Sales are terrific out there so you're my kind of crowd. I've been getting reports. We're breaking all kinds of records and we're going to start off with question number 26 which goes to station station two. Hi, Warren and Chalice. My name is James from Malaysia.
Given the reason challenged faced by the major US bank, what is your overall outlook on the banking industry? How do you assess the risks and the opportunity in this section? Well, anticipating a few questions on banks, I decided we should start using bank language here to describe. And Charlie.
The situation in banking is very similar to what it's always been in banking that that fear is contagious always and historically sometimes the fear was justified and sometimes it wasn't my dad lost his job in 1931 because of a bank run and they had a bank run on state banks and they had the all-mone national banks said well we're a national bank and they never run on the national banks and of course they both face the same problem.
So it used to be that if you saw people lining up at a bank the proper response was to get into the line and they'll always leave it and the story is that Sydney Wyberg of Goldman Sachs during one of the bank runs back in 1907 or thereabouts how the job is a runner Goldman Sachs and asked if he could take them week off and you boss said sure not much is going on anyway so he got in line that whether it's the Nicarbarco Trust or wherever and as he got toward the front of the line he sold his place in line to somebody he didn't have an account of the bank but that was an asset.
The banking system has changed so much over the years and we did something enormously sensible in my view when we set up the FDIC as many as 2,000 banks have failed in one year back after World War I I mean bank bank runs were just part of the picture and if you have people that are worried about whether the money is safe in the bank and all find wood draw you can't run an economy very well so the FDIC was very logical it's got changed over the years some but here we are in you know 2,023 and we actually see the FDIC pay off at a hundred cents on the lower to everybody or make it available on all the man deposits and yet you still have people very worried about their the periodically geographically all kinds of crazy ways and that just shouldn't happen so the messaging has been very poor it's been poor by the politicians who sometimes have an interest in having a poor it's been poor by the agencies and I'd say it's been poor by the press I mean you shouldn't have so many people that misunderstand the fact that although there may be a debt ceiling it's going to get changed although there's a $250,000 limit on FDIC the FDIC and the US government and American public have no interest in having a bank fail or have deposits actually lost by people we had a demonstration project the weekend of Silicon Valley bank and the public is still confused so it's really it's something to have a law that was passed in 19th or a law that became effective in 1934 or modified in some way not understood about something as important as the banking system I don't think the American public is that dumb and I just want I made that offer over in Tokyo incidentally I haven't heard from anybody that wants to take up my million dollar bet on whether the public will lose money and if they have a demand deposit at a bank no matter what the size so that's the world we live in.
It means that a lot of magic can turn into a configuration or it can be blown out and who knows what will happen and we don't have any worry we keep our money up to cash and treasures you're both at Berkshire because we keep a hundred and 28 billion or whatever it was at the end of the quarter and we want to be there if the banking system temporarily even gets stalled in some way it shouldn't I don't think it will but I think it could and I think that the incentives in bank regulation are are so messed up and so many people have an interest in having them messed up it's totally crazy I mean the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were doing 40 or so percent of the mortgage business in the United States that is huge they were regulated those just those two companies were regulated by some group I forget what they called but they had 150 people that were in charge.
