The Ledger, every show

“And I'm almost with Milton Friedman, who wrote that famous New York Times Magazine piece in 1970, which said that the job of a company is to go out and make money ethically, legally, responsibly, but ultimately to serve the shareholders.”

“Particularly the FDIC, which was run by Sheila Bair, who was particularly difficult. And this caper, as my deputy Ron Bloom used to call it, almost fell apart over that problem.”

“What a lot of these firms or institutions have is a lot of illiquid stuff. Harvard is still trying to untangle some of it that they probably shouldn't have done”

“One of the things that I force the team to do once a year is go back and look at our terminated managers, because it's easy to fire a manager. And in most firms, you fire a manager, nobody's ever going to ask you again, well, how did that manager do? Did you m…”

“If you do the math, right, a firm has, let's just say, a hundred managers. So each manager has one percent of your capital on average. And each of those managers has 20 top positions. What is that? Five basis points of your capital is in some given position. N…”

“I believed in the specialist model. The idea that you have five or six smart senior people, and they all go off and do whatever they feel like doing, and often they're doing different things from one investment to another, it didn't make perfect sense to me.”

“I do think the return premium Which, while it's smaller now, probably, certainly than it was, is still there. I think the way that private equity guys and ladies think about driving performance, not getting caught up in being a public company, being very comme…”

“I think I wrote a piece for Business Week years ago, in which I said that hedge funds are not an investment strategy, they're a fee structure.”

“We're not good, I frankly don't think anybody is, at market timing or even factor overlays”

“We're way underweight Europe. There are many days when I wake up and think we should just leave altogether. There's nothing attractive about the fundamentals.”

“People assume, and maybe Mike assumed this, that because I had been a banker and a private equity guy, I could run an investment management firm, but it's like asking a cardiologist to look at your elbow that you think you might have broken that's really belon…”

“Most of our money is and always will be managed externally because we do believe in diversification.”

“The advantages of doing it internally are that, quite frankly, the fee drag of private equity is the biggest of any asset class, and I Sort of knew what it was when I was on the other side, but as a limited partner, I really knew what it was. It's enormous.”

“And so our unfunded liability ratio is very, which again, I don't want to get into specifics, is very low compared to what the typical endowment or foundation has.”

“Now the problem is that just like in other parts of money management, performance persistence is not that great. So a firm that was top quartile in its last fund could well end up being second, third, or fourth quartile in its next one, and then back to first …”

“I believe that it's a little bit of reverse engineering, that I'm willing to pay almost any level of fees if I believe the net performance is going to be superior. So we have people that we pay very high fees to, because I really believe they're exceptional pe…”

“We don't invest in Russia, I can't imagine we ever would”

“I don't know how a guy sitting in New York can be as effective in China as people who are on the ground there.”

“We like owner operators. We want Firms that are owned by the people who are actually managing the money, not part of some colossus. We want the lead person, or lead couple people, if that's what it is, to just be so driven that you can feel that they taste thi…”

“One of the early decisions that Alice and I made was that if we couldn't be in what we thought was a top quartile manager, we just wouldn't do it, and so the result was it has taken us 11 or 12 years now And we still do not have as big of a venture portfolio a…”

“There isn't really a true private equity market in China yet. It's more of a growth equity and venture market, and probably also cheaper than the US.”

“I'll make one observation you didn't ask about, but it does, I found it fascinating, which is that we have more investment managers in China on the private side with a senior partner or the CEO of the firm as a woman than we have here, because here we have zer…”

“We actually opened our doors for business, his business on January one of 2008, which I mentioned because you know what happened in 2008. And so we went right down the water slide with everybody else. Fortunately, most of our money was in cash in 2008.”

“They had had 15 or 20 years to build a portfolio, to establish relationships, build a team, and so on, and we were starting fresh. That certainly put us at a disadvantage, particularly in things like venture capital.”