CEO shocks business news host, says billionaires and bad companies 'deserve to get wiped out'
Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO of investment firm Social Capital, has been going on CNBC’s Fast Money Halftime Report with host Scott Wapner for the past few weeks, and recently he said something shocking: The government shouldn’t be in the business of bailing out failing hedge funds and Fortune 500 companies when there are millions of people losing their jobs and trying to figure out how to make ends meet. “What we’ve done is disproportionately prop up poor-performing CEOs and boards, and you have to wash these people out.”
Ostensibly Palihapitiya has been brought on to the show to assure viewers that the end of the world is not upon us. The markets have been dropping precipitously for a couple of weeks now; any little surge has been instantly erased by the end of the day. Palihapitiya first gave what can only be called the most simple and obvious and honest answer as to why this is happening, which is that investors are all over the map, following their emotional feelings from day to day, moment to moment, in a very unsteady time. But, as Palihapitiya said in a March interview on the show, he also had a lot of things he wanted to get off his chest.
In March he explained why allowing the 2008-2009 bailout money was a disaster that should not be repeated. He said buybacks are the main “game” played by the boards and CEOs of these companies to enrich themselves. “Now we have a whole bunch of companies who, you know, frittered away tens and hundreds of billions of dollars on buybacks when they should have been saving it for a rainy day, investing it in R&D, or doing something that was much more important than what they did. There needs to be consequences for those actions.”
Palihapitiya then talked about hedge funds and how since the 2008 crash they had taken up the shell game mantle, levering their investments to inflate the market. This inflation—which is great for the guys running hedge funds—is also the source of a lot of the volatility of the marketplace. It’s responsible for the wild swings and prospecting based on very big numbers, which are themselves inflated.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/4/10/1936168/-CEO-shocks-business-news-host-says-billionaires-and-bad-companies-deserve-to-get-wiped-out?detail=emaildksp
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