Of just figuring out whether Freddie and Fannie were doing the right thing but I could have done it you know it's hardly could have done it you know and I'm not sure they needed an assistant even to do it but the incentives were all wrong and Freddie and Fannie which were doing fine in August apparently doing fine in July and August of 2008 were put into conservatorship you know early in September and the things that followed from that were just incredible so there are second order and third order and fourth order effects that are somewhat unpredictable as to what they will be and the sequence and all that but things change and if people think the pauses are sticky. anymore they're just living in a different era you know press a button you don't have to get in the line and wait for days and have the teller counting out the money slowly and gold so that you hope the line goes away you can you can have a run in a few seconds so the way it hasn't been addressed properly is is a problem and who knows where it leads but you'll have to have a punishment for the people that do the wrong thing
and if you take first republic for example you could look at their 10k and you could see that they were offering non-government guaranteed mortgages to in jumbo amounts at fixed rates sometimes for 10 years before they change the floating and that's a crazy proposition if it's to the advantage of the bank they get it they get the guy coming in and says I'll read for finance at one and a half percent and then one percent and if it's if it's a banished the other way the fellow keeps out of 10 years you don't give options like that but but that's what first republic was doing it was a plain site and the world ignored it till it blew up and some of stock in some of these banks that were held by insider was a soul and who knows whether they had a plan or whether they some plan that was innocent or whether they started sensing what was coming but but you do know that the directors are not going to be able to read some book or anything like that but they do they do have the ability to hold the CEO accountable CEO gets that's the bank in trouble both the CEO and the director should suffer the stockholders of the future shouldn't suffer they didn't do anything it doesn't teach anybody any lessons or anything it teaches the lesson is that if you run a bank and you just screw it up you still live you're still a rich guy and the clubs don't drop you and and the charity group some but asking it is our benefit the world goes on that is not a good lesson to teach people who are holding the behavior of the economy in their hands so I think there's some work to be done but I don't think it's it's not a difficult problem it's just we screwed up the answer and we screwed up the communication of it
Charlie well I'm so fashioned that I kind of liked it better when banks didn't do investment banking that makes me very outmoded in the modern world and the country decided it was contrary to public interest for a while and then then the banks wanted to get back into it did they ever yeah no I mean I don't think having a bunch of bankers all of them were trying to get rich leads to good things but I think a banker should be more like an engineer he's more like in the avoiding trouble than he is getting rich and they could do fine they can do find that way and I think we're gonna be mistaken we create a bank where everybody who joins his plans to get rich you know it's a it's a contradiction and values and we came to that conclusion I don't want glass to go past or anything but but then they want to get back and how many of you know and I maybe I'm wrong on this I haven't looked lately but the Federal Reserve actually it was given the responsibility for setting margin requirements and they change margin requirements a lot of times
Because it was known that people that borrow a lot of money cause a danger to the bank system you get too many in the picture and all of that sort of thing and what's happened the banks figured out a thousand different ways to get so you get borrow on a hundred percent margin you know I have different I mean through derivatives and everything they just totally distorted every all the lessons that were learned in the 29 crash and the magic taking banking into derivative trading who in his right mind would have allowed that yeah well there's more money and that's why they're in it yeah and and but it isn't necessarily a great social outcome for the rest of us that's what that's what those Senate committees decided back in 1931 and 32
and then in the late 1990s particularly I mean you know very decent people but you know Bob Roman and some of the people that you know they they said this is the modern world and here's what the modern world is turned out to hand us and banking banking can have all kinds of of new inventions but it needs to have old values and well if we don't we don't know what's going to happen you know because there are a lot of things that could happen out of the present situation depositors will not lose money stockholders and debt holders of the holding up and all they should lose money and the people borrowed on out on commercial real estate and now it isn't the loans aren't getting extended they should leave too bad I mean that's part of borrowing on 100% margin which is what people were doing I've been knowing on commercial real estate that you've got to have the penalties hit the people to cause the problems and if they took risks that they shouldn't have it it needs to fall on them if you're going to change how people are going to behave in the future
okay Becky this question comes from Davis Hans in Houston Texas he writes what do you think about the business models of the big banks as compared to the regional banks in the wake of the events at Silicon Valley bank and how does the perceived implicit guarantee of all deposits at all banks affect big banks and those regional banks yeah well I I can say this if you found if you follow sound banking methods which means not doing some things that other people do a bank could be a perfectly decent investment in fact Charlie and I once me originally in six nineteen sixty nine we bought a bank at Berkshire and we had nineteen million dollars invested in that bank and we had seventeen million I think invested in our insurance companies
