In order to help small businesses gain access to the credit and capital they need to run their business successfully, Congress must adopt policies that support functional capital markets without imposing undue restrictions on providers of debt and equity capital.
The reason why access to facilities - and access to public spaces - is so important is because it's much more difficult to go to work, to go to school, to participate in the public marketplace if you can't access bathrooms that make sense for you, that match who you are.
You also need to understand that when you consolidate credit card debt into mortgage debt - like a home equity loan or a HELOC [ home equity line of credit ] - you're taking an unsecured debt and turning it into a secured debt.
At the time we were funding our national debt, we heard much about "a public debt being a public blessing"; that the stock representing it was a creation of active capital for the aliment of commerce, manufactures and agriculture. This paradox was well adapted to the minds of believers in dreams.
Private equity capital in each of those markets Europe and Asia - while those markets have very different characteristics - fills a niche where either strategic investors or the public markets don't go, or don't want to go for some particular reason. I think that's going to continue to be the case going forward.
When I started Biocon in 1978, the obstacles I needed to navigate were manifold - ranging from infrastructural hurdles to issues related to my credibility as a business woman. With no access to venture capital, money was scarce and high-cost, debt-based capital was all I had.
There are respectable individuals, who from a just aversion to an accumulation of Public debt, are unwilling to concede to it any kind of utility, who can discern no good to alleviate the ill with which they suppose it pregnant; who cannot be persuaded that it ought in any sense to be viewed as an increase of capital lest it should be inferred, that the more debt the more capital, the greater the burthens the greater the blessings of the community.
In India, one has to have faith in equity. What are the alternatives - real estate, debt? If debt can give you 6 percent, equity can give you 15 percent.
If it's a situation in which the public is being given access, you can't discriminate against the media and say, as a general matter, that the media don't have access, because their access rights, of course, correspond with those of the public.
America is the only advanced industrial democracy where people can get sick and languish because they can't afford care. Or where people are blocked in access to the system because they don't have access to insurance, which is only available through certain narrow portals and under certain very restricted conditions. We're the only society that hasn't embraced this idea that no one should go without access to these services, regardless of their financial condition. And no one should be saddled with a lifetime of debt because they have the misfortune of falling ill.
All the central banks are doing is substituting one form of debt with another form of debt. They're issuing short term debt and using it to buy long term debt. In finance, we tend to think that's a neutral activity, even though those stimulus programs are huge.
Now, it is clear to the nation that there is an access-to-abortion crisis. We're going to win this case, and as a movement, we're going to go forward to make sure that there is equity in access.
The issue of access to growth capital is common to all entrepreneurs. Any entrepreneur who can demonstrate a credible business model and plan would be able to access to capital.
I'm struck by the fact that by and large equity capital doesn't play a big role in new financing; it's either bonds or internal financing but not really equity. And therefore, it's not clear that anything which improves the equity markets has really much to do with the productivity of the economy as a whole.
There's an argument that private debt, in some way, is creating indentured servants in our country. But public debt does not do that. In fact, public debt does the exact opposite - it relieves private debt.
The convertible note is a useful and common financing structure in Silicon Valley. It's a form of debt that is really more a type of equity - one where the valuation hasn't been determined yet.