

The budget idea, I may admit, is a sort of obsession with me.

I believe in budgets. I want other people to believe in them. I have had a small one to run my own home; and besides that, I am the head of the organization that makes the greatest of all budgets, that of the United States Government. Do you wonder, then, that at times I dream of balance sheets and sinking funds?

I've already written a section in the annual report for next year explaining why I think in one case that the figures on our balance sheet as calculated are wrong. But it's the standard way of doing it. It's holy writ. The SEC wants us to do it that way, and we'll do it that way, and I'll explain why I think it's wrong and shareholders can read it and see whether they agree with my logic or don't.

I have a very, very great balance sheet, so great that when I did the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue, the United States government, because of my balance sheet, which they actually know very well, chose me to do the Old Post Office, between the White House and Congress, chose me to do the Old Post Office.

For most businesses, America is the most important asset on their balance sheet.

Most people think of the economy as producing goods and services and paying labor to buy what it produces. But a growing part of the economy in every country has been the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, which comprises the rent and interest paid to the economy's balance sheet of assets by debtors and rent payers.

In business a reputation for keeping absolutely to the letter and spirit of an agreement, even when it is unfavorable, is the most precious of assets, although it is not entered in the balance sheet.

What outsourcing causes - what it's caused by, rather.

I understand, for instance, how to read a balance sheet. I happen to believe that having been in the private sector for twenty-five years gives me a perspective on how jobs are created - that someone who's never spent a day in the private sector, like President Obama, simply doesn't understand.

Balance sheets bore me. I suspect if figures had excited me I would have gone into the city and now be a lot wealthier.

Long term debt and bank debt (including off-balance sheet financing must be judiciously employed. There must be room to expand the debt position if required.

No one would look just at a firm's revenues to assess how well it was doing.

Far more relevant is the balance sheet, which shows assets and liability. That is also true for a country.

The 'black armband' view of our history reflects a belief that most Australian history since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. I take a very different view. I believe that the balance sheet of our history is one of heroic achievement and that we have achieved much more as a nation of which we can be proud of than which we should be ashamed.

If you look at the balance sheet, the US is heavily in debt.

If you look at the income account - the amount of interest the US pays abroad - it is almost exactly equal to the amount of interest that it receives from abroad. American assets held abroad are earning a higher rate of return than foreign assets held here.

When Gordon Brown becomes prime minister, the balance sheet that reflects his economic stewardship could look very sickly indeed. He could become Labour's biggest liability, not its most marketable asset.

When the planes still swoop down and aerial spray a field in order to kill a predator insect with pesticides, we are in the Dark Ages of commerce. Maybe one thousandth of this aerial insecticide actually prevents the infestation. The balance goes to the leaves, into the soil, into the water, into all forms of wildlife, into ourselves. What is good for the balance sheet is wasteful of resources and harmful to life.

We always look at the margin of safety in the balance sheet and then worry about the business.

The basic question that the 'new science' raises for our balance sheet is the issue of what scientific questions have not been asked for 500 years, which scientific risks have not been pursued. It raises the question of who has decided what scientific risks were worth taking, and what have been the consequences in terms of the power structures of the world.

If cuts have to be made, the question then becomes which expenditure adds the least value? This is possibly what drives companies to reduce their advertising expenditure - simply because they do not understand its full value and especially as it is usually the single biggest investment on the balance sheet.

While President Obama shirks his responsibility to advance solutions to our fiscal challenges, he can no longer hide from the merciless math of the balance sheet. Conservatives have made certain of that.