and if the banking holding company act of nineteen seventy hadn't been passed we might have ended up owning a lot of banks instead of a lot of insurance companies we were looking at more banks and Harry keep was taking us around Chicago and there were other things we could do and then Bingo they passed the nineteen seventy bank holding company act and we had to divest ourselves of that bank in in in ten years which we never had a bad death oh it never had an unnecessary cost it made nothing but money with no risk it never presented any deposit insurance risk of the government zero it was a lovely sound constructive institution in this community and any person who ready to deserve credit could get credit and we were going to buy more banks and we were forced out of it and we were going to buy more banks and we bought more banks we probably wouldn't be expanded the insurance business but you know the law changed and so we divested and we done okay
And insurance but banking was more attractive to us it was bigger than there were more targets to buy and you could run a perfectly sound bank then and no negotiable social evidence of all these things all the inventions that came later and you could still run it today and you could earn you know a lot you could earn good money very good money and we didn't we would have found more banks but we're precluded from doing that and we sold banks bank stocks in the last while we sold them first when the pandemic broke out and then we sold some more in the last six months and we don't know where the shareholders of the big banks necessarily or the regional banks or any but are heading I've got my bank I've got my own personal money and I'm probably above the FDIC limit and I've got it with a local bank and I think I don't worry about it in the least but in terms of owning banks events will determine their future and you've got politicians involved you've got you've got a whole lot of people don't really understand how the system works and I would say that you've had something less than a perfect communication between various people and the American public so the American public is probably as confused about banking as ever and that has consequences and nobody knows what the consequences are because every event search recreating a different dynamic I mean in physics you know that Pi is going to be 3.14 you know infinite number numbers after that but no matter what happens but you don't know what has happened to the stickiness of deposits all they got changed by 2008 it's got changed by this I mean it and that changes everything and so we're very cautious in a situation like that about ownership of banks and we we we do remain with one bank holding a deal but we originated that deal and with the Bank of America and I like Bank of America I like I like the management and I propose the deal to them so I stick with it but do I know how to project out what's going to happen from her the answer is I don't because I've seen so many things in the last few months which really weren't that unexpected to me to see but which reconferred my belief that the American public doesn't understand their banking system and some people in Congress perhaps don't understand it anymore than I understand I don't understand what the spaceships call I mean there's all kinds of things I don't know about but if you're in Congress you take a position on everything and sometimes it's your advantage if you really understand it not to say exactly what you what you feel and and here we are Charlie
yeah well a lot has happened in Bank of America in my lifetime I welcomed all that early banking of the deserving immigrants by the early Bank of America and I think all the credit cards when they came in as original bank cards were a great contribution to civilization and but the game here gets in the market looks like investment banking the last time I get as a citizen I don't want I have always I am deeply distrustful situations of which everybody wants to get rich and envy's everybody else I regret that atmosphere is utterly toxic and the people who like one story which is again a true story and I'm not naming the name and it wasn't Pete Jeffries because he might fit this name but it wasn't Pete but our hero Jean A. Beck was going to retire at some point and so we we hired a future replacement it's got a little problem I talked before about having the perfect business and now we're gonna bring in somebody we actually bring in somebody that went to Central High with Charlie although I class yeah and Charlie didn't know I was picking out this guy he wasn't he'd ask me we wouldn't I heard him well I sure I probably wouldn't hired anybody but that's another question but this guy comes over a perfectly decent guy but presentable it looks like a banker and everything and of course the first thing he wants to do we've got this wonderful bag but we have the crumbiest looking building in Rockford and we don't need a great building we just need a great banker and natural this guy wants to build a new building and because we were the most profitable bank but we didn't look like we were the most profitable back so I told him he could have any building you wanted as long as it was not higher than I had to be shorter than than our nearest competitor he lost interest totally he wanted to be at the top floor of the biggest building in town and I told him he could horizontally do anything he wanted but he couldn't do it vertically it taught me a lot about the guys motivations in life and he didn't end up running the bank anyway that's all I know about bagging probably more
在我一生中,美国银行发生了很多事情。我欢迎早期美国银行为应得的移民提供的所有银行服务,我认为当信用卡首次出现时,它们作为最初的银行卡为文明作出了巨大贡献。但现在市场上的事情看起来像是投资银行业务了,最后一次作为一个公民的经历让我不想再去参与。我一直深深地不信任任何人想要变得富有并羡慕其他人的状况。我遗憾的是,那种氛围是极其有害的,而那些喜欢一个故事的人,这个故事是真实的,我不会说出名字,但这不是Pete Jeffries,因为他可能适合这个名字,但不是Pete。我们的英雄Jean A. Beck有一天会退休,所以我们雇佣了一个他未来的继任者,但这有一个小问题。我之前曾谈过拥有完美的业务,现在我们要引进一个新人,实际上他是去了中央高中和Charlie同班的。当时Charlie不知道我选了这个人,他问过我,我们在招人的时候,我听过他的声音,他很不错,但他想要的第一件事情是我们现有的这座建筑物不够好看,我们不需要一个很棒的建筑物,我们只需要一个很棒的银行家,但这个家伙想要建造一个新的建筑,因为我们是最有利可图的银行,但看起来我们并不是最有利可图的,所以我告诉他,他可以建造任何建筑,只要不比我们最近的竞争对手更高,他完全失去了兴趣,他想要在城里最大的楼顶。我告诉他,他可以横向做任何事情,但他不能垂直做,这教会了我很多关于这位男子人生动机的事情,他最终也没有成为银行的经营者。这就是我知道的关于银行的事情,可能还有更多。
