A U.S. jury on Tuesday found the National Association of Realtors and some residential brokerages, including units of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway , liable to pay $1.78 billion in damages for conspiring to artificially inflate commissions for home sales.
Actually, even if you took half for the lawyers (they’d get less) and assumed both buyers and sellers would get money back, 5.3billion would still be $5,300 for each buyer and each seller.
Not “get rich” money, but a hell of a lot more than three bucks.
It was a joke. I wasn’t going for accuracy. The joke was that seemingly “huge” judgments don’t seem to find their way to the parties that were actually damaged, especially in class action lawsuits.
Unfortunately, hitting people in their bank account is the only remediation our system has for this sort of thing. The good news is that these people only care about money, so you can legally hit them where it hurts the most. Bad news is that the real victims only get a fraction of what they should.