"It’s crazy to have people get so big and so important that you can’t allow them to fail, and allow them to be run with as much knavery and stupidity as permeated the major investment banks. It’s not that Berkshire hasn’t had wonderful service from investment banking all these years, because we have. It’s just that, as an industry, this crazy culture of greed and overreaching and overconfidence in trading algorithms and so on creeps in. I would argue it’s quite counterproductive for the country, and it ought to be reigned way back. These institutions are too big to fail, and it was demented to allow derivative trading to end up the way it’s ended up and with the current risks that are embedded in the present system. And it’s amazing how few people spoke against it as it was happening. There was just so much easy money to be reported. A lot of the money that was reported as being earned wasn’t really being earned. It was in that wonderful category of assets that I call 'good until reached for.' They sit there on the balance sheet, and when you reach for it, it just fades away like — mist." --Charlie Munger (May 3, 2008)
Bill Gates at the DealBook conference (video) (LINK)
Reed Hastings at the DealBook conference (video) (LINK)
[The rest of the DealBook conference videos can be found HERE.]
Three Things I Think I Think – Has The World Gone Mad? - by Cullen Roche (LINK)
The Acquirers Podcast: Ian Cassel turns the tables and interviews Tobias Carlisle (LINK)
Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman (podcast): Bill Gates — How to accelerate history (LINK)
The Hazards of Talking to Strangers (LINK)