Just as Merv King has a go at the City, a Business Wire interview of famed investor Warren Buffett offers a bit of stick for Wall Street street too.

“You have to put in something where there is downside to people who really mess up large institutions,” Buffett said.

Like axeing golden parachutes perhaps…

“What you have to change in Wall Street, is you have to make sure that in addition to carrots, there are sticks,” he said. “And it can’t be a one-way street where they are making ungodly amounts of money when things are good and then they move on to someplace else for a while when things are bad.”

Despite his reservations about the Street, you wouldn’t necessarily expect him to call it evil, even a necessary one:

“I don’t look at Wall Street as ‘evil,’” he said. “I look at Wall Street as given to huge excess sometimes. I don’t want to get rid of it. We need something to allocate capital and distribute securities and all of that throughout the system. We have got a big capitalist system and we have to have a big capital market – but there is plenty of room for improvement.”

A mastery of understatement from the billionaire who pays himself $100,000 a year.