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In truth, it's not the shareholders of the American International Group who benefited most from its bailout; they were mostly wiped out. The great beneficiaries have been the creditors and counterparties at the other end of A.I.G.'s derivatives deals - firms like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale, Barclays and UBS.

There's a lot of companies that profit from a weak dollar.

Why do investors seem to care about 'billion dollar exits?' Historically, top venture funds have driven returns from their ownership in just a few companies in a given fund of many companies.

I think that the failures of Enron and WorldCom and other companies are partially failures of investors to recognize companies that are selling for a thousand times nothing, but chances are they may be worth only that.

I often say to entrepreneurs, 'If Lehman Brothers were Lehman Brothers & Sisters, it wouldn't have gone into bankruptcy.'

You cannot have companies where many of the largest ones lose money indefinitely without someone finally waving the white flag, and IBM is the most recent example of that.

The people who are buying stocks because they're going up and they don't know what they do deserve to lose money.

You can't operate a business running at a loss, and particularly if you're doing it by paying yourselves. It just doesn't fly.

But if you look at WorldCom, which is the biggest failure to date, they grew dramatically, they were buying companies that were bigger than they were and they were doing it off inflated stock.

In our equities business, 49 of the 50 most important Lehman clients are back doing business with us. The flows are 75 to 80 per cent of what they were prior to the bankruptcy. The issues which damaged Lehman were around commercial mortgages and illiquid private equity assets.