Well, that’s not exactly how he put it. But at discussion this morning at the Milken Institute Global Conference, hedge fund titan Griffin did say this:
Gains were shared by millions of Americans through home equity extraction and sale of homes. … It dwarfed the gains reaped by Wall Street. …
We have allowed what was a society-wide bubble to be turned into a dialog about how Wall Street failed to fulfill its responsibilities in an appropriate way.
My immediate reaction to this was:
1) There is something to this. Lots of people other than investment bankers and hedge fund managers made money off the credit bubble.
2) It’s incredibly tone deaf. Many of the people who took out home equity to pay for speedboats and groceries and other frivolities are now in deep, deep financial trouble. Lots of people may have benefited from the bubble, but no other group benefited as spectacularly as Wall Streeters. (I’m including Chicago-based Wall Streeters such as Griffin here too.) PIMCo’s Mohamed El-Erian, a far more diplomatic fellow, later “paraphrased” Griffin’s point as, “Recognizing that the system is more important than any individual claim.” Well, if you put it that way …