Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO of investment firm Social Capital, has been going on CNBC’s Fast Money Halftime Report with host Scott Wapner for the past few weeks, and recently he said something shocking: The government shouldn’t be in the business of bailing out failing hedge funds and Fortune 500 companies when there are millions of people losing their jobs and trying to figure out how to make ends meet. “What we’ve done is disproportionately prop up poor-performing CEOs and boards, and you have to wash these people out.”
Ostensibly Palihapitiya has been brought on to the show to assure viewers that the end of the world is not upon us. The markets have been dropping precipitously for a couple of weeks now; any little surge has been instantly erased by the end of the day. Palihapitiya first gave what can only be called the most simple and obvious and honest answer as to why this is happening, which is that investors are all over the map, following their emotional feelings from day to day, moment to moment, in a very unsteady time. But, as Palihapitiya said in a March interview on the show, he also had a lot of things he wanted to get off his chest.
In March he explained why allowing the 2008-2009 bailout money was a disaster that should not be repeated. He said buybacks are the main “game” played by the boards and CEOs of these companies to enrich themselves. “Now we have a whole bunch of companies who, you know, frittered away tens and hundreds of billions of dollars on buybacks when they should have been saving it for a rainy day, investing it in R&D, or doing something that was much more important than what they did. There needs to be consequences for those actions.”
Palihapitiya then talked about hedge funds and how since the 2008 crash they had taken up the shell game mantle, levering their investments to inflate the market. This inflation—which is great for the guys running hedge funds—is also the source of a lot of the volatility of the marketplace. It’s responsible for the wild swings and prospecting based on very big numbers, which are themselves inflated.
PALIHAPITIYA: These hedge funds are massively levered. You know you heard earlier about risk parity funds blowing up. These are not funds that are trading billions of dollars—Scott, when you go to a prime broker with $25 or $30 billion of Treasury securities, they're allowing you to lever that up 10, 12, 13 times. In the case of some of these hedge funds, $100 billion funds running trillions of dollars of notional exposure and they are completely roiling the capital markets. They are turning around and turning upside down people's 401ks and people's pensions, driving companies down 70% when they maybe should only be down 30%. Somebody needs to answer for that volatility.
And all of these problems were predictable. The lessons we should have learned from the 2008-2009 bailout are once again being forgotten: “Now all of a sudden, if we have to go and step into the capital markets with United States dollars that everybody has a right to, as citizens of this country, to shore up the financial operations of the capital markets. Somebody has to pay a price for that as well, you know?”
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This is an important distinction. The entirety of Wall Street and the big companies are all asking for bailouts once again. They want to pretend that this is an unimaginable natural catastrophe that no business could foresee. That isn’t simply untrue—it’s also the easiest way forward for big businesses that have been running greed-driven, thin, and fragile corporations and funds that are now being exposed for how weak and worthless they are, to the detriment of the enduring health of our nation.
Palihapitiya then reminds the host that we did this exact thing just a decade ago, and our lack of corporate punishment—and our government’s inability to police the crimes perpetrated on the American public by the top 1%— has led to even more inequality, fraud, and reckless opioid addiction.
CNBC host Scott Wapner mentioned that Trump had just announced that he wasn’t averse to the “U.S. taking equity stakes in companies,” to which Palihapitiya very flatly responded that it was not nearly enough. “That's not enough. You can't just hold the CEO accountable after making $400 million over the last 10 years, to all of a sudden take no bonus.”
Palihapitiya went on explain the steps the federal government is taking to continue this pattern of codification of our income and social inequality problems. The $2.3 trillion stimulus the Trump federal government is trying to inject—mostly into big businesses—is a bandaid, a “land mine” for the American people, in Palihapitiya’s estimation. But Palihapitiya was clear as he explained that he absolutely believed that the federal government needed to harness its treasury in order to help both our economy and Americans in general.
Palihapitiya said that he had lived through four economic downturns in his lifetime. Two of those times happened when he was young, poor, and receiving government assistance. The other two times, he was wealthy. He said in all of the previous cases, he was mostly unaffected. When he was poor, he remained poor. When he was wealthy, he remained wealthy. “The people that get decimated are the 80% in the middle, and we have a responsibility this time around to learn from what we did wrong the last time. You can't just bail folks out financially for being financially greedy. It's unfair! And what we did in was incomplete.”
Palihapitiya goes on to explain that Trump and Sen. Mnuchin are simply reacting to this bogus market filled with rich people playing with inflated, leveraged Monopoly money. “It has nothing to do with anything.” Wapner then talked a circle around how it’s all Monday morning quarterbacking, so what can we do? Palihapitiya explained that we “know where the bodies are buried” and who is to blame for the fragility of our economic system. So, saying we didn’t know and now we know is no excuse for making the exact same mistakes we made in giving out hundreds of billions of dollars to rich and greedy people. Americans have a right to demand that this bailout money comes with a hefty price tag.
But the grand finale came Thursday night when
Palihapitiya was brought onto the show and explained that billionaires and hedge funds and badly run companies should be allowed to fail. He stated that the majority of the American people would be better off if the Fed would have “given half a million to every man, woman and child in the United States.” In the first clip below, you can watch as he explains that the idea that these companies going under will mean bigger economic tragedy than just allowing them to fire people and keep all our bailout money is a “lie” cooked up by Wall Street. Referring to bankruptcy, Palihapitiya explains that people don’t simply get fired when a company goes under—they get deals, and their pensions get figured into that equation. With bailouts, they just get fired.
“The people that get wiped out are the speculators and own the unsecured [unclear] of debt, the folks that own the equity, and by the way, those are the rules of the game. That’s right because these are the people that purport to be the most sophisticated investors in the world. They deserve to get wiped out.” Wapner attempts using the phrase “wiped out” to pretend he doesn’t understand how numbers work. “Why does anybody deserve to get wiped out?” This is a specious argument, of course, and it sounds like Wapner might be one of the speculators Palihapitiya is talking about. As he retorted: “But just who are we talking about? About a hedge fund that serves a bunch of billionaire family offices? Who cares. Let them get wiped out. Who cares?”
I almost cried getting to hear that on television. But Palihapitiya was on a roll.
”They don’t get to summer in the Hamptons? Who cares?”
Wapner then attempted to say that employees owned “company stocks,” to which Palihapitiya said that Wapner should look at the receipts as most of these companies’ stocks are owned by everyone except the employees.
Wapner tries one last Hail Mary throw, saying that since this is a natural disaster, isn’t it immoral to allow “anyone” to get wiped out? He seems to have forgotten about how many more people are the amorphous face of Blackrock.
PALIHAPITIYA: On Main Street today, people are getting wiped out. And right now, boards that had horrible governance are not. Hedge funds are not. People are! $6 million people, just this week alone, basically saying, “Holy mackerel, I don’t know how I’m going to make my own expenses for the next few weeks, days, months.”
Watch.