Aug

30

fox at the henhouse
The upside down manager getting a high brow beat down…:

Earth to Bill Gross: We Chickens Know You Are The Fox Minding the Hen house

via naked capitalism by Yves Smith on 8/25/10

Boy, when you think you've seen the worst in utterly shameless, self serving tripe, someone manages to outdo it. Admittedly, it's awfully hard to beat Steve Schwarzmann's recent one-two punch of utter canard wrapped in tasteless hyperbole, that of Obama proposals that private equity kingpins pay taxes on what is really the fruits of their labor like other working stiffs was a " a "war… like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939."

But no, Pimco's Bill Gross bests Schwarzmann in making it clear to the great unwashed his unabashed belief that what is good for him is good, period. Schwarzmann is a tad less horrid by at least limiting his grandiose claims to his own industry. Gross is marginally less offensive to good taste (although a discussion of his body odor in an investment piece is certainly a novel wrinkle), but makes it up by insulting his audience's intelligence, namely, by presenting himself as a staunch ally of the little guy.

In case any of missed it, one of the major screwups of the crisis just past was the failure to make shareholders and bondholders of dud financial firms (or ought to be dud, the power that be have gone to great lengths to present the fiction that many insolvent players were merely having a wee liquidity crisis) take losses. These investors signed up to be risk capital, and even if bailouts might have been inevitable, they would have been much smaller and more palatable if the people who had failed to do their job in monitoring their holdings suffered too. And who was the chief lobbyist for the "you better not make bondholders take any pain" camp? None other than Bill Gross.

Here is the rest of the excellent post.


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