John Paulson, a hedge fund speculator, scolded occupy wall street activists today:
Paulson's message for the protesters: "Don't vilify our most successful businesses."
They are not. John, if you are not too busy trading speculative investments and weird financial vehicles, you might have noticed that the protesters are outside of the financial district in New York. The name is Occupy Wall Street, which in contemporary English stands for the financial industry. The name is not Occupy Google headquarters, or Microsoft. The protesters are not targeting successful businesses, ones which create new products, new ways of doing business, new opportunities and new lives. They are targeting financial speculators, people like you, who suck up and destroy the value in a productive economy.
The most successful businesses in this country are not the ones which destroyed the economy, imposing a failure tax on each and every person in the world. The most successful businesses are not the ones which required massive governmental bailouts in order to keep their speculative house of cards from collapsing. The most successful businesses, by the way, do not include yours, even before your hedge fund took massive losses this year, causing a high percentage of your investors to run for the exits.
John, in all the years of your hedge fund operation, you created nothing of value, and the only jobs you created were for speculators and employees to service them. Don't compare your operation to a successful business. Your success is simply the success of a con man. And the long con you have been profiting from is coming to an end.
(Cross posted at Possible Experience)