John Clifton Bogle, founder of Vanguard, on Financial Crisis

As John McCain runs around Red America at a time when his campaign ought to be assured of its own base, The Philadelphia Inquirer (online Sunday, October 19, 2008) reports some interesting remarks from John Clifton Bogle, the Verona, New Jersey-born and Blair Academy-educated founder of The Vanguard Group.

Here's some of Jack's recent wisdom to Bogleheads meeting in southern California:

"The handwriting was on the wall for all this to happen a long time ago," Bogle said. "The financial sector, with all its sins, would in times less generous be hoist by its own petard - to wit, blown up by its own dynamite. And, of course, that is what happened."

"Investment bankers caused this mess, and apparently they're not going to pay anything to get out of it!"

"Any time you have a system that privatizes the rewards of an enterprise and socializes the risks, you're going to be in trouble!"

"The stock market is a giant distraction from the business of investing. Investing is earning a return on your capital; speculation is betting on price. It's so insane to have a market where it's almost all rank speculation and no investment!"

"In Las Vegas, do the gamblers win? No. The croupiers win! That's the way the Wall Street system works. That's why we've got this overloading of wealth, the top one-tenth of 1 percent making obscene amounts of money for subtracting value from society. I don't like it!" 

Here's a link to the Inquirer story:

 http://www.philly.com/inquirer/front_page/20081019_Market_Moralist.html