Max Keiser: Warren Buffett is a fraud

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Max Keiser isn’t impressed by billionaire Warren Buffett. The crypto enthusiast, who sees a bright future for cryptocurrency, recently called out the financial wizard for comments he made to shareholders of his Berkshire Hathaway holding company. In a nutshell, Keiser says that Buffett is a fraud.

In a Twitter post on Saturday, Keiser stated, “#Bitcoin up on news Warren Buffett exposes himself in his annual letter as an unmitigated fraud and charlatan reliant entirely on tax-payer bailouts and accounting tricks.”

Keiser was drawing on a letter Buffett sent to shareholders in which he stated, “Berkshire’s holdings of American Express have remained unchanged over the past eight years. Meanwhile, our ownership increased from 12.6% to 17.9% because of repurchases made by the company. Last year, Berkshire’s portion of the $6.9 billion earned by American Express was $1.2 billion, about 96% of the $1.3 billion we paid for our stake in the company. When earnings increase and shares outstanding decrease, owners – over time – usually do well.”

The crypto evangelist asserted about stock buybacks, “It’s pure fraud. Its sole purpose is to commit accounting fraud for the benefit of insiders.”

Keiser also took exception to another part of Buffett’s letter, which reads, “Those who regularly preach doom because of government budget deficits (as I regularly did myself for many years) might note that our country’s national debt has increased roughly 400-fold during the last of my 77-year periods. That’s 40,000%! Suppose you had foreseen this increase and panicked at the prospect of runaway deficits and a worthless currency. To ‘protect’ yourself, you might have eschewed stocks and opted instead to buy 31⁄4 ounces of gold with your $114.75.”

Keiser wasn’t buying it, and stated, “The real story is to put gold in context and understand that Buffett’s so-called success is entirely driven by a cozy relationship with Wall Street and the Fed that gives him virtually unlimited access to credit carrying zero percent interest.”

As with most, if not all, fiat pundits, Buffett can’t see the forest for the trees. He’s either too concerned with his own back pocket or too old to understand that things are changing. Crypto is here to stay and has already proven itself as a legitimate alternative to fiat. Digital currency has been able to receive legitimate recognition because it does what no other currency can—give the power back to the users and eliminate the problems caused by extensive credit and government-controlled currency valuations.