QuestionerOr have we reached a new point where criminal activity in Wall Street is being institutionalized, sort of allowed to happen because they're too big to fail, too big to go to jail, and too big to be regulated to follow the law?
WarrenI think behavior on Wall Street is enormously improved as a result of the trauma we've just been through. And so I think the worst of it is behind us. But you're never going to have perfect behavior when a bunch of human beings live in a miasma of easy money. This is always going to happen to some extent.
QuestionerHow do you feel about the prosecution of individuals versus the prosecution of corporations?
WarrenWell, I think there's hardly anything that changes behavior more than prosecuting individuals. When they took Boy Scout leaders out of Pittsburgh or wherever it was and put the, in the federal penitentiary for fixing steel prices. It really changed behavior of American businessmen. So I do think that a few criminal prosecutions do change behavior a lot. And it looks to me they will get a few. Yeah. I may be biased a little bit by the experience of Solomon, but I lean way more toward prosecution of individuals than corporations. You know, I literally saw, you know, a bad act, or maybe multiple bad acts, by just a couple of people. And negligence in reporting by a couple more, you know, come close, certainly upsetting, hurting, and maybe destroying, you know, possibly thousands and thousands of other people's lives, forgetting about the financial investment. And it did, it did seem to me, when I've had that experience a couple of other times in what I've seen, that, that it really, it may be easy, it's way easier to prosecute the corporation. The corporation is going to write a check, and, you know, I mean, it's somebody else's money, and, uh, and the prosecutor knows he's going to get a win, basically, if he goes against the company, where he's got a way tougher job going against individuals. the company's going to cave. It's just, their calculus is such that it just doesn't make sense to fight if they can write a check, whereas the individual is fighting to stay out of jail. So, the prosecutor's got an easy case or relatively easy case, and probably a headline-grabbing case, if he goes against the corporation, and he has a grinded-out type of thing, which he can very well lose, and which really takes a lot. a lot of work against individuals. But I still lean very much toward going against individuals. The way to change behavior is to have the fear, at least among people who may be doing the wrong things is have the fear that somehow it's going to come home to them and hit them hard. And if the only fear is that the company is going to have to write a big check, you're going to get way less change in behavior than if it'll hit home to the individual. of John.