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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
Different
Resources
Bankruptcy
Always
Company
Exceed
People
Natural
Infrastructure
Business
Productivity
Away
Technical
Doesn
Assets
Reason
Investing
Liabilities
Country
Countries
Liability

More quotes by Walter Wriston

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Capital goes where it is welcome and stays where it is well treated.
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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.
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Information about money has become almost as important as money itself.
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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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Failure is not a crime. Failure to learn from failure is.
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Risk is not a dirty word.
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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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The information revolution has changed wealth. Intellectual capital is far more important than money.
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Every line in the government's budget has its own constituency.
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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The guy with the competitive advantage is the one with the best technology.
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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As long as capital-both human and money-can move toward opportunity, trade will not balance.
Walter Wriston
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A truly global economy, as opposed to the multinational economy of the recent past, will require concessions of national power ... that seemed impossible a few years ago and which even now we can but partly imagine.
Walter Wriston
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A country does not go bankrupt.
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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All of life is the management of risk, not its elimination.
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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Banking is a branch of the information business.
Walter Wriston
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I walk into all these organizations, and I'm always puzzled when I realize that people still want to be there. Most people really want to love their organizations. We need that level of commitment ... Yet organizations have done very little to deserve that kind of staying-power.
Walter Wriston