Investment legend Warren Buffett says Americans are quite justified in feeling anger that no one has gone to jail for the misdeeds that caused the financial crisis.
“It's infuriating to people to see their friends losing their jobs, in terms of seeing their friends having their houses foreclosed upon, whatever it may be,” Buffett told the BBC.
At least in the Enron debacle, CEO Jeffrey Skilling went to jail, he points out.
“Society at least felt there was a little bit of vengeance taking place. 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.”
And Buffett says it’s unrealistic to expect that crises won’t happen again.
“We will do foolish things again. It’s human destiny,” he says
“We’ve got to try to protect as much as possible the foolish things that I do from impacting too many other people. That’s the job of government.”
Buffett says, “We’ll come out of this a little smarter on that. But it won’t be enough smarter so that we avoid troubles in the future.”
Ace economist Nouriel Roubini says the next crisis could come when the dollar rebounds.
“Once the dollar stops falling. . . you have to dump assets, and you could have a market crash all over the world,” he told CNBC.
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