Wilbur Ross Quotes

102 Wilbur Ross Quotes

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[In November 2008] We do not liquidate things, destroy the company or sell off its assets to make money. Instead we try to infuse vitality back into the company.
Wilbur Ross

[In November 2008] If we start getting into trade wars and protectionism, that’s the one thing I could see pushing America into a real black hole.
Wilbur Ross

[In November 2008] China has become the whipping boy in the US, just as Japan was some 15 years ago.
Wilbur Ross

The good thing about oil hitting a high of $140-plus is that it provoked behaviour changes in people, especially in America. The sports utility vehicle (SUV) market collapses and the miles driven dropped substantially.
Wilbur Ross

[In November 2008] Wall Street and the real economy are the same. The financial markets interact very actively with the commercial or the other side of the economy.
Wilbur Ross

You can’t keep losing market share every year.
Wilbur Ross

We are very big in the auto parts business as suppliers. In fact, we are just expanding in India… We have employees in about 17 countries. More than half of our business is outside the US.
Wilbur Ross

There are only about a dozen car companies that amount to anything in the whole world. But there are hundreds and thousands of suppliers. So it’s too fragmented. Our theory is that eventually auto manufacturers will go to global platforms…
Wilbur Ross

In steel we’ve changed the companies we bought and that changed the whole industry structure.
Wilbur Ross

We do not liquidate things, destroy the company, sell of the assets and make money out of it. We are more like the phoenix – the bird that re-creates itself from its own ashes. We try to infuse that vitality into a company and often use it as a roll-out kind of an M&A to help consolidate the industry.
Wilbur Ross



[In November 2008] I think another problem that America faces is that there are not enough engineers. India and China each are graduating 3-4 times as many engineers as we are. In the longer-term, if you have a very large supply of engineering, it’s be very hard for the US to compete.
Wilbur Ross

[In January 2009] I don’t think we’d buy little banks. We want to buy a big bank in distress.
Wilbur Ross

[In January 2009] Many banks need management changes.
Wilbur Ross

[In January 2009] There are too many banks in this country. We have about 8,000 and only a small handful has half the deposits. I think you will see consolidation within the industry. It is both inevitable and desirable.
Wilbur Ross

[In August 2010 on how he got into business.] What happened was the then treasurer of Yale left to go a money management firm. And instead of continuing to park cars on Plymouth Park Jockey Club, which had been my prior summer job, he dragged me down to Wall Street, and that’s what changed my whole career.
Wilbur Ross

Actually my whole team liked the investing better than the advisory. So I went to the management of Rothschild and said, we don’t want to do this anymore. I’d like to buy the fund from you, and then we’ll go out of the business. We won’t compete with you for advisory assignments. And that’s the deal that we worked out. So on April Fool’s Day, 2000, I went into business for myself.
Wilbur Ross

[On LTV in it’s second bankruptcy.] I went to the leader of the USWA, United Steelworkers, and said we’ll buy this thing and we’ll revitalize it, but we need a contract that’s different from the contracts that you have had historically. And it turned out he was looking for someone to do just that.
Wilbur Ross

[In August 2010] I have found that the leaders of some of the big industrial unions, the steelworkers, the autoworkers, they understand the dynamics of the industry at least as well as the senior managements of the company.
Wilbur Ross

I’m a big believer in productivity bonuses for blue collar workers, because the American worker, if you give them the right environment and chance to do well, will be a very, very productive person.
Wilbur Ross

[In August 2010 on selling LTV] The year we sold the business we paid about $200 million in productivity bonuses to blue collar workers, probably more than any American company ever has.
Wilbur Ross



[In August 2010 on a one year tariff when investing in the steel industry during LTV’s second bankruptcy.] All we were pitching for was not a permanent tariff. I don’t believe in big barriers forever, because that leads to destructive practice. We just wanted a little opportunity to reform the industry.
Wilbur Ross

[In August 2010] We’re in the business not so much of being contrarians deliberately, but rather we’d like to take perceived risk instead of actual risk. What I mean by that is that you get paid for taking risk that people think is risky. You don’t particularly get paid for taking actual risks.
Wilbur Ross

