Love Quote by Henry Kravis

Kravis is dressing up leverage in the language of art, and that’s exactly the point. Calling capital structure “creativity” is a deliberate reframe: it turns something many people experience as predatory (debt, control, restructurings, layoffs) into something that sounds like design thinking. The line is persuasive because it borrows the cultural prestige of creation and applies it to finance’s most engineered maneuver: deciding who gets paid first, who takes the risk, and who loses autonomy.

The intent is also defensive. By insisting a structure can be “appropriate… no matter what field,” Kravis positions private equity as sector-agnostic expertise rather than opportunism. It’s a claim of universal competence: the same toolkit can “fit” a retailer, a manufacturer, a hospital chain. That broad applicability is the sales pitch to investors and targets alike - we don’t need to know your business as well as you do; we know the balance sheet better.

The subtext is power. Capital structure isn’t just funding; it’s governance. Debt covenants discipline management. Preferred equity rearranges incentives. Layered financing can make a company more “efficient,” or simply more extractable. The creativity he loves is the ability to write the rules of the game inside the contract.

Context matters: Kravis, as KKR’s co-founder, is inseparable from the LBO era, when financial innovation became a cultural flashpoint and “value creation” started to mean restructuring by spreadsheet. In that light, the quote reads less like a personal preference and more like an argument for legitimacy: finance as craftsmanship, not merely capture.