Quotes & Sayings About Balance Sheets

Tatemae is a charming attitude when it means that everyone should look at the other way at a guest's faux pas in the tearoom; it has dangerous and unpredictable results when applied to corporate balance sheets, drug testing, and nuclear-power safety reports. — Alex Kerr

All a company report and balance sheet can tell you is the past and the present. They cannot tell future. — Nicolas Darvas

One cannot live any longer on refrigerators, on politics, on balance-sheets and cross-word puzzles. One cannot live any longer without poetry, colour and love. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

A work of art expresses itself as a balance sheet pitting the spoken against the unspoken. — Russell Sherman

Astute observers of corporate balance sheets are often the first to see business deterioration — Benjamin Graham

Never invest in a company without understanding its finances. The biggest losses in stocks come from companies with poor balance sheets. — Peter Lynch

It is economically irrational to exclude large environmental costs from the balance sheets of the producers and the consumers. You are only kidding yourself if you export those costs on to society as a whole. — John Holdren

Throughout the industrial era, economists considered manufactured capital - money, factories, etc. - the principal factor in industrial production, and perceived natural capital as a marginal contributor. The exclusion of natural capital from balance sheets was an understandable omission. There was so much of it, it didn't seem worth counting. — Paul Hawken

Instead of 6.7 million, the actual number was probably closer to 18 million, and, including Alt-A loans and loans backing PMBS, at least 31 million. Most of the missing subprime loans were on the balance sheets of Fannie and Freddie, which were hiding the numbers of subprime loans they had acquired to meet the affordable-housing goals. — Peter Wallison

The problems of 2008 were never cured. The Federal Reserve's solution to the crisis was to lend the economy enough money to borrow its way out of debt. It thought that if it could subsidize banks lending homeowners enough money to buy houses from people who are defaulting, then the bank balance sheets would end up okay. — Michael Hudson

If we had intellectual vigour enough to ascend from effects to causes, we would explain political, economical and social phenomena less by credit sheets, balance of trade and reparations than by our attitude towards God. — Fulton J. Sheen

Accounting does not make corporate earnings or balance sheets more volatile. Accounting just increases the transparency of volatility in earnings. — Diane Garnick

When I started Netscape I was brand new out of college and all the aspects of building a business, like balance sheets and hiring people, were new to me. — Marc Andreessen

Evidently stockholders have forgotten more than to look at balance sheets. They have forgotten also that they are owners of a business and not merely owners of a quotation on the stock ticker. It is time, and high time, that the millions of American shareholders turned their eyes from the daily market reports long enough to give some attention to the enterprises themselves of which they are the proprietors, and which exist for their benefit and at their pleasure. — Benjamin Graham

Deflation can be particularly dangerous when a financial system is shaky, with household and corporate balance sheets in poor shape and banks undercapitalized and heavily burdened with bad loans. — Ben Bernanke

A good reputation for yourself and your company is an invaluable asset not reflected in the balance sheets. — Li Ka-shing

The problems of the global economy are not based in perception, but in the reality of prices, balance sheets and income statements, vast concentrations of wealth and power, precarious systemic imbalances, ruthless exploitation, and command economies mismanaged by Central State/Bank policy and manipulation. — Charles Hugh Smith

We are led by lawyers who do not understand either technology or balance sheets. — Thomas Friedman

Market values are fixed only in part by balance sheets and income statements; much more by the hopes and fears of humanity; by greed, ambition, acts of God, invention, financial stress and strain, weather, discovery, fashion and numberless other causes impossible to be listed without omission. — Gerald M. Loeb

The Fed has gone about as if the problem is a shortage of liquidity. That is not the basic problem. The basic problem for the markets is that uncertainty that the balance sheets of financial firms are credible.
-Anna J. Schwartz interviewed in the Wall Street Journal, October 18-19, 2008. — John Brian Taylor

It sounds extraordinary but it's a fact that balance sheets can make fascinating reading. — Mary Archer

I passionately disagreed with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's plan to bail out the banks by using a public fund called the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to help banks take toxic assets off their balance sheets. I argued that it would be much better to put the money where the hole was and replenish the equity of the banks themselves. — George Soros

Nobody knows everything that's hidden in the balance sheets of banks. In fact, they are completely impenetrable. — Jerome Kerviel

There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write. — Henry R. Luce

U.S. companies are letting cash pile up on their balance sheets without investing in new projects because they don't have any concrete plans for the future. — Peter Thiel

Balance sheets bore me. I suspect if figures had excited me I would have gone into the city and now be a lot wealthier. — Anne Robinson

I cannot be a monk, nor a crusader, nor a tumbler. I must stay here and hem sheets until I die. My humors are greatly out of balance. I prescribe for myself wormwood and spiced wine and some of the custard left from supper, and I will let all of the dogs sleep in my bed. — Karen Cushman

With weak balance sheets, banks tend to continue lending unprofitable businesses and leave them existing. — Toshihiko Fukui

The important thing," Henry said loudly, "Is that the balance sheets are not balanced at all."he balance sheets are not balanced at all. — B.C. Chase

I look for the hotels that have figured out the comfortable balance - a modern room that is well designed, and really clean sheets. — Simon Sinek

Balance Sheets are meaningless. Our accounting systems are still based on the assumption that 80% of costs are manual labor. — Peter Drucker

Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets. — Simone Weil

The fact is that one of the earliest lessons I learned in business was that balance sheets and income statements are fiction, cash flow is reality. — Chris Chocola

Investment banking has, in recent years, resembled a casino, and the massive scale of gambling losses has dragged down traditional business and retail lending activities as banks try to rebuild their balance sheets. This was one aspect of modern financial liberalisation that had dire consequences. — Vince Cable

If you think too-big-to-fail banks are not worthy of investment because of their impossible-to-read balance sheets, well then, don't buy them. — Barry Ritholtz