Jim Chanos Quotes
105 Jim Chanos Quotes
1 2 3
As an analyst, you have to be very comfortable with the balance sheet, flow of funds statement, and very comfortable reading the footnotes. That’s blocking and tackling 101.
Jim Chanos
I rely on those who have gone through the bull markets and manias and bubbles. And still, they too, sometimes get caught up in the positive hype.
Jim Chanos
Relying on what somebody else is saying is… very fraught with danger.
Jim Chanos
If I were good at timing, I probably would have retired a long time ago.
Jim Chanos
Even a transaction that looks immaterial to an entity may be material to one person in that entity… Always remember, what is immaterial to one entity can be very material to a key person.
Jim Chanos
[In May 2007 on Macquarie Bank (MQG)] (Macquarie) doesn’t care what it pays for assets and flips those assets to entities funded by other investors. This only works in a world of cheap credit and asset inflation.
Jim Chanos
[In September 2008] We are currently witnessing one of the periodic financial convulsions that inevitably follow eras of easy credit and lax regulation.
Jim Chanos
[In September 2008] Short selling has been misunderstood and maligned throughout history. In the 1630s, England banned short selling after tulipmania collapsed in the Netherlands to prevent a similar fallout in England.
Jim Chanos
[In September 2008] Short sellers openly warned about the problems at Enron, Tyco, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before their meltdowns. And when it comes to investigating corporate fraud, it's the short sellers who are the detectives, while all too often our regulators practice archaeology. Indeed, my firm was among the first to raise red flags about Enron's finances.
Jim Chanos
[In September 2008] Short-sellers act as ‘safety valves.’ Their transactions help to bring share prices to levels supported by the fundamentals, decreasing the likelihood of price bubbles. Short selling also improves market quality and efficiency by narrowing spreads, improving the speed of price adjustments based on new information, and pumping liquidity into the market.
Jim Chanos
[In September 2008] Economists have long believed that market prices are best set by a variety of viewpoints, including by those with no previous ownership interest. In the financial markets, that latter group is the short-sellers. As a former SEC chief economist aptly observed, ‘To ban short selling is to in effect say that the government is going to try to determine what stock prices should be.’
Jim Chanos
[In September 2008] Closing down short sellers will not work to help the U.S. maintain the freest, strongest and most liquid capital markets in the world.
Jim Chanos
Borrowing short and lending long is still a bad idea.
Jim Chanos
Equity capital is not simply to ‘Balance the books.’
Jim Chanos
Issuer compensation creates inherent conflict of interests.
Jim Chanos
Regulate the activities not the actors.
Jim Chanos
Capitalism on the upside and socialism on the downside is bad policy.
Jim Chanos
[On Quantitative Easing] Printing money is not a real solution: Zimbabwe should not be the gold standard!
Jim Chanos
Zombie banks financed with cheap money only prolongs the problem: Did we not learn anything from Japan?
Jim Chanos
Insurance without reserves is not insurance.
Jim Chanos
Shooting the messenger does not change reality.
Jim Chanos
Wall street always attacks naysayers during the boom. Problems do not go away by silencing critics.
Jim Chanos
Cosmetic changes in accounting policies will not change reality.
Jim Chanos
[On his first job after college as a beginning analyst for Blyth Eastman Dillon working 80 hour weeks for $12,500/year.] I could’ve made more money shovelling snow in Milwaukee.
Jim Chanos
[On Baldwin-United Corp] I started looking at this mess of a company and couldn’t figure out how they were making money… I was just simply calling up people and asking questions and trying to figure this thing out.
Jim Chanos
People’s rational decision-making breaks down in an environment of negative reinforcement.
Jim Chanos
People think I have two horns and spread syphilis.
Jim Chanos
[On his ex partner offering to sell his share of the Kynikos business for $1 so he could write off the tax loss and sleep at night just before the 1987 stock market crash. (They had waited a year watching stocks they had shorted go up and up.) Chanos took the dollar bill out of his wallet on the spot.] It was the best purchase I ever made, ironically. [On his ex-partners wife – She] Still wants to kill him over it.
Jim Chanos
[On comments that a scandal-ridden firm had a reputable auditor signing off on it’s reports.] They ALL have reputable audit firms. That’s one thing I want you to take away from this course: every big fraud had a great audit firm behind it.
Jim Chanos
[On comparing auditors and government regulators to archaeologists.] They’ll tell you what happened after the damage has been done.
Jim Chanos
A me-too company called Dynegy tried to buy Enron as it was spiraling down to bankruptcy. Someone said, ‘Have you looked at Enron’s books?’ And Dynegy said, ‘That’s the good news. We’ve looked at the books and their accounting is exactly the same as ours.’ I backed up the truck on Dynegy at that point. We made as much on Dynegy as we did on Enron.
Jim Chanos
We’ve had our most success with debt-financed asset bubbles – as opposed to just plain asset bubbles – where there are ticking time bombs in terms of debt needing to be repaid, and where there are people ahead of the shareholders in the bankruptcy or workout process.
Jim Chanos
Consumer fads. This is when investors… use recent experience to extrapolate ad infinitum into the future what is clearly a one-time growth ramp-up. People are consistently way too optimistic… Cabbage Patch Kids in the 1980s, NordicTrack in the early 1990s, Salton with the George Foreman grills.
Jim Chanos
[In January 2010] Bubbles are identified by credit excesses, not valuation excesses, and there’s no bigger credit excess than in China.
Jim Chanos
[In January 2010 on excess office construction in China.] There is a 5 foot by 5 foot office cubicle being built for every man, woman, and child in China.
Jim Chanos
[In April 2010 on newly built apartments in China.] A lot of these apartments are empty… What’s even more interesting when we did our research is that the realization that investors who buy more than one property as we often saw in Miami and other markets in the US – they keep them empty, they don’t rent them because it’s much easier to sell an unoccupied apartment for the next speculator to flip it!
Jim Chanos
[In April 2010 on what the Chinese government can do about their property bubble.] The game has to keep going, they’re on this treadmill to hell. Because so much of their GDP growth is construction. 50-60% of this countries GDP growth is construction
Jim Chanos
[In April 2010] In China it’s all about making the number… They’re really hooked on this sort-of heroin of real estate development to keep the numbers going. It’s not infrastructure, it’s not airports…
Jim Chanos
[In April 2010 on the housing being built in China not being for the mass-market.] This is not affordable housing for the middle class, this is high end condo’s in major urban areas and high end office buildings.
Jim Chanos
[In April 2010 on China’s oversupply of housing.] The thing about property bubbles is when the cranes stop going higher, when the buildings stop being built, and when they stop putting foundations – holes in the ground, you know that the bubbles over… It happened in Miami, it happened in Dubai – it will happen here. [‘Okay – Then give me the timeline that you see?’ – Charlie Rose] Ah – the timeline. If I knew that – I’d be a rich guy… We’re starting to see the signs now of some silly excess.
Jim Chanos
1 2 3
Return from Jim Chanos Quotes to Quoteswise.com