Matt Levine, Columnist

Hack Hearings and Investor Ordering

Also Uber governance, Twitter defamation, love regulation, HODL, trash unicorns and virtual-reality word processing.

October 4, 2017 at 1:37 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Hearings.

Yesterday Tim Sloan, the chief executive officer of Wells Fargo & Co., and Richard Smith, the recently departed CEO of Equifax Inc., schlepped down to Washington, D.C., to be yelled at by politicians, at two separate hearings. Of course they deserve it -- not so much because they are bad people, or because the politicians are paragons of moral probity and competence who are entitled to lecture the CEOs, but just because, if you are the CEO of a large financial institution, part of what you are (well) paid for is the risk that something will go wrong and you'll have to go get yelled at by Congress. "At best you are incompetent, at worst you were complicit," Senator Elizabeth Warren told Sloan, and if he's smart he slipped into a meditative state and contemplated the $35 million he's received over the past three years in unconscious anticipation of this moment. "Yes, incompetent, complicit, sure," I hope he mumbled earnestly, while caressing a wad of cash.