Warren Buffett Calls For Penalties Against Banking Executives
When even Warren Buffett, who is no Boy Scout himself, is calling them out, you know it's bad:
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Warren Buffett, the world's most famous investor, launched an attack Saturday on big-bank executives, calling for penalties for those who led their companies to near-ruin.
In his latest letter to shareholders, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. decried the fact that while shareholders suffered during the recent crash, the top people at the banks got off relatively lightly.
"It has not been shareholders who have botched the operations of some of our country's largest financial institutions," wrote Buffett. "Yet they have borne the burden, with 90% or more of the value of their holdings wiped out in most cases of failure. Collectively, they have lost more than $500 billion in just the four largest financial fiascos of the last two years. To say these owners have been 'bailed-out' is to make a mockery of the term.
"The CEOs and directors of the failed companies, however, have largely gone unscathed. Their fortunes may have been diminished by the disasters they oversaw, but they still live in grand style," added Buffett.
How about: bilked the country and the world out of trillions, not once but twice.
The first time in mortgage security fraud, the second time in bailout swindle…
These guys should be in jail.
Wait, how does that go? Fool me once…
statusquObama, change you can only pretend in
Goldman's got the EU over a barrel right now.
Several EU members bought "currency swaps" from Goldman to hide the extent of their debt so they would be admitted into the EU.
The phoney bookkeeping has come to light, driving the Euro to a 9 month low and threatening to drive it lower.
Predictably Goldman has shorted the Euro, so the more it loses the more they gain, in a crisis Goldman helped create.
The crisis was certain to hit sooner or later. Even if the phoney bookkeeping had gone undetected, when the "currency swaps" reached maturity these EU members' on-the-books national debt would have skyrocketed far beyond EU requirements, creating precisely the crisis they are experiencing now.
So .. Goldman KNEW they were creating this crisis.
Book 'em!
Democracy is too important to be entrusted to politicians.
Rise Up!
Protest!
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=4HAjhtPZGDY
(I always thought that was a nasty song).
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Or if you prefer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVZUVeMtYXc
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
The crime of the millennium was pulled off by bankers with the complicit aid of every political monkey in DC who see, hear, and speak no evil.
Goodnight, Frau Blücher
Sure they got off relatively lightly
They put everything under their relative's names.
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
He also spoke out against Bush's tax cuts.
Goldman Board Rejects Shareholder Demands on Pay
US Banks Veto 'Socialist Pay' in Secret Talks
Democracy is too important to be entrusted to politicians.
Rise Up!
Protest!
Just exactly what malfeasance is he guilty of? He is against the repeal of the estate tax. He plans to give away 85% of his wealth to philanthropy. He backed Obama. He pays himself $100,000 per year. He treats his shareholders with respect, and even hobnobs with them once a year at the annual meeting.
If there's some story out there of Warren Buffett screwing people over, I'm surely not aware of it.
...he's such a bad singer?
The Quebe Sisters, on the other hand, are worth checking out.
"Courtesy is owed. Respect is earned. Love is given." --Unknown author, found in Guide to Texas Etiquette by Kinky Friedman
no one flies planes, large or small, into these creep's homes. No tea-baggers congregate outside their business HQ waving firearms and badly-spelled signs. No Fox Blowhards clamor that the Goldman VIPs are "the enemy of America" and "should be eliminated". No half-wit columnist/pundit writes inflammatory books accusing the Banksters and Wall Street Execs of being Traitors or NAZI's or Atheists.
Odd. The Dogs Don't Bark at the true villains. I'm bummed.
Fox won't put the real crooks on TV. They work for them. Instead, they put up "Death Panels" and "Obama is from Krypton". All to scare the stupid and easily misled teabaggers into drawing their hate away from the real problem. I wish these idiots would congregate outside of the mansions of the health insurance CEOs who love denying people who need help.
NOBODY 2012
Can't get in the gates, sugar, even if protestors could afford to travel to those exotic locales.
They are, though, barking, and MSM wears blinders and earplugs.
Is Buffett objecting because he adheres to a "modest" lifestyle despite his wealth? He should have to live the lifestyles of the carpet workers he employed at wages so modest they dared not speak their names, and who are now laid off and living off unemployment or church charities.
He and the bankers are cut from the same cloth. In the carpet trade, it's called "smiling" cloth, since it is loosely woven and has gaps the size of a child's tooth gaps. Like rugs, they smile and lie, if ungrammatically.
I concur 100% with New_Damage. Declaring Buffet a man who's no boy scout certainly holds no sway with me. He is by leaps and bounds one of the most ethical CEO's in the world and to claim he isn't, is a travesty to history. Not only that but it makes you look very inaccurate and typifies the kind of rhetoric that this site lambasts routinely. That's shameful and clearly you can't back up your story with more than one negatively spinned sentence.
that he keeps pressing on this...loudly & persistently.
Only one their peers could garner any attention from them, someone who is equally rich.
No one really believes or listens to anything politicians or their agencies say...they're too busy providing talking points for whoever pays the highest price.
Keep it up Warren...someone needs to!!
Warren Buffet views everything from the world of investment capitalism. I think he is a genuinely good guy, pretty good basic values, but his vision is limited by his lifelong involvement and beneficiary of the capitalistic system. Any person that really believed in the free markets (as opposed to corporate welfare, the real system in the US) would feel the way he does about heads of public companies ripping off their investors. I knew that capitalism was to be dead soon when the supreme court of fools voted against shareholders being able to sue for just this type of criminal behavior.
The owners of the banks are being screwed. I don't care if it's a grandma with 100 shares or Prince Whatever with one million, the people who are putting up the capital because of the employee's performance are losing their money while the people they hire to maximize it face no consequence. I think the reason that there hasn't been a revolt is because the bulk of the ownership is other firms on Wall Street.
This video snip had nothing to do with the quote from Buffett. I did not hear him say ""It has not been shareholders who have botched the operations of some of our country's largest financial institutions," wrote Buffett. "Yet they have borne the burden, with 90% or more of the value of their holdings wiped out in most cases of failure. Collectively, they have lost more than $500 billion in just the four largest financial fiascos of the last two years. To say these owners have been 'bailed-out' is to make a mockery of the term.
"The CEOs and directors of the failed companies, however, have largely gone unscathed. Their fortunes may have been diminished by the disasters they oversaw, but they still live in grand style," added Buffett."
C&L, you are slipping again.
We have surrendered our passion for freedom to the acquisition of stuff. We cannot even mount a decent opposition to wars that are destroying what little we have left in our treasury or to resist the oligarchy that has taken over our electoral process.
It is truly pathetic that the most prominent person calling for punishing the scum who, through their reckless greed, have ruined the financial welfare of millions upon millions of Americans is a billionaire investor and not a Democratic Politician.
Can you imagine what a real polician like FDR or LBJ or HST would be doing about this mess? They would, as FDR did, be going for the jugular with liberal answers to the nations problems and consigning the GOP and their failed consevative policies to 40 years in the minority.
In comparison our contemporary timid, impotent Democrats are afraid to pass HCR without first wasting over a year appeasing the very party that ran the country into a ditch.
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