Private Equity Quotes

A very good friend of mine spent a fair amount of time doing postmortems and met with a number of the senior folks on the Romney campaign and they spent, what was it, $140, $160 million on data. And this friend of mine, who is a very sharp thinker, asked a series of questions, but the most important one he asked, he said, "What decisions did you make differently because of the data?" And he's coming from the private equity world where he wants to know, OK, and the answer from virtually every single senior Romney person was "nothing."

Private equity has been the purview of super wealthy individuals and institutions.

The role of private equity as fiduciaries is certainly to make money.

Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.

Not all private equity people are evil. Only some.

Private-equity and hedge-fund guys typically come into a situation of mediocrity, where rapid change may result in a profit.

It's very hard for individual inventors to get paid. For the same reason that private equity is valuable - broadly, that's a good thing - in the case of patents, many that own them aren't in a good position to take the next step.

I think this is also a great time to invest in private equity, helping companies grow from the ground up.

I've heard that one-half of the students at elite schools want to go into private equity or hedge funds. They want to keep up with their age cohorts at Goldman. This can't possibly end well in terms of meeting these expectations.

It's clear to me when you do private equity well, you're making companies more efficient and helping them grow and become more profitable. That success means our investors - such as public pension funds - benefit, which contributes to the economic wealth of society.

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.

A good default, like Portugal or Greece, would be very good for the private equity business.

Generally, an indie film in the U.K. is put together much like in the states. We got a tax credit. You sell the domestic rights, which can be quite low, but it's enough to push you over the line. And you get a tax credit on top of that, and then you cobble it together with private equity or gap financing and things like that.

The problem of how we finance the welfare state should not obscure a separate issue: if each person thinks he has an inalienable right to welfare, no matter what happens to the world, that's not equity, it's just creating a society where you can't ask anything of people.

The stock market has gone up and if you are stock picking, that's fine, you may do a bit better than the market. But if you want to play in another game where you can get rapid increases of value and so on and so forth, this apparently has become the new parlour game, to invest in these companies and many their cases, the private equity that has been piling in onto of the venture capital is creating the unicorn, in other words the company with the $1 billion valuation.

I see myself as a private-equity investor that helps rebuild companies. Restructuring is a cottage industry in that there aren't that many serious practitioners.

I delivered lectures, and I was also a consultant for international companies in finance, both private equity and big venture capital funds.

People used to think that private equity was basically just a compensation scheme, but it is much more about making companies more efficient.

If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don't need tax loopholes to make money.

Our economy is a plantation run for the aristocrats - the CEOs, hedge funds, private equity firms - while the field hands are left with the scraps.

Banks don't want certain asset classes, and that's created opportunities for private equity, hedge funds, Silicon Valley. In this case I think he was referring to some of the European banks shedding assets, and the big buyers are probably not going to be big American banks. Someone like Blackstone may have a very good chance to buy those assets, leverage them, borrow up a little bit, and do something good there.

The lingo used in the space is so arcane and out of date that investors have no context for the discussions. The failure to establish a clear, effective communication system has been the biggest sin private equity has committed.

Venture capital has peaked in terms of its appetite, in terms of how much money it wants to put in. So now private equity funds are piling in. Primarily because interest rates are virtually zero so there's no fixed income play and they're not moving around.

If you have money draining out of the public equity markets, that inevitably affects the private equity market. They cannot exist going in different directions because somehow that will rent the fabric of the universe. It's just not permitted that that happens. Obviously there can be anomalies for brief periods of time but it just can't happen forever.

Whether a tops-down or bottoms-up investor in bonds, stocks, or private equity, the standard analysis tends to judge an investor or his firm on the basis of how the bullish or bearish aspects of the cycle were managed.

It's quite astonishing how much money people make in the hedge fund business and in the private equity field, and how well-off affluent families really are.

Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud.

We live in a global market and money's fungible and hedge fund private equity is looking for momentum plays, and there ain't no momentum plays in bonds, right? When the interest rates were spiking up or down, well they never really spike down they do spike up though. Something's got to happen, there's got to be motion, the dice has to be rolling on the board, and if it's not then they're not going to play because they're not going to get the adrenaline rush from looking at... you know, money markets fund interest rates or bond interests or whatever. It's got to be sexy.

Commodities tend to zig when the equity markets zag.

Let's face it, we're skunk drunk and it's because of money. It's almost like we all need to enter Betty Ford Clinic 2.0 together. This time, it's not stock market money but private equity, M&A, VCs and to some degree the reckless abandonment of logic by some advertisers who are perpetuating what is sure to end badly when the economy turns. Hubris is back my friends.

In the 1930s, there was a stretch where you could borrow more against the real estate than you could sell it for. I think that's what's going on in today's private-equity world.