From “Investment Outlook” by Bill Gross, January 2010
“Conceived with the vision of liberty and justice for all, we have descended in the clutches of corporate and other special interest to a second-world state defined by K Street instead of Independence Square. Our government doesn’t work anymore or, perhaps more accurately, when it does, it works for special interests and not for the American people. Washington consistently stoops to legislate 10,000 page perversions of health care, regulatory reform, defense and budgetary mandates overflowing with earmarks that serve a monied minority as opposed to an all-too-silent majority…what most politicians apparently are working for is to perpetuate their power—first via district gerrymandering and then, second, by around-the-clock campaigning financed by special interest groups. If, by chance, they’re ever voted out of office, they have a home just down the street—at K Street—with six-figure incomes as a starting wage.”
What’s unusual is not what is said, but who is saying it: the head of a trillion-dollar bond house. Remember when Bill Clinton said, I thought the President ran the country, then I found the bond market runs the country?
Will the term “K Street” become as iconic as “Wall Street?”
To be sure to catch the start of Adam Smith’s Interrogation, available in ai5000 Magazine after February 3, click here.
aiCIO Editorial Staff