Wilbur Ross Quotes

You cannot just keep borrowing more and more and keep spending more and more without eventually having a day of reckoning.

There is a future for the auto parts industry, but it needs a consolidation and a rationalization of geography in that most suppliers have facilities in the U.S., although most of their customers are overseas.

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.

There is no evidence that more regulation makes things better. The most highly regulated industry in America is commercial banking, and that didn't save those institutions from making terrible decisions.

Banking, I would argue, is the most heavily regulated industry in the world. Regulations don't solve things. Supervision solves things.

We're in the business not so much of being contrarians deliberately, but rather we like to take perceived risk instead of actual risk. And what I mean by that is that you get paid for taking a risk that people think is risky, you particularly don't get paid for taking actual risk.

Between the Community Redevelopment Act, requiring banks to make what I would call very weak loans, and specific quotas that the Congress imposed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that created the market demand that really led to the subprime phenomenon.

I think it's natural for any manager to want to grow his business. The question is at what rate, and in what direction, and in what format?

Each weekend I play at least one and maybe two sets of tennis a day. My doubles team was in the finals recently at my tennis club in Palm Beach and lost a tiebreaker after a three-hour match. I must confess, by the end of the three hours, I was relieved it was over.

The one term I don't like to be called is a 'vulture.' Because to me, a vulture is a kind of asset-stripper that eats dead flesh off the bones of a dead creature. Our bird should be the phoenix, the bird that reinvents itself, recreates itself from its ashes. And that's much closer to what it is that we really do.

My wife Hillary sometimes accuses me of trying to reinvent the 19th century. In some ways she's right because I like things that I can understand and that aren't too complicated.

Shale gas, if left to flourish, could create several hundred thousand more jobs.

Generally speaking, companies get into bankruptcy as a kind of meritocracy. Somebody made some sort of big mistake, to get into bankruptcy, and very often, a part of the mistake is too much leverage.

Ships are a strange kind of commodity because they're very lumpy, very big individual units, but they're commodities.