From June 1st.
Worldly wise (and word wise) Charlie Munger, almost ebullient at the May 2 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, struck a darker, more moralistic chord a month or so earlier in an interview with the Stanford Lawyer. To call Munger an economist would be as limiting, if not as insulting, as typing Benjamin Franklin simply as a politician. When asked if the economic crisis is “worse than the Great Depression,” Munger, as usual, didn’t mince words: “The economy hasn’t contracted as much as [it did] during the Great Depression, but the malfeasance and silliness, the triggering events for today’s crisis, were much greater and more widespread. In the ’20s, a tiny class of people were financial promoters and a tiny class of people were buying securities. Today, it’s deep in the whole culture, and it is way more extreme. If sin and folly get punished appropriately, we’re in for a bad time.”
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Related previous post: Stanford Lawyer: Interview with Charlie Munger