Wealth & Money Quote by David Dinkins

Bankruptcy, in Dinkins's framing, is a cultural weather vane: what used to read as moral failure now passes for savvy risk management. The line is doing two things at once. On the surface it normalizes a legal tool - "a way to regroup and come back again" - in the language of resilience, the American comeback story polished to a corporate sheen. Underneath, it’s a quiet indictment of how status and power launder consequences. When bankruptcy becomes "almost considered wise", the question is: wise for whom?

As a politician who governed New York City through fiscal anxiety and widening inequality, Dinkins understood that money troubles aren’t just personal; they’re reputational. "Stigma" is the key word: it’s social punishment, unevenly distributed. For a working person, insolvency can mean years of black marks, lost housing, and a life organized around shame. For a large firm or a well-lawyered individual, it can function as a strategic reset button - losses socialized, future preserved. Dinkins is pointing to the moral inversion baked into late-20th-century capitalism, where prudence looks like leveraging debt and consequences are negotiable.

The sentence also reveals a politician’s ambivalence. He doesn’t moralize explicitly; he reports a shift in norms. That restraint is its own subtext: a recognition that law and culture are already moving, and public ethics are being rewritten by boardrooms, not voters.