Greed is Good Redux

The real life Gordon Gekko set went to an investor’s conference in Gotham City to defend wealth this month.  I dare you to find much difference between some of the quotes I read in this Bloomberg article and the Greed is Good speech.  Remember most of these are guys are bankers.  These aren’t guys that make cars, produce wheat, or build houses.  These are functionaries of overhead and gambling.  They still don’t seem to get that people don’t hate rich people that come by their money without manipulation of laws, favorable tax treatment, and government subsidies and bailouts.  It’s people that get wealthy by gaming the system, raiding the US treasury, and extracting huge salaries for running failed casino operations that are the targets of anger these days.  I guess all that money doesn’t guarantee you’ll actually be able to use your brain or your common sense to solve a problem.

Here’s a pretty good example of some whining that deserves no sympathy.

The organization assisted John A. Allison IV, a director of BB&T Corp. (BBT), the ninth-largest U.S. bank, and Staples Inc. co- founder Thomas Stemberg with media appearances this month.

“It still feels lonely, but the chorus is definitely increased,” Allison, 63, a former CEO of the Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based bank and now a professor at Wake Forest University’s business school, said in an interview.

At a lunch in New York, Stemberg and Allison shared their disdain for Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires public companies to disclose the ratio between the compensation of their CEOs and employee medians, according to Allison. The rule, still being fine-tuned by the Securities and Exchange Commission, is “incredibly wasteful” because it takes up time and resources, he said. Stemberg called the rule “insane” in an e-mail to Bloomberg News.

“Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive,” Allison said. “This attack is destructive.”

Oh, wait.  There’s more.

Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP (BX) CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.

“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”

Some of Schwarzman’s capital gains at Blackstone, the world’s largest private-equity firm, are taxed at 15 percent, not the 35 percent top marginal income-tax rate. Attacking the banking system is a mistake because it contributes to “a healthier economy,” he said in the interview.

Paulson, the New York hedge-fund manager who became a billionaire by betting against the U.S. housing market, has also said the rich benefit society.

“The top 1 percent of New Yorkers pay over 40 percent of all income taxes,” Paulson & Co. said in an e-mailed statement on Oct. 11, the day Occupy Wall Street protesters left a mock tax-refund check at its president’s Upper East Side townhouse.

I’ll quote just one more and then you can read the others on your own.

Tom Golisano, billionaire founder of payroll processer Paychex Inc. (PAYX) and a former New York gubernatorial candidate, said in an interview this month that while there are examples of excess, it’s “ridiculous” to blame everyone who is rich.

“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.

There’s an entire rogue’s list of the persecuted 1 percent there along with some eye popping quotes.  I can’t decide if I should close with a reference to the Julio-Claudian period in Rome or the Bourbon monarchy in France.  Do these guys really think their contributions to civilization are all that?  Since when did destroying the savings and home values of most of the country become something to brag about?

Pitchforks or Guillotines?