Wilbur Ross Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

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

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

“I think at the end of the day, the real sick man of Europe is liable to turn out to be France, not Greece, not Portugal, not Spain, not Italy. The reason is France is very uncompetitive to begin with on a global scale, and the measures that Hollande has been putting in have been very, very negative from the point of view of economic growth.”

“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.”

“I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a bank being big. In fact, there are some good arguments about universality of geography that in theory, if you have all your eggs in one little community, and some big employer goes out, that could be your downfall.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”