Wealth & Money Quote by Henry Kravis

Kravis, one of the architects of modern leveraged buyouts, is an unlikely preacher of virtue, which is exactly why the line lands. In an industry caricatured as clinical and predatory, he’s staking a claim that the one asset you can’t financial-engineer is trust. “You can’t buy it” is the key move: it’s a rebuke to the fantasy that everything has a price, the fantasy markets run on and critics fear. He frames integrity as scarce capital, the only kind that doesn’t inflate with success.

The subtext is reputational and deeply practical. For dealmakers, integrity isn’t a halo; it’s a credit rating. If counterparties think you shade the truth, the pipeline dries up, regulators circle, talent exits, and even your wins get discounted as luck or coercion. His absolutism (“you have nothing”) sounds moral, but it’s also a risk-management doctrine: ethics as the cheapest insurance in a world where one headline can vaporize billions.

Context matters. Kravis built KKR in an era when Wall Street’s legitimacy was under constant argument, from 1980s takeover panics to post-2008 distrust. Saying this out loud is a form of image repair, yes, but also a boundary-setting message to younger financiers: your spreadsheet can model leverage, not character. The quote works because it smuggles an old civic ideal into a ruthlessly transactional setting and dares you to treat it not as sentiment, but as strategy.