Top quotes from Restructuring Summit: Tuesday
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Following are notable quotes from the second day of the Reuters Restructuring Summit.
JAMES SPRAYREGEN, MANAGING DIRECTOR, INVESTMENT BANKING
DIVISION, GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP INC (GS.N)
"I don't generally prognosticate as to what is going to happen in the macroeconomy, but people have been projecting a restructuring boom coming in the next 18 to 36 months for the last 48 months, and we may finally be seeing truth to those projections."
"Since June 2007 things have been very much tighter in the credit markets, but there is still a willingness to lend to sufficient-quality companies, and (those) with the right story."
"Price has gone up. Leverage has gone down. Covenants have come in. Credit agreement terms have tightened. But there is still money out there to be lent. It takes longer to get done."
"I think there's a lot more pain to come in the retail area, and I think you're going to see it spread all over retail. It goes to the ones that have expanded into a lot of places where they don't need to be; it goes to the ones whose cost structure is out of whack; it goes to the ones whose products are not necessarily differentiated or needed by the public."
MARTIN FRIDSON, CHIEF EXECUTIVE AND CO-CHIEF INVESTMENT
OFFICER OF FRIDSON INVESTMENT ADVISORS
"Short-selling restrictions, in general, are a very bad idea... There is a 300 plus-year history of failed attempts in a number of different countries, including Malaysia's attempt to impose a penalty of caning for short-selling, none of which have worked."
"Given the rate at which it's been rising, that wouldn't astound me if it (the government rescue plan for finance firms) wound up being a price tag of $1 trillion."
"The intention of the plan is to make it very open-ended and the benefit of that is to assure that the flexibility will be in place without having to go back to Congress for additional authority if suddenly the Treasury perceives that there is a greater need. The concern is that this is an extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of the Treasury and the secretary of the Treasury without judicial review as it is proposed."
EDWARD ALTMAN, PROFESSOR OF FINANCE, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY STERN
SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
"We haven't yet seen the bankruptcies and defaults that I think we will see and that could be. You know the old saying -- 'another shoe could drop.' That is not being discussed very much in the press."
"We talk about a $700 billion bailout. That number is, I think, almost meaningless. The reason why it's meaningless is that even although it's great for publicity and getting the anxiety up among taxpayers and journalists ... $700 billion is what is going to be potentially purchased, but these are not valueless assets."
GARY TALARICO, MANAGING DIRECTOR, SUN CAPITAL PARTNERS
"Creative destruction is a good way to describe it," Talarico said in reference to the failure of Lehman Brothers, the buyout of Merrill Lynch and the government takeover of AIG.
"These things have to happen. I'm very sad about Lehman. I worked there for 15 years and I absolutely loved the firm. It's a possibility that if the government moved faster, they might still be alive today. A lot of things might be different. Unfortunately, it is very hard to see the future.
"We're in a recession, there's just no doubt about it. I don't care what the economists like to define it as. I think we're in a consumer-led recession and now it's becoming even worse with a corporate-led recession because of jobs being shed and people having trouble finding financing."
"I don't know what's insulated right now -- I don't think anything is. Because I think it's a general economic slowdown, starting with the consumer, but the auto companies are having terrible trouble."
"I think it's going to be the worst holiday season, certainly since 2002, but it could be worse. I think it's going be pretty bad."
(Reporting by Martha Graybow, Edward Tobin, additional reporting by Chelsea Emery; editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Phil Berlowitz)
