Words matter. These are the best Wilbur Ross Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
You cannot just keep borrowing more and more and keep spending more and more without eventually having a day of reckoning.
The E.U., China, and Japan all talk free trade, and they all practice protectionism.
We’re in a trade war. We’ve been in a trade war for decades. That’s why we have the deficit.
In many critical things, such as the very high purity of the aluminium we need in aerospace, we only have one producer. That’s not a good formula.
Believe it or not, Mexico has better treaties with the rest of the world than the Unites States does.
There are deep value opportunities in insurance stocks, which were beaten down because of their exposure to the subprime crisis, annuities, and commercial real estate.
I think what we have to do is figure out how to make sure we get the benefits of improved technology and yet cope with the dislocation that it will inevitably produce in certain industries.
I still like TIPS (Treasury inflation-protected securities), and I think a big opportunity is coming in the municipal bond market.
I’m a very big proponent of cloud. We’ve used it a lot in private sector, and as far as we can tell, it is not only more efficient, it’s probably also more secure for lots of very complicated technical reasons. I think it’s a very important thing for government to do, and also to have systems that talk to each other.
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.
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.
Everybody talks about tariffs as the first thing. Tariffs are the last thing. Tariffs are part of the negotiation. The real trick is going to be increase American exports. Get rid of some of the tariff and non-tariff barriers to American exports.
If you want to do something to destroy consumer spending, just eat away at the middle class because the other problem we have is the structural problem of middle class America.
The problem with regional trade agreements is you get picked apart by the first country. Then you negotiate with the second country. You get picked apart. And you go with the third one. You get picked apart again.
If you think about it: a big bank in any country, what is it? Really, as an investment, it’s a warrant on economy.
The reality is if something were to happen that cost China jobs – like, if they upwardly revalued the currency a lot – those jobs aren’t going to come back to the U.S. They would go to Vietnam; they would go to Thailand. They would go to whatever country was the lowest cost.
Washington, D.C., is the new Wall Street. No significant financial transaction of any consequence occurs without it.
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.
My obligation is to disclose companies in which I’m an officer, a director, or an investor.
There’s trade, there’s sensible trade, and there’s dumb trade.
To me, the most terrifying form of warfare would be if there was some simultaneous cyber attack on our grid, on the banking system, and on our transportation system. That would be quite a devastating thing, and yet in theory, absent some real protective measures, that could happen.
Absent some international interruption, there’s no real justification for oil being more than $90 or $100 a barrel.
I am not anti-trade. I am pro-trade. But I am pro-sensible trade.
If you add up all the promises any politicians makes, the math doesn’t work.
Part of the reason why I’m supporting Trump is that I think we need a more radical, new approach to government – at least in the U.S. – from what we’ve had before.
Shipping has a great oversupply of vessels that came from over-ordering a few years back. We think 2014 may be when it turns around.
One of the problems with industries that have been in relatively long-term declines is that, very often, the managements in those industries develop a kind of loser mentality. And when you ask them what’s wrong with the business, they’ll point to extraneous forces.
I believe in the two-party system.
Mexico has 44 treaties with other countries that make it very advantageous to do international shipping from Mexico rather than from the United States.
Ships are a strange kind of commodity because they’re very lumpy, very big individual units, but they’re commodities.
We’ll be aggressive on trade because we know that deals that have been made historically have resulted in the great loss of manufacturing jobs, a great amount of closed manufacturing businesses. We don’t want that to continue.
Banking, I would argue, is the most heavily regulated industry in the world. Regulations don’t solve things. Supervision solves things.
NAFTA is an ancient treaty.
I think partly the decline in the peso was due to worry about renegotiation of NAFTA, but I think we also need to think about some other mechanisms for making the peso/dollar exchange rate a bit more stable.
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?
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.
Enforcement is a very important part of the administration strategy. We think that even our friendly nations should live by the rules, and if they don’t, we will intend to enforce things against them.
There isn’t a bank in the world that could withstand a run. They all borrow short and lend long, regardless of what they say.
It’s important to have a sound idea, but the really important thing is the implementation.
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 fundamentals are the U.S. is going to end up being a net exporter of natural gas. That’s going to be wonderful to help our balance of payments, reduce our dependence on a lot of countries that aren’t so crazy about us, and change many, many parts of what goes on here.
Confrontational things, admission of error, admission of defeat, restructuring, laying people off – those are not American ideals.
If you add up all the promises any politician makes, the math doesn’t work. Hillary Clinton’s math doesn’t work; Donald’s math probably doesn’t work. I think you have to listen to their campaign pitches more as symbolic, more as metaphors.
Shale gas, if left to flourish, could create several hundred thousand more jobs.
If trade deficits are good, why is China so pleased that they run a huge trade surplus? It’s perfectly obvious that if China hadn’t been such a huge net-exporter, it never would have grown at the rate that it did.
