Warren Buffet on why Wall Street Needs Punishment

10/27/09 Stockholm, Sweden – A recent BBC News interview with billionaire Warren Buffet covers his perspective on the lack of punishment for Wall Street given the compensation and bonuses recently handed out.

Buffett says, “it’s infuriating to people to see their friends losing their jobs… having their homes foreclosed… And, nobody going to jail. It was one thing in Enron. At least you had (Jeffrey) Skilling and Ken Lay, or WorldCom or those things. Society at least felt there was a little bit of vengeance taking place. (Laughs.) But here nobody’s going to jail. In fact, a lot of them are walking off with tons of money which they got, in many cases, with preferential tax terms. So the American public’s exasperation of this is very understandable…”

The above transcript is from Boom2Bust, and the original video interview, where Evan Davis talks to Warren Buffett, is found on BBC News.

Rocky Vega

Rocky Vega is publisher of The Daily Reckoning. Previously, he was founding publisher of UrbanTurf and RFID Update, which he operated from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico, and associate publisher of FierceFinance. He specialized in direct marketing at MBI, facilitated MIT Sloan School of Management programs, and has been featured on CBS. Vega graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he was on the board of Let’s Go Publications and directed business programs involving McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Harvard Business School faculty. He is also enrolled at the Stockholm School of Economics.

View articles by Rocky Vega

Related Articles:

• November 19, 2010 -- Looking Back on the Grasshoppers’ Indian Summer
• October 21, 2009 -- Somewhere “Over the Rainbow” Unabashed Swindling is Frowned Upon
• January 13, 2012 -- Pinstriped Psychopaths
• January 13, 2012 -- Greed and Deception on Wall Street
• January 12, 2012 -- Markets Seen and Unseen

 Print This Post