And just last week he gloomily concluded that the too-big-too-fail banks basically own us:
“[T]he consolidation and ever-increasing complexity of the financial-services industry has reduced the ability of firms to police each other and to earn each others’ trust, while at the same time increasing incentives to fraudulently game the system.
***
“[A]s a result, financial-industry scandals will continue to arrive on a semi-regular basis. When they do, they will always be accompanied by calls for stronger regulation: rules-based, or principles-based, or some combination of the two. But the real problem here isn’t regulatory, and as a result there isn’t a regulatory solution. The real problem is deeply baked into the architecture of too-big-to-fail banks. And frankly I don’t see any realistic way of unbaking that particular loaf.”
Well, that was so last week. Now Felix is all up in arms because NYTimesgal Geraldine Fabrikant has written “a rather odd and meandering profile” of Mohamed El-Erian, CEO and co-CIO of PIMCO, aka “the mighty Pacific Investment Management Company” (Geraldine’s terminology), that actually, you know, criticizes Wall Street big shots, implying that they’re, you know, greedy. For starters, Felix indignantly accuses Fabrikant of “burying her lede” in the sixth paragraph—as though that were something heinous—said “lede” being that Mohamed made $100 million last year. Not only that, PIMCO co-CIO Bill Gross took in $200 million, sez Geraldine.
For whatever reason, Felix was convinced that Mohamed and Bill couldn’t have been so rapacious, “So I asked Pimco what it thought of Fabrikant’s reporting, and got this back from a spokesperson: ‘The article contains numbers that are seriously inaccurate, as well as other factual errors.’”
If you’re like me, that response rings seriously lame, a classic non-denial denial. There’s nothing specific at all about either man’s salary. If both men made double what Fabricant reported, PIMCO’s response would still be “accurate.”
But Felix isn’t listening. He simply speculates, at great length, with no real evidence, that Bill (and, presumably, Mohamed) wouldn’t have taken that kind of cash, because, well, because they just wouldn’t do that. “Gross, who’s already a multibillionaire and really doesn’t need the money, would have had to be utterly tone-deaf to pay himself $200 million in 2011.”
Because whoever heard of a tone-deaf Wall Street multibillionaire?
Update
Wait a minute. How can you update a post before it’s been posted? Well, I can, because while I’ve been, hmmmm, lollygagging, others have been posting. Over at “Stone Street Advisors,” a dude with the seriously inside name of “Dutch_Book” gives poor Felix an extended beatdown, causing Felix to reply with an extended beatback. But regardless of beatdown and beatback, the fact remains: Felix says that Bill Gross couldn’t have taken the $200 million that Frabrikant said he took because Bill is a big guy and big guys don’t do things like that. Which sounds to me like something a Water Boy would say.
