Financiers, Heal Thyselves

>Image Credit: Christophe Vorlet

Memorandum

To: Jeffrey Bezos, chief executive, Amazon.com Inc.; Warren Buffett, chief executive, Berkshire Hathaway Inc.; James Dimon, chief executive, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

From: individual investors everywhere

We were excited by the news this week that your three firms are forming “an independent company that is free from profit-making incentives and constraints” to provide consumers “with simplified, high-quality and transparent” services “at a reasonable cost.”

Darn it. For a moment there, we thought you were talking about cleaning up the investment business — perhaps the only area of the economy that can rival health care in complexity, low quality, opacity and unreasonable cost….

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This article was originally published on The Wall Street Journal.


Further reading

Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor

Arthur Zeikel, The Future Before Us, Financial Analysts Journal (Sept.-Oct. 1996)