Warren Buffett's Advice on Holding Cash, Bonds, and Stocks.

Reputation is not tied inextricably to actual operating results. It's tied to perception and also the perception that temporarily fuels market value.... agency problem is a real thing. It exists. As an internal contributor, I do have skin in the game on the guidance I provide to senior management... My immediate employment, the value of my RSU's, and so on. All else being equal, the outside analyst does not have this kind of skin in the game, can move on and obfuscate certain details from view.

[Citation needed.]

Can they do this indefinitely? You can fool some of the people all of the time and that's enough for some consultancies to stay afloat. I don't think they plan to fail as frequently as they do, but consider the number of bank managers that continued getting paid bonuses while exposing shareholders to significant risk and how many times the board looked the other way.

You use rhetoric, and then an appeal to "common sense" with the bank manager bonus issue. Lets bring that back to the law:

Bank bonuses were dictated by contracts, and not subject to arbitrary change simply because it looks bad. As Lawrence Summers (White House Economic Council director) said:

“The easy thing would be to just say, you know, ‘Off with their heads,’ and violate the contracts,” he said. “But you have to think about the consequences of breaking contracts for the overall system of law.”

It's really idealistic to think that all business dealings are fair, just and rational, rather than ego driven.

It is. Yet here you are complaining about the unfairness of bankers getting bonuses while their banks get bailouts.

That, and outside consultancies that bring in big data analysts are frequently having fresh graduates do the deep dives...

[Citation needed.]

they're very smart kids but not very experienced and knowledgeable, and consequently draw a lot of bad inferences from massive amounts of data that they only superficially understand.

This relies on a premise that you have failed to back up with evidence. Perhaps you would fall into the category of drawing "a lot of bad inferences from massive amounts of data that [you] only superficially understand."

/r/personalfinance Thread