Quote

If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don't need tax loopholes to make money.

James Surowiecki

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
Private
Remaking
Taxes
Firms
Company
Loopholes
Money
Equity
Need
Claim
Needs
Firm
Make
Companies
Good
Claims

More quotes by James Surowiecki

Image
Self-dealing, essentially, occurs when managers run companies to line their own pockets instead of those of the companies' owners. It's been a perennial problem in American capitalism and became a real dilemma when America moved toward a model in which corporations would be run by professional managers who had only small ownership stakes.
James Surowiecki
Image
The fact that industries wax and wane is a reality of any economic system that wants to remain dynamic and responsive to people's changing tastes.
James Surowiecki
Image
As technology improves, on-screen avatars look more and more like real people. When they start looking too real, though, we pull away. These almost-humans aren't quite right they look creepy, like zombies.
James Surowiecki
Image
In the days when corporate downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly and setting the bar for corporate performance so high that executives felt their only option was to slash payrolls.
James Surowiecki
Image
On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough.
James Surowiecki
Image
You'll sometimes hear from people that they actually do a better job of getting their work done when they have a lot of other obligations - in effect, it removes the possibility of procrastinating.
James Surowiecki
Image
The typical American corporation is a shareholders' republic the same way that China is a peoples' republic.
James Surowiecki
Image
What an economy really wants, after all, is not more investment per se but better investment. It wants capital to flow to companies that will create value - not in the form of a rising stock price but in the form of more goods for less cost, more jobs, and rising wages - by enhancing productivity.
James Surowiecki
Image
Life insurance became popular only when insurance companies stopped emphasizing it as a good investment and sold it instead as a symbolic commitment by fathers to the future well-being of their families.
James Surowiecki
Image
Of course, plenty of people don't think that guaranteeing affordable health insurance is a core responsibility of government.
James Surowiecki
Image
Downsizing itself is an inevitable part of any creatively destructive economy.
James Surowiecki
Image
Being out of a job can erode people's confidence and their sense of possibility and employers, often unfairly, tend to take long-term unemployment as a signal that something is wrong.
James Surowiecki
Image
The ban on sports betting does exactly what Prohibition did. It makes criminals rich.
James Surowiecki
Image
Moviegoers love the intricacies of a crime all the more when it's for a good cause.
James Surowiecki
Image
If small groups are included in the decision-making process, then they should be allowed to make decisions. If an organization sets up teams and then uses them for purely advisory purposes, it loses the true advantage that a team has: namely, collective wisdom.
James Surowiecki
Image
Businesses that have gone through an episode of hyperinflation become understandably alert to the threat of it: at the first hint of inflation, they're likely to increase prices, since they've learned that if they don't, and inflation hits, their businesses will be wrecked.
James Surowiecki
Image
If you thought the advent of the Internet, the spread of cheap and efficient information technology, and the growing fragmentation of the consumer market were all going to help smaller companies thrive at the expense of the slow-moving giants of the Fortune 500, apparently you were wrong.
James Surowiecki
Image
Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.
James Surowiecki
Image
Corporate welfare isn't necessarily a bad thing.
James Surowiecki
Image
I tend to have a hard time working on pieces long before they're due. That's why I think the fact that I write a column is really good for me - the column has to be done, and there's no getting around it.
James Surowiecki