Back in 2005 and 2006, I argued as forcefully as I could, in letters to clients of my investment firm, ‘Scion Capital’, that the mortgage market would melt down in the second half of 2007, causing substantial damage to the economy.
One of the hardest things to do is to get capital. That’s where we, as black business, struggles. And the other place we struggle is scale, and because we don’t have an access to capital, we cannot scale.
Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
Legislative reforms in the 1990s and the public/private structure led managements to expand the GSEs’ balance sheets to enormous size, underpinned by wafer-thin slivers of capital, driving high shareholder returns and very high compensation for management.
Accounting rules give financial institutions flexibility about when they choose to recognize venture capital profits.
The better side of Wall Street is when it is acting as an efficient mechanism of capital formation and capital flow, which helps businesses invest.
One of the most important political and economic facts of this young century is that capital has been slipping the traces of the nation-state. Business is global; government is national.
With the policymaking process, you have an idea, and you try to sell other stakeholders on the idea. That’s not much different than in business, where you’re trying to find capital to make your idea a reality.
I often say Policy Planning is very analogous to a venture capital firm. A venture capital firm sees an interesting idea and puts money behind it; in Policy Planning, we look for promising ideas and then put contacts and relationships behind it.
Democrats who see virtue in the estate tax are doing the equivalent of aborting future enterprises. They deprive businesses of oxygen with their support for capital gains taxes and disregard for contracts.
There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.
You know, when the cost of capital goes down, when credit becomes cheap, people start taking greater and greater risks.
While I continue to work towards another opportunity with the Majors, I’m excited to grow my partnership with SeventySix Capital.
A study by Treasury economists estimated that a country with a tax rate one percentage point lower than another country’s attracts 3 percent more capital. It’s not surprising then, that average OECD corporate tax rates have trended steadily downward.
It’s like how science fiction in the ’50s was a way of talking about war without actually having to risk any political capital. The obvious metaphor is power and powerlessness, but I also think it’s a way of experimenting with dangerous feelings in a safe arena and trying things out.
All countries will eventually need to rebuild their growth models around digital technologies and the human capital that supports their deployment and expansion.
Capital isn’t scarce; vision is.
To focus capital and entrepreneurship into empowering innovation, we should change is the capital gains tax rate. We would be better served by a regressive tax rate, that would become progressively smaller the longer the investment is held.
Marx, as we have seen, solved it by declaring capital to be a different thing from product, and maintaining that it belonged to society and should be seized by society and employed for the benefit of all alike.
Growing up in Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda, I had a wonderful life, one that I have not experienced anywhere since, even after living in nine countries.
The senior officer who met with reporters in Baghdad said there had been 21 car bombings in the capital in May, and 126 in the past 80 days. All last year, he said, there were only about 25 car bombings in Baghdad.
It’s not fair to say that people who work with their head or with their hands ought to pay taxes, but people who earn their living with capital ought not to.
Silicon Valley has been a technology capital like New York is a financial capital.
It is clear as you look at the team why Data Point Capital has so quickly become one of the premier venture capital firms. I look forward to adding to the firm’s very bright future.
That’s the key: get the constitution in place. Get rule of law in place, capital will come, electricity will follow.
Unions are about the collective leverage, the power of numbers versus the power of capital.
It doesn’t take Warren Buffett to realize that when companies don’t know what new rules will look like, it affects their ability to commit capital and create new jobs.
I wanted to be a venture capitalist and join Sequoia Capital. They’ve financed and helped built some really special and enormously successful companies, including Google, Yahoo, Paypal, YouTube, Cisco, Oracle, Apple, and also Zappos.
We spend billions on international aid annually, but we don’t find ways to connect people to dignified work. I realized that if we don’t think about ways to harness private capital to solve problems, we’re leaving large amounts of money on the table and doing ourselves a disservice.
Nowadays, you don’t need to live in a fashion capital of the world, have lots of money, or be able to shop during certain hours. With online retail, it’s possible to browse and shop for fashion anytime of the day, from pretty much anywhere.
If you would make the most of yourself, cut away all of your vitality sappers; get rid of everything which hampers you and holds you back, everything which wastes your energy, cuts down your working capital. Get freedom at any cost.
Just as invasion is the true and tried weapon in the hands of capital against the class struggle, so on the other hand the fearless pursuit of the class struggle has always proven the most effective preventative of foreign invasions.
There’s no better place in the world for technology start-ups than Silicon Valley; there’s such an incredible well of talent and capital and resources. The whole system is set up to foster the creation of new companies.
One of the factors a country’s economy depends on is human capital. If you don’t provide women with adequate access to healthcare, education and employment, you lose at least half of your potential. So, gender equality and women’s empowerment bring huge economic benefits.
Victoria is proudly the multicultural capital of Australia; we have a diverse, harmonious community.
Since the 1980s, we’ve been living in this era, really, of corporate rule, based on this idea that the role of government is to liberate the power of capital so that they can have as much economic growth as quickly as possible, and then all good things will flow from that.
The thing that people associate with expertise, authoritativeness, kind of with a capital ‘A,’ don’t correlate very well with who’s actually good at making predictions.
My mother was born in Latvia. She and most of her family fled from the capital city of Riga in 1944 with the final approach of the Soviet army.
On one level, bombing ISIS is easy. The U.S. knows where the group operates. There’s no need for a ten-year hunt like the one for Osama bin Laden. The terror group has two capital cities: Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. Al-Qaeda never had such an obvious home address.
Many entrepreneurs have shifted their focus to pursuing VC funding as a primary strategic priority instead of concentrating on generating value for their users. This is worrisome because raising capital alone is misleading as a benchmark for success.
In 1987, Merrill Lynch asked me to open a Swiss capital markets operation. I was 27. In hindsight, I was lucky enough to start a business from scratch. And I mean from zero – no offices, even, just a space with walls between different areas. We decided to tear down the walls.
Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life.
Private enterprise in the history of civilization has never led large, expensive, dangerous projects with unknown risks. That has never happened because when you combine all these factors, you cannot create a capital market valuation of that activity.
In 1998 I invested in the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at Strathclyde Uni and subsequently put more capital into enterprise education to try and help change the culture.
There will soon come an armed contest between capital and labor. They will oppose each other, not with words and arguments, but with shot and shell, gun-powder and cannon. The better classes are tired of the insane howling of the lower strata and they mean to stop them.
Blitzscaling is always managerially inefficient – and it burns through a lot of capital quickly. But you have to be willing to take on these inefficiencies in order to scale up. That’s the opposite of what large organizations optimize for.
If I could press a button and have all of Sequoia Capital on the Midas List, I would choose to do that over a honoring a single individual.
Venture capital is unscalable. Production equals the time each partner has.
I was a chief justice. And before that, I was a district court judge, handled major felonies, including capital murder cases; and I handled major civil litigation.