Mr. Buffett and Mr. Munger hi my name is Daphne I'm 13 years old and this is my six annual Berkshire halfway Shen and I've had the privilege to ask you both questions and years passed my question for you today is the following as you know the US national debt is currently at an estimated 31 trillion dollars making up about 125 percent of the US GDP in the meantime over the past few years the federal reserve has telegraphed that they intend to monetize the debt by printing trillions of dollars even as they insist that they're fighting inflation already other major economies in the world such as China Saudi Arabia and Brazil are moving away from the dollar and anticipation of this my question is are we likely to face a time in the future when the US dollar is no longer the global reserve currency how is Berkshire prepared for this possibility and what can we do as American citizens to attempt to shelter ourselves from what's beginning to look like the beginnings of de-dollarization
well I should ask you to come up here and answer some questions I mean it's very interesting I mean we are the reserve currency I see no option for any other currency to be the reserve currency and I think that nobody understands the situation better than Jay Powell and I but he's not in control of of physical policy and every now and then he drops a few hints and there was no question that when the when when when the pandemic broke out I mean it was a semi-war like situation but nobody knows how far you can go with the paper currency before it gets out of control if and particularly if you're the reserve world reserve currency nobody knows the answer to that and you don't want to try and pick out the point it does become a problem because then it's all over and I think we should be very careful I mean you know we all learned Keynesianism and we played in World War II to the advantage of the country and we did every we couldn't we could to prevent inflation during the war and then war ended in August of 45 and I think in January 46 and I'm not giving you exact figures at all now but in January 46 I think the rate of inflation was it you know something like 1% or thereabouts and by the end of the year I think it was at like 15% and again I'm doing this from long memories but but it's it's easy for America to do is a lot but if we do too much it's very hard to see how you recover once you let the genie out of the bottle and people lose faith in the currency and they behave in an entirely different manner then they do when they feel with if they put some money in the bank or have a pension plan or whatever it may be that they're going to get to something with roughly equal purchasing power and it just changes the economy and all kinds of things can happen then and I can't predict them and nobody else can predict them but I do know they aren't good and we will see and I do this as I'm you know I voted for both parties and it's it's it's not limited to politicians to be the party or anything of the sort people take positions some of them understand what they're doing some don't understand what they're doing and you know if they put me on some medical board I don't understand what I'm doing you know I it's not that there's nothing wrong with the fact that you that you can't master everything you can all be Isaac Newton but you can't go around pretending you do or making decisions on it and and we are not as well off in relation to curbing inflation expectations which become self-fulfilling and we are not as well off as we were earlier and the butcher is better prepared than most investments for that kind of a period I said this in the annual report but we aren't perfectly prepared because there's no there's no way to perfectly prepare you don't know what course of action will occur and it's a very political decision now it's a tribal decision to some degree and you'll hope for leadership that that's actually will do something recognizes the problem and America's an incredible society rich you know we got everything going for us but that doesn't mean we can just print money indefinitely but as as that and it'll be interesting to see how it turns out
Charlie, well at some point printing money to buy votes will be counterproductive yeah and we don't we don't know exactly where that comes and something is going to be dangerous and unproductive you ought to keep it a fair distance away.
Now if you have a culture that is exceptionally strong like Japan they have done some strange things there but they couldn't have been a reserve currency no of course not and but Japan bought back most of the national debt and most of the lot of the Collins talks and debt it just the Federal Reserve on spread of everything in Japan and the country's working it's in and 30 years of economic stasis but it's not going to help.
I really admired Japan and but I don't think we should try and imitate it I don't think we're as good as Japan at taking they have a cohesive culture and we don't. Charlie that's exactly right in Japan everybody's supposed to suck up and cope and in America we go play so I hope you come next year with a tougher question and thank you.
I predict I would love to be being born again today in the United States I mean we we can do a we can do a lot of them things and get away with it we can't do an unlimited number there are people who care about that and you know you have to be willing to be extraordinarily unpopular.
I mean Paul Voker there were there are other Federal Reserve tear people that would not have not have done what they did it's just it's too uncomfortable and there used to be a politician in Nebraska and if you ask them some really tough question like you know how do you stand on abortion or he would look you right in the eye say I'm all right on that one and then he move next well that's what people have done basically on inflation and they they one way or another they they say I'm all right on that and then they they don't really think about what the consequences of their actions could be particularly.
