Paul Tudor Jones Warns Disastrous “Wealth Disparity” Will End In “Revolution, Taxes, Or War”
Having previously warned of the “disastrous market mania,” and told Janet Yellen to “be terrified” in April, legendary trader Paul Tudor Jones has a new message for CEOs, urging them to stop embracing the profit-above-all-else ethic creating massive wealth-inequality, or face the “tearing down of our civilization via war, revolution, or taxes.”
“One of the key things that always ends up tearing down great civilizations and countries is wealth disparity. It’s not sustainable,” explained the billionaire hedge fund manager at the Forbes Under 30 Summit in Boston, telling corporate chiefs that they have gone too far in embracing economist Milton Friedman’s profit-above-all-else ethic and they need to change how they do business.
Corporations have paid too much attention to prioritizing shareholders, said Jones, who’s backing a nonprofit called JUST Capital that will rank companies on how well they treat their employees, consumers, communities and investors.
Bloomberg reports that Jones said that even Friedman would rethink his ideas if he could see how divided the U.S. has become in terms of wealth, and worries about the outcome…
“The way wealth disparity has been historically dealt with is either wars, revolution or taxes. My guess is in the future it’ll be one of those three in this country.”
At the time of Friedman’s 1970 article, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” the maximum federal individual tax rate was 70 percent, versus about 40 percent today. The wealth gap was one-fifth of what it is today, said Jones.
Friedman believed corporate executives should make as much money as possible while “conforming to the basic rules of the society.”
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