Trader's $1.25m attack on 'trickle-down communism'

A Texas-based trader who made a $1.25m (£674,000) profit on volatile banking shares is so outraged by the US government's proposed Wall Street bail-out that he is using his proceeds to campaign against "trickle-down communism".

Bill Perkins, who runs a venture capital firm called Small Ventures USA, took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times attacking the treasury's $700bn intervention in the financial markets.

The ad comprises a cartoon depicting President Bush, treasury secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve boss Ben Bernanke raising a US flag on top of graves marked "private enterprise" and "capitalism". It is a mock-up version of an iconic photo of wartime troops planting the stars and stripes on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima.

Perkins, 39, said yesterday that he intended to dedicate the entire profit from a lucrative trade in Goldman Sachs shares last week to campaign against the bail-out and for charitable donations.

"I think it's a kind of trickle-down version of socialism or communism," said Perkins. "When you say certain institutions can't fail, when you have the government nationalising more institutions than Venezuela, I don't see why you shouldn't call a duck a duck."

Watching Goldman Sachs shares tumble last week, Perkins made a quick buck by gambling that they would surge back upwards. He bought at $129 per share, then again at $100 and at $90 as the price dropped. A day later, Paulson's bail-out sent the stock up and Perkins sold at $130. He is displeased, however, by the way this happened: "Everybody's getting taxed in order to support a few who voluntarily chose to be in a gladiator's arena where only the strong survive."

Perkins argues that the government has no grounds to rescue firms which lived "fat and high on the hog of the real estate boom". He suggests that an economic downturn would be preferable: "This country's been through a lot worse. Although recessions are bad for some people, they're good in general. They cleanse things out."

Although Perkins has hosted a fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, his objections to the bail-out echo those voiced by Republicans in Congress who see it as a perversion of free-market economics.

Richard Shelby, an Alabama right-winger on the Senate banking committee, employed the ultimate insult in conservative US politics by suggesting that the Bush administration was adopting a French-style approach.

"I think we're going down the road of France now," said Shelby. "In all due respect to my French friends."