David Einhorn On Bloomberg TV (AAPL, JOE)

Greenlight Capital co-founder and President David Einhorn, who famously got it right on Lehman Brothers, guest hosted "In the Loop" with Betty Liu and Jon Erlichman on Bloomberg Television this morning. Einhorn said that too-big-to-fail sentiment curbs concessions and that he is not looking at the jobs story when he's deciding on an investment right now. He also said Apple AAPL is a premium opportunity and that a St. Joe JOE buyout would be would be "very tough." Highlights can be found below, courtesy of Bloomberg Television. The video can be accessed here. On the European debt crisis: "What's interesting about the European debt crisis and the way that it's being handled, from what I can see, is one of the lessons that the authorities seem to have drawn from the Lehman failure is to not allow anything that is very big to be allowed to fail. That includes these European governments. It puts itself into a very interesting position because you have entities that look like they're insolvent, look like they would default, and the authorities have decided that they're not allowed to fail. Generally speaking, whether it's the banks or the governments, there's a fair amount of insolvency here. What's interesting is that if people realize they are going to be bailed out no matter what because the system isn't going to allow it, then they have no incentive to make concessions." On the euro: "I don't really have a strong view one way or another on the currency itself. The dynamic in terms of how it default or non-default and how the situation plays out is interesting, more from a society at large basis. We own a fair amount of European equities, and basically we've hedged out the currency so that we effectively own them in dollars." On the jobs situation in the U.S. "I don't think there's an obvious, easy solution to the jobs problem. If there were, we would have come upon it and fixed it. I think part of the problem is that people have the expectation that--well, if the Fed does this, or the Treasury does that, or if we cut taxes this way--all of a sudden there's going to be a tremendous recovery in jobs. In order to have jobs, I think we have to figure out what it is that creates wealth. Wealth is created not by stock prices going up and people feeling richer, wealth is created by making goods and services that are more valuable than it costs them to produce. What we need to do is think about it from a countries perspective, how is it that we can create a climate where people can create goods and services that are more valuable."