By John Ballard
Warren Buffet is pushing hard for taxing the ultra-rich. For a longer, more insightful interview go to Zero Hedge here (Type Pad doesn't "do" script embedding and the You Tube version is "Embedding disabled per request").
The Zero Hedge post is more focused on something Buffet let slip earlier regarding European banks possibly having approached him about spreading some of his money in their direction.
While Buffett hemmed and hewed in his usual populist rhetoric, discussing how multi-billionaires can afford to be generous with other people's tax rates, all of it completely unremarkable and highly hypocritical, the Octogenarian did release, whether by accident or on purpose, something quite critical, namely that European banks have approached him with requests for money. From Bloomberg: "They need capital in their banks, in many of their banks," Buffett, Berkshire's chairman and chief executive officer, told Bloomberg Television's Betty Liu on "In the Loop" today. "We would not be a good prospect," he said in an interview from the New York Stock Exchange. He's received "very, very few" calls about putting capital into European banks. "Not quite none at all," he said, declining to name any institutions."And that, as they say, is a word out of place, because while one my pretend that borrowing $500MM from the ECBs Fed swap line is really just an (inverse) arb on Libor or some other useless excuse, a bank begging for Buffett to take a bath can not be explained away.
[Emphasis in the original.]
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