And it's so much fun to there's 435 of you to just be one of 135 instead of being the person actually responsible anyway I am still next to the question of two superpowers and when you get into really destroying a planet destroying the reserve currency of the world when there's really no substance and forget about all the toys you know with with I mean it's a joke to think of any tokens or that sort of that that that's madness but but it's also madness to just keep printing money yeah and we know how to do it and we actually came from a money printing money printing economy in world or two which was required and we suffered significant inflation the price level.
I mean there's a million ways to judge it but maybe ten times what it was or something like that well that's that's getting close to the edge of where you don't want to you don't want all dollars anyway I want to hold something else my whole real estate you want to hold an interest in a business there's a lot of good your best your best defense is your own earning power if you're the best doctor in town if you're the best lawyer in town if you love us teacher in town or even if you love 10th best you're gonna make a good living I mean you know the economy is productive and you will succeed with your towns but you won't succeed by hoarding dollars you'll just be you'll just succeed by the fact that you're your value to the community which is a rich community overall is sustained and so the best investment is always in yourself that that's the answer I would give you.
Well we have a situation where we've learned to print money in gobs and a big chunk of our young people go right into wealth management this is like we did like we did yes we've been bad examples and I want to say that I didn't realize wealth friends won't get so big when I went into it and I don't apologize for what's happened yeah well anyway you did well back he.
This question comes from Gary Gambino in Parma Ohio who says he's been a Berkshire shareholders since 2004 he says the amount paid this year for the 41.4% stake in pilot values the. entire company at around 19 billion dollars that's about six times what BP is paying for travel centers of America but pilots market share is just three times travel centers of America's was it a big mistake to base the final price on 2022 earnings which has unusually high fuel margins well that's a very good question the answer is that we arranged to buy it in three stages with the third stage being at the option of the owner of 20% the first stage we we bought what turned out to be a very attractive price the second stage turned out to be a very good year for the diesel business which means that the seller got a very good price and I would say that overall we feel very good about the fact we only 80% as a price that we do but we would have rather own better if we just bought the 80% to start with and the last 20% the seller has the option and that's always an intelligent way of structuring something we've had that arrangement with other while we've dealt with the furniture mark we bought 80% of the furniture mark on August 30th 1983 almost 40 years ago and it's worked out perfectly but when you give the other person the option they've got some advantage we we we have 80% now of a business we like very much and the comparison to travel America is really curious because travel America not only much smaller but they they run all the problems we have hundreds and hundreds of locations on the interstate they're zone for what we commercial the can maybe 15 acres or there's nothing like it and they're not going to move the interstate two miles to the right or something and you know everything was sort so we've got a position that that you know BP may or may not have made a fine deal I've read the perspectives and I can understand I mean it's a big big source of output for BP but I like I like the management we have had at the pilot I like very much the fellow who's coming in that's the new CEO I just have to tell you a little bit about Adam right who's taking that job I he came from Omaha he wasn't sorry because he came from Omaha he came from Omaha he came from North high that a public school that my wife graduated from I've got grandchildren that graduated from there he went to the University of Nebraska almost set the rushing record and football which will never be beaten because they've given up football but I think he rushed from maybe 3600 he held three jobs while he went through there he didn't turn to mid-American 20 years ago his mother worked to put him to school I mean it's just it's a ratio of your squared and we have him the the managed pilot and the assholes have given us a wonderful business they're a big gem and I would he my vintage I mean great people and here we are and I'm glad I'm very glad we own pilot I just wish we bought a hundred percent
I first made the deal was that was not the deal it wasn't for sale it wasn't for sale yeah and and incidentally we the last 20% of of the furniture mark wasn't for sale when we bought we bought 80% of it and that's worked out well and and we've we've done various deals various ways the best way to do it is just write people to check and and get the stock but we did that with TTI but you can't always make the same deal we make if we like the business well enough and the people well enough we we will tailor it differently but our preferences to write a check and on the whole place and and keep the management in place it's really wonderful to watch something like Adam right work I mean that basically you know I don't know what his mother was earning but but he went to North High which is probably four or five miles from here public school graduate and worked his way up went for a short period of Pacific gas and electric and we brought him home the Ron pilot and pilot well pilot the prices on diesel were way different I should have brought pilot close to 80 billion of sales last year but more normal prices it's it's significant and you know it's half that or thereabouts maybe a little more but he is I don't know how old Adam would be but it's in his 40s and and he came up through he came up through the organization that Greg able to involve with and now here is running up our major business it's good I'd prefer to be able to do that and I don't you know somebody else may have gone to Warpust to just business schools I think so what you know we see what Adam can do
Okay station for good afternoon Mr. Buffett, Mr. Munger. My name is JC, I'm 15 years old and I'm from Ohio. This is my fourth in-person Berkshire meeting. I have a lot of passion learning from your speeches, interviews, and articles. Thank you for sharing your wisdom all the time. Mr. Buffett, in your annual shareholder letter this year, you said that Berkshire's journey consisted of continuous savings, the power of compounding, the American tailwind, and avoidance of major mistakes. You have humbly admitted in the past that you have made many mistakes, but this is the first time that major mistakes stood out to me. Could you please advise us on what major mistakes we should learn we should avoid in both investing and in life? I would also like to have Mr. Munger's thoughts to please. Thank you very much.
