Politics & Power Quote by Henry Kravis

Kravis lands the jab with a pun that feels almost too neat to be accidental: “quarters” as the coin you can’t stretch and the reporting periods you can’t escape. It’s a businessman’s critique of businessmen, which is what gives it bite. He’s not denouncing capitalism from the outside; he’s warning that the scoreboard has hijacked the game.

The specific intent is a rebuke of short-termism: strategy flattened into a 90-day sprint, where “making the quarter” becomes a substitute for building anything durable. The subtext is harsher. When everything is priced in quarterly increments, risk gets reframed as “volatility,” investment becomes “excess spend,” and people start managing optics instead of operations. Research budgets, worker training, maintenance, and long-horizon bets are the first to get treated like luxuries, because they don’t reliably convert into next quarter’s talking points.

Context matters because Kravis isn’t a wide-eyed idealist; he helped define the modern era of leveraged buyouts and shareholder-value discipline. Coming from him, the line reads less like a moral scolding and more like a diagnosis from someone who knows exactly how incentives can be engineered - and distorted. It also carries a subtle self-defense: if even a dealmaker associated with aggressive financial logic is complaining about quarter-by-quarter thinking, the culture of public markets must be truly addicted to the immediate.

The quote works because it compresses a systemic problem into a single, almost throwaway image: America’s biggest companies running on pocket change and calendar math.