Banking is a branch of the information business... .International banking exists in a certain state of economic tension with all governments, including the most democratic. This tension is an ancient phenomenon....

Any country that continues to make the difficult decisions,... that opens its economy to global markets and lets the market price mechanism function, will continue to find willing partners among the world's major commercial banks, and the banks will find them worthy credit risks. But even those countries that are self-sufficient can no longer isolate themselves ... .This state of affairs does not necessarily make the world an easier place in which to live.

Economic interdependence in no way lessens the importance of independent national initiative... .Each nation has to evolve its own system for bettering the condition of its people....

Sometimes countries or companies get into trouble with imports because they refuse to look at the real world. We lost the shoe business in New York not because of price but because of styling. The international division of labor is always operative and has taken on the added dimension of consumer preference, which requires a new kind of capital.. .intellectual capital....

Superior intellectual capital always attracts the necessary financial capital over time because it produces a sufficiently attractive real rate of return....

What many less developed countries (LDCs) have in common is a desire to accelerate their growth in order to raise the living standards of their citizens, while at the same time they share an inability to generate enough internal savings to finance that acceleration. Their chronic need for foreign investment and credit is something for which they deserve more praise than criticism....

Like every other developing country, the U.S. was built with borrowed money. We started borrowing abroad about the time the Pilgrims landed...and did not get completely out of debt to foreign creditors until the First World War....

There is nothing intrinsically wrong about carrying a large external debt; capital can be successfully imported over a very long period of time- so long as it remains capital and it is treated as an asset and not as an enemy.

If a country's policymakers ignore the need for capital to reproduce itself, if they keep converting it to current consumption, then tomorrow is never going to be better. The seed corn will have been eaten. Outsiders will cease sending their capital to such a society....

A developing country that wants access to the private savings stream has to adopt policies that reflect a clear understanding of what a bank can and cannot do.

Capital can only be attracted. It cannot be driven....The details of economic development are extremely complex. The basic economic principle involved is very simple....

The shape of coming events is unknown, and we have all learned that the balance of the world's economy can be suddenly and severely disrupted. We have also come to realize that even under crisis conditions the global adjustment process works. It is what saved us in the past and gives us confidence in the future....

It was not the highly publicized LDCs that caused the huge loan write-offs at the banks in the 1970s; it was the made-in-America real estate investment trusts. While the pundits were predicting horrendous defaults in loans to LDCs, the American banking system instead was writing off billions of dollars of bad loans on good old American real estate. Somehow, that never made as good copy as the losses that did not occur.

An individual country may place legal or regulatory obstacles to the free flow of electrons just as it may censor its postal services or its media.... Access to international credit markets is essential for its citizens to share in the goods, materials, services, and technology that are available in the world. It is impossible, as a result of the telecommunications revolution, to keep people from knowing and wanting what is produced and available in other parts of the world. This requires trade....The only thing that finances trade is reverse trade....

All exports in the end are financed by the people who export them. That's why the Arabs have had to finance the export of oil by channeling their surpluses into loans and to investments in the oil-importing countries. That's where the international banks again come in, and can never be kept out, because the function must be performed.