"Well, the mayor Charlie, Charlie said the major mistake you make of that, you know you're lucky being in the United States to go around the world. You don't have a lot of choices some in some places, but what you should, you should write your obituary and try and figure out how to live up to it, and you know that's something you get wiser on as you go along. The business mistakes you just want to make really don't make any mistakes to take out of the game or come close to taking out of your game. You should never have a night when you're worried about investing. I mean, you still don't have any money to invest at all, and you should, you should, you should spend a little bit less than you earn, and you can spend a little bit more than you earn and then, then you've got that, and the chances are you'll never get out of that. I'll make an exception in terms of a mortgage on your house, but credit card debt, and we're in the credit card business big time, and the world will stay in the credit card business, but why get behind the game, and if you're effectively paying 12 or 14 or whatever percent you're paying out of credit card, you know you're saying I'm gonna earn more than 14 percent of money, and if you can do that, come to Berkshire out of the way. So, I hate to say this with Charlie's around me, but it's straight out of Ben Franklin, and it's not, it's not. It's not that complicated, but you well I'll give you a couple of lessons on you know Tom Murphy, the first time I met him, said two things to me said you know we still someone to go to hell tomorrow, well, that was great advice then, and think about great advice it is.
When you sit down on the computer and screw your life off forever by telling somebody to go to hell or something else in 30 seconds and you can't erase it and you know you haven't lost the option, you know and and and and he said you know praise praise my name criticized by category. Well, what what makes more sense than that? I mean who do you like the criticizes you all the time and you don't need didn't you don't need to vilify anybody to make your point on on on some of your discussion and and and then they give you another general piece of advice. I've I've never known anybody that was basically kind that died without friends and I've known plenty of people money that died without friends including their family, and but I've never known anybody and and, you know, I've seen a few people including Tom Murphy senior and maybe junior who's here, but certainly his dad, he, I never saw him, I watched him for 50 years. I never saw him do, and I'm kind. I didn't seem to win very many stupid actually there, I mean it wasn't he was not discriminating. He just, he just, he just decided that there's no reason to do it, and wow what a difference that makes in life trying.
Well, it's so simple to spend less than you earn and invest, rudely, and avoid toxic people and toxic activities and try and keep learning all your life, etcetera, etcetera. And do a lot of deferred gratification because you prefer life that way, and if you do all those things, you are almost certain to succeed, and if you don't, you're gonna need a lot of luck. A lot of luck and you don't want to need a lot of luck. You want to go into a game where you're very likely to win without having any unusual luck. I'd add one more thought to it. You need to know how people can manipulate other people, then you need to resist the temptation to do it yourself. Oh yes, the toxic people who are trying to fool you or lie to you, who aren't reliable meeting their commitments. A great lesson of life is to get them, a hell, out of your life, yeah, and do it fast, do it fast. And I would add, but try, what. Don't agree with me, do it tactfully possible too, but do get about your life, yes, yeah.
I don't mind a little tact or even a little financial cost, but the question is getting in my hell out of the law.
我并不介意一点点策略或甚至一点点经济成本,但问题是这让我感到极其烦恼,与法律有关。
Okay, Becky. Alright, this comes from Roger Lee Town. He says, "My name is Roger from Hong Kong, a long-term shareholder of Berkshire, admire and follower of Mr. Buffett's and Munger's wisdom and principle. Both of you have said before that the most difficult problems in life are always people problems."
