The opportunity cost of capital is the expected rate of return forgone by bypassing of other potential investment activities for a given capital. It is a rate of return that investors could earn in financial markets.
Famous quotes containing the words opportunity, cost and/or capital:
“Familiarity breeds contempt. How accurate that is. The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Keeping accounts, Sir, is of no use when a man is spending his own money, and has nobody to whom he is to account. You won’t eat less beef today, because you have written down what it cost yesterday.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“We saw the machinery where murderers are now executed. Seven have been executed. The plan is better than the old one. It is quietly done. Only a few, at the most about thirty or forty, can witness [an execution]. It excites nobody outside of the list permitted to attend. I think the time for capital punishment has passed. I would abolish it. But while it lasts this is the best mode.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)