Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Actually, Rob, you would have to push for criminal charges, because no one else is. As for the civil part, you would need to file the lawsuits. It is all in your hands.
Steve Jobs had a net worth of over $10 Billion and Bill Gates has a net worth over $80 Billion. Shouldn’t you adjust your expectations?
You’re making my point, Anonymous. $500 million is a mountain of money. But given what we are talking about here, it is a 100 percent reasonable number.
If you truly didn’t believe that anyone was going to be bringing criminal charges when this gets written up on the front page of the New York Times, you have nothing to worry about. I hereby promise NOT to take any action whatsoever to bring criminal charges or to encourage others to bring criminal charges.
I’ll tell the truth about what happened, to be sure. But if no one else pushes for criminal charges, there will be no criminal charges. I talk about criminal charges because I want to bring the nasty side of this to a full and complete stop before the lengths of the sentences grow even greater. That’s my part in this. I would be 100 percent happy if there were no prison sentences. I don’t believe that it is going to play out that way. But it is fine with me if it does.
Rob
Anonymous says
Don’t you need the criminal charges in order to get on the front page of the New York Times? This seems to be the only way to get that $500 million, so if you don’t bring charges, I don’t see how you get your $500 million.
Rob says
I’m going to tell the story, Anonymous.
Part of the story is financial fraud. So I am going to say that. That’s certainly not the entire story. I certainly am going to tell the other parts as well, some of which reflect very well on all of my Buy-and-Hold friends and even on my Goon friends in some cases. I’ll tell it all. I won’t leave out the financial fraud aspects of the story but I don’t intend to focus on them. My aim is to tell the story in a balanced way, not leaving important parts out because I am afraid to address them but also not dwelling on those aspects of the story because of some personal grudge or anything like that.
Will criminal charges be brought as the story gets out? I believe so. But I won’t be bringing them. And I won’t be leading an effort to see that they are brought. To the extent that I play any role re the bringing of the criminal charges, I expect that my role is going to be to argue for a deemphasis on that part of the story. I see it as my job to bring us all together. So I would prefer to focus on more positive aspects of the story and to try to explain the pressures that my Buy-and-Hold friends and my Goon friends have felt as a partial explanation for their bad behavior. I cannot control how others react to those efforts. So I am not making any promises as to how things will turn out. But I can say that my personal intent is to praise the Buy-and-Holders and to try to make the people who will be angry at them following the next price crash understand the difficult circumstances that influenced many of their decisions.
My personal guess as to how the criminal side of this will be addressed is that following the next price crash a group of responsible people in the field will be arguing for an amnesty that would need to go through Congress. The amnesty will let a lot of people off the criminal hook while containing funding to aid the transition to Valuation-Informed Indexing. Please understand that that is pure speculation. I have no inside knowledge re this aspect of things. I am just putting forward a guess by someone who has been involved in this since the first day as to how it might make sense for us to proceed as a society in a way that gets the important work done that we need to get done in a manner that all parties can accept.
The $500 million is for a settlement of civil claims. It is a separate matter from the criminal charges. I believe that we will likely need a legislatively adopted amnesty to address the criminal side of this because that is so sensitive a matter. I don’t see the $500 million settlement payment as being such a big problem. That’s just money. The Wall Street Con Men have tons of money. They will of course want me working with them for p.r. purposes as well as for lots of other reasons Paying $500 million to make that happen quickly is nothing for them. I don’t see any problems in that area once the story gets out.
I hope that helps a bit.
Rob