One of the key lessons you have learned to be able to live a happy life and a successful life is to stay away from negative people my question is what to do if those negative people are your families the people whom you can't simply stay away from yeah you minimize it but you can no that I mean there's no question about it Charlie Gavin Edshaw I thought was a master of tact the other day when he says you always don't know how to interact with people and behave well it says of course you have to make something substance your family but it was but it's true and you know you really I don't know what it's like to have you know a drunken you know bullish probably father but parents just generally I mean it you know how do you handle it it's very interesting that the MacArthur family very famous John MacArthur the battle set up the MacArthur Foundation had five kids and four of them turned out to be superstars of one sort or another and they had this crazy I generate drunken father but they all decided the thing to do was to get the hell out of the house and so yeah this the father of the van MacArthur Foundation that did that along with three of the siblings out of five so you know I I was lucky I mean Charlie was lucky and it you know if you if you have a I mean our father saw probably of shortcomings and and and and both of us but you know it would still be there for us and if you have one that won't be there for you you know I it's a very tough problem and I think one way or another I probably would have gotten through with that through that if I had that situation but I don't think I think my life would have been a lot different Charlie I have no idea where we're okay station five hey Warren and Charlie good afternoon my name is Sudhakarity and a pretty I'm from Bentonville Arkansas home of Walmart I'm here shareholders since 2019 and my daughter sar shareholders since 2020 my question is this is my first time coming to shareholders and my question is Walmart Walmart and Berkshire at the has very great relationship with BNSF McLean and consumer goods like fruit of the looms and granemals and etc.
My question is, Granemals is exclusively sold at Walmart and Fruit of the Loom is sold at many other retailers. How does Berkshire Hathaway decide which items are sold at some retailers exclusively versus others sold at many retailers? Well, that's a good question. But obviously, you'd love to control if you have a product. You'd love to control the distribution and you're probably going to get better gross emergence if they ask for you by name. I mean, they just had an article about Bernardo Arnold who is the LVM agent. You know he's got a blue box of Tiffany and the blue box itself means something. And Coca-Cola, the bottle meant something in the 1920s. I think there was a study of that kind of hoops shirt bottle and blindfolded very high percentage of the population could recognize it was Coca-Cola. One they can recognize not only the product but the container. You know you're going to have good gross margins.
我的问题是,Granemals只在沃尔玛销售,而Fruit of the Loom则在许多其他零售商处出售。伯克希尔·哈撒韦公司如何决定哪些产品只在某些零售商处独家销售,而其他产品在许多零售商处出售呢?嗯,这是一个好问题。但显然,如果你有一个产品,你会喜欢控制它的分销,如果别人能直接叫你的名字买你的产品,你很可能会得到更好的总利润。比如,他们刚刚发表了一篇关于LVM代理商Bernardo Arnold的文章。你知道,他有一盒蒂芙尼的蓝盒子,这个蓝盒本身就有特殊的意义。可口可乐,在20世纪20年代,瓶子本身就有意义。我认为有一项研究,对这种带环形状的可口可乐瓶子进行蒙眼测试,很高比例的人可以认出它是可口可乐。如果人们不仅能认出产品,还能认出容器,就可以获得良好的总利润。
And if you're just another cola and there've been hundreds of them and even if you have distribution to something like Walmart, who has Sam's cola, it just doesn't, it's not the same. I mean, there I am, you know, in 1886 or so, John Pemberton and Atlanta cratered it and they spent a very significant amount of money advertising. On the other hand, Hershey's didn't spend any money on advertising. So we have observed, Charlie and I both have observed, so many products, so many methods of retail and we really think we know quite a bit about it. And we also know how much we don't know about it at the same time.
And it doesn't mean that we want to go into retailing ourselves. But it does mean we've learned to some extent what to avoid. And we've learned when somebody really has something. And Granemals has something. It's just that there's only many, you know, at Walmart. Does a great job of distribution for us. And it's a good product for Walmart. It's a good product for us. And on Fruit of the Loom, they can sell lots of types of underwear and they can do a big volume. But we're not going to make as much money rattling up lead to capital employed or anything with a product that has a whole bunch of competitors.
这并不意味着我们想要亲自进军零售市场,但我们已经在某种程度上知道该避免什么。我们也学会了如何识别出真正有价值的产品。Granemals是有价值的,只是在沃尔玛这样的商店里售卖的数量有限。沃尔玛为我们做了很好的分销工作,这对他们来说是一个好产品,对我们来说也是一个好产品。对于Fruit of the Loom这样的品牌,他们可以售卖许多种内衣并且可以大量销售,但是我们不会用一个有大量竞争者的产品去赚取更多的资金。
And if they can once the Granemals Jambas are something, it's not the sort of products that cause people to drive 20 miles out of their way to buy it or anything of the sort. But if you're in the Walmart and you're picking up a Jambas or something for the kid and Hershey wants a particular product and it's not, it's reasonably priced and everything and where's well whenever you know we will, we're happy to have it distributed through somebody with a distribution power of Walmart and their design, they're very happy to have the product, unbalanced.