Out came ‘Business Week’ asking, is Wilbur Ross crazy?
Wilbur Ross

[On buying Bethlehem Steel.] The joke was, right when everybody was taking this is too risky, it will never work, the big debate within our shop was should we just liquidate it and take the profit or should we try to start it up. That’s how sure we were that we weren’t actually taking risk.
Wilbur Ross

[On transforming Bethlehem Steel.] We became the most efficient steel company in America. We were making steel with less than one man hour per ton. The Chinese at the same time were using six man hours per ton… We were actually exporting some steel to China.
Wilbur Ross

[On what he had in common with Natal who he merged Bethlehem Steel with.] both were viewed as outsiders to the industry. Both were viewed as kind of strange in the way we went about things. But also we both believed the consolidation is totally essential for the industry.
Wilbur Ross

[On the reason he believed consolidation was essential in the steel industry.] the reason it was essential, when you had a lot of mills that only had one mill, one location, steel demand was down five percent, you can’t winch back a mill five percent for very long. It’s kind of like a car engine. It’s either on or it’s off. So if you have multiple mills you can modulate your production to be consistent with demand.
Wilbur Ross

[In August 2010] What I’m worried about is R&D. U.S. is graduating one-seventh as many engineers per year as China and India combined… And not all of ours stay here, because many of them can’t get green cards.
Wilbur Ross

[In August 2010] Right now, China - we think of China as a polluter. Let me tell you, China is the leader in wind technology, wind-power technology, and in solar.
Wilbur Ross

[In August 2010] Railroads use one-fourth as much fuel per ton mile as intercity freight… Twenty-five percent as much as intercity freight by truck. Yet they keep spending… So you don’t even need exotic solutions in order to cut pollution. But what you need is someone to say a policy and enunciate a reasonable policy.
Wilbur Ross



[In August 2010 on government policy.] You need a policy that’s based in the economic realities, not just in political realities.
Wilbur Ross

[In August 2010] People paint immigration with a big broad brush. Not everybody who wants to emigrate here is a drug dealer or somebody who is going to be a burden… A lot of people would like to come here are very well educated, very professional people that could really contribute.
Wilbur Ross

[In August 2010] If you want to do something to destroy consumer spending just eat away at the middle class… Median income in this country went nowhere the whole decade of the 2000s. But every year, people want to live a little better than they did the year before and the only solution they could find was to borrow. And I really believe that that sociological phenomenon is what ultimately led to the subprime crisis.
Wilbur Ross

[In October 2011] We are big investors in Virgin Money, Richard Branson’s company, and we are backing Virgin in their bid for Northern Rock. We are actually putting in the bids tomorrow. Tomorrow European time.
Wilbur Ross

[In December 2011] I think there are two gigantic factors happening in the world today. One is globalisation and that is changing everything. Whatever else it will mean, it will mean rising standards of living in the emerging countries. And that in term is going to change the patterns of commodities. Commodities will continue to be cyclical in pricing, but now there will be a strong secular growth trend underlying that.
Wilbur Ross

[In December 2011] Rising standards of living fundamentally mean more consumption of commodities.
Wilbur Ross

[In December 2011] The second major phenomenon is the internet. The Internet is now reducing the value of information to zero. And I believe the consequence of that will be to drive the value of expertise to infinity. Because everybody has information overload. The problem nowadays is not getting information, the problem is sorting through it and figuring out what’s relevant and what to do with it. And that’s become a challenge because all information travels at the speed of light. To me those are the big factors that will shape tomorrow’s world.
Wilbur Ross

[In December 2011] We are not high-tech investors. We try to stick to very conventional things that we can understand.
Wilbur Ross

[In December 2011] My wife accuses me of trying to re-invent the nineteen century. And maybe that’s true but without the slavery part.
Wilbur Ross

[In December 2011] At the end of the day the traditional industries should be the biggest beneficiaries of the internet.
Wilbur Ross



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