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Countries don't go out of business....The infrastructure doesn't go away, the productivity of the people doesn't go away, the natural resources don’t go away. And so their assets always exceed their liabilities, which is the technical reason for bankruptcy. And that's very different from a company.

Walter Wriston

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Walter Wriston
Age: 85 †
Born: 1919
Born: August 3
Died: 2005
Died: January 19
Banker
Middletown
Connecticut
Walter Bigelow Wriston
Always
Company
Exceed
People
Natural
Infrastructure
Business
Productivity
Away
Technical
Doesn
Assets
Reason
Investing
Liabilities
Country
Countries
Liability
Different
Resources
Bankruptcy

More quotes by Walter Wriston

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A country does not go bankrupt.
Walter Wriston
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The Doomsayers have always had their uses, since they trigger the coping mechanism that often prevents the events they forecast.
Walter Wriston
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All the Congress, all the accountants and tax lawyers, all the judges, and a convention of wizards all cannot tell for sure what the income tax law says.
Walter Wriston
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Every line in the government's budget has its own constituency.
Walter Wriston
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It is a maxim of cryptology that what one man can devise, another can unravel. This principle keeps armies of tax lawyers and accountants employed, but adds nothing to our national productivity.
Walter Wriston
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There'll be a growing disparity between economics and politics. An economy that grows so rapidly is intractably global. On the other hand, the current political system is intractably national. So there is a growing dichotomy between a global economy and locally based politics.
Walter Wriston
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Failure is not a crime. Failure to learn from failure is.
Walter Wriston
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Capital will always go where it’s welcome and stay where it’s well treated. Capital is not just money. It’s also talent and ideas. They, too, will go where they’re welcome and stay where they are well treated.
Walter Wriston
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The information revolution has changed wealth. Intellectual capital is far more important than money.
Walter Wriston
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We're not in cultures which support learning we're in cultures that give us the message consistently: Don't mess up, don't make mistakes, don't make the boss look bad, don't give us any surprises. So we're asking for a kind of predictability, control, respect, and compliance that has nothing to do with learning.
Walter Wriston
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The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away.
Walter Wriston
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Information is a business in itself. It is also something that has made control impossible ... you cannot get customers to accept prices in one place when they know there's a better deal elsewhere. It's a whole new world.
Walter Wriston
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One man saying that everything is wrong can command coast-to-coast attention in living color, a power not given to an absolute monarch a century ago.
Walter Wriston
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Rising prices or wages do not cause inflation they only report it. They represent an essential form of economic speech, sincemoney isjust another form of information.
Walter Wriston
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If we had a truth-in Government act comparable to the truth-in-advertising law, every note issued by the Treasury would be obliged to include a sentence stating: This note will be redeemed with the proceeds from an identical note which will be sold to the public when this one comes due.
Walter Wriston
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Banking is a branch of the information business.
Walter Wriston
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Many organizations are now trying to walk under the banner of The Learning Organization, realizing that knowledge is our most important product ... But the only place that I've seen it is in the Army. As one colonel said, We realized a while ago that it's better to learn than be dead.
Walter Wriston
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As long as capital-both human and money-can move toward opportunity, trade will not balance.
Walter Wriston
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The greatest testimony to the human spirit that I'm witnessing now is the fact that people still come back to work, after all that has been done to them. They are still willing to participate for a more positive future if they would be sincerely invited.
Walter Wriston
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Information about money is more important than money itself.
Walter Wriston