Wilbur Ross Quotations

My wife Hillary sometimes accuses me of trying to reinvent the 19th century. In some ways she's right because I like things that I can understand and that aren't too complicated.

I think it's natural for any manager to want to grow his business. The question is at what rate, and in what direction, and in what format?

Shipping has a great oversupply of vessels that came from over-ordering a few years back. We think 2014 may be when it turns around.

The typical big Japanese company has somewhere between a third and 40 percent of its revenues coming from developing countries, and about a third of Japan's exports are also to the emerging countries, so in a strange way, Japan, which has very little internal growth, its big companies are a good way to play the emerging markets.

I think at the end of the day, the real sick man of Europe is liable to turn out to be France, not Greece, not Portugal, not Spain, not Italy. The reason is France is very uncompetitive to begin with on a global scale, and the measures that Hollande has been putting in have been very, very negative from the point of view of economic growth.

The one term I don't like to be called is a 'vulture.' Because to me, a vulture is a kind of asset-stripper that eats dead flesh off the bones of a dead creature. Our bird should be the phoenix, the bird that reinvents itself, recreates itself from its ashes. And that's much closer to what it is that we really do.

We would be interested in bidding if Collins & Aikman in the U.S. were to come up for sale,

I see myself as a private-equity investor that helps rebuild companies. Restructuring is a cottage industry in that there aren't that many serious practitioners.

Shale gas, if left to flourish, could create several hundred thousand more jobs.

Banking, I would argue, is the most heavily regulated industry in the world. Regulations don't solve things. Supervision solves things.