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Wilbur Ross

From Wikiquote
There was not a single hint of a protester anywhere there during the whole time we were there.- Ross, on his visit to a country where protestors are executed

Wilbur Louis Ross, Jr. (born November 28, 1937) is an American businessman who served as the 39th United States Secretary of Commerce from 2017 to 2021. A member of the Republican Party, Ross was previously chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of WL Ross & Co from 2000 to 2017.

Quotes

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Quotes about Ross

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  • [Trump] appoints as his commerce secretary one of leading vulture capitalists in America, Wilbur Ross, whose specialty is seizing a company that's run out of cash, recapitalizing it. You don't pay the bills you owe... (something that Donald Trump never heard of). You borrow new money (something Donald Trump certainly has heard of) then you squeeze the borrowed money out and put it in your own pocket, and you turn the zombie [company] loose until it dies.
  • Wilbur Ross goes with Donald Trump to Riyadh, where Donald Trump praises the Saudis for leading the fight against terrorism. You know who the biggest funders of terrorism in the world are? He attacks Qatar... an ally of the US that allows us to have our most important military base there. ...Wilbur Ross comes back from this trip, he goes on CNBC and he says, "...The Saudi people love us. ...There wasn't a single demonstrator, anywhere..." and Becky Quick ...says "...It's against the law to protest there. They arrest people. They whip them," and he said "Well, if you say so. I don't know... [M]y Saudi guards got out these two baskets of dates... what a heartfelt gift..." This guy doesn't even know when he's being bribed by a foreign government.
  • To counteract all this, we are told that big government must now return, to regain control, redistribute resources and, with enlightened industrial policy, steer resources to particular national industries and green technology. This is what the debate looked like even before the pandemic. When the new coronavirus ravaged the planet, suspicion of the outside world and free trade exploded. Governments began to close their borders and demand that supply chains be repatriated. ‘I don’t want to talk about a victory lap,’ Trump’s rather enthusiastic business secretary said about the ravages of the virus, but ‘I think it will help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America.’ Financial Times’ global business columnist Rana Foroohar declared that ‘Globalisation as we’ve known it for the last forty years, has failed.’ Governments, meanwhile, decided that the way to protect the economy was bailouts for everyone – first for the financial sector, then for everybody else. People got used to the idea that gains are to be privatized but a growing share of losses are to be covered by taxpayers or central banks. When they run out of money, they just print more and when this creates inflation, people need another round of bailouts to compensate for higher prices. And so on.
    • Johan Norberg, The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World (2023)

See also

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Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia has an article about:
Commons
Commons
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  • Wilbur Ross, Secretary of Commerce, @U.S. Dept. of Commerce