It's obviously better if you own C's candy than if you own the no-name candy company. You know, particularly when the people buy it as gifts a couple of times a year. I mean, they know that if they give their girlfriend if they give someone in the hospital, if they give a gift to Christmas or going to a dinner. They know if they hand the box of candy to somebody, they don't say at the same time, "Here I got a wonderful deal on this candy." I mean, it just kills the moment, right? But they really want to see as a smile on the other person's face that they're receiving it and they get it.
So knowing what custard and C's box chocolate are not remotely the market that soft drinks are. And the product does not travel particularly Hershey's chocolate and trouble. I mean, if you look at candy bars, what's popular in the UK isn't that popular in the US and all kinds of things cold cold travels. There are 200 countries and roughly and probably 180 of them it's a nominal product. And how do you do it? Well, it helps if you start in 1886 and from that point forward.
So we've learned a lot. We got a lot to learn. But we did learn that something like Arrow knit socks, almost we understood when it came around. Nobody ever heard of it. We bought it for a very low price, as it turned out, in 20 years ago and still, nobody knows that we own it. That's fine. but they know what grandmothers are and and it has legs it keeps it just keeps going year after year and some some things are like pet rocks and and we're learning all the time try I have nothing bad you probably never want to go around almost no I never I don't even know where them it wouldn't fit okay
Becky this question comes from Barry Laffer in New York City Berkshire owns about 94 million shares of Paramount Global as of the last published data this asset rich company is disappointed on recent quarterly earnings reports in just this week slash its dividend by 80% how do you see the streaming wars evolving and do you still have conviction in your investment thesis is your investment thesis based on the company being an acquisition target or based on its fundamentals yeah and how would you like to manage my money for nothing they we are not in the business of of giving stock advice to people and people who don't know anything about stocks can make a lot of money doing that we don't think it's something we should get away but I will say this it's not good news when any company passes a civil and Earth cuts a civil and dramatically and the streaming businesses extremely interesting to watch because there's people people love to use their eyeballs watching being entertained on on a screen in front of them or phone or whatever it may be but there's a lot of companies doing it and you need fewer companies you need higher prices and well you need higher prices or it doesn't work and you don't lock in people when you get them to to join up for the streaming period when your cereal runs I mean you know you keep them on for a while but you can't look them up and and we'll see what happens
I mean I had a gasoline station when I was 21 or 22 when this about three or four four four of my hopes from here and we had one competitor and and he determined our profit because he we looked at his price every day and if we cut the price he'd match it and we couldn't raise the price and he did twice the gallery so he won and there's just basic business problems that you see with certain interest you don't see with the other Disney was unique and it's animated what it offered you know in the 30s and 40s and they wrote the stuff off at the first showing and then they they rejuvenated so white and all these other people every seven years and that was fine but this is a different world and the eyeballs aren't gonna increase dramatically the time they can spend it's not gonna increase dramatically and you got up which is companies that don't want to quit and who knows what pricing does under that but anybody tells you what they know what pricing will do in the future as is getting themselves
Charlie Charlie's had a lot of experience since now with Hollywood I mean he used to before I even met him I think the movie business is one tough business yeah that's my view the talent will make the money the agents will make the money and if you've got a theater you know the theaters are now doing 70 percent of the business as they did before the pandemic and big hits you know you have enormous grosses but you can't reduce the supply people of mourning got so many so many hours in the day they've only got two eyeballs and and they got more choice than ever before and they've got such the sheepers that offers them the same experience and some of them like the experience you know particularly the big hits of going in but it isn't like you can double the number of people or double the eyeballs or anything like that and and you've got a lot of people the sound will always get paid and when you essentially are packaging that talent one way or another and you need to get higher prices and you've got a strong companies that don't want to quit that's an interesting an interesting equation
if you think the movies are tough try to invest in a New York show on a conventional stage there they think it's a breach of faith in that business to let the purpose don't put up the money ever get any money back yeah well Charlie saw a lot of that actually yeah I don't like those businesses tell them what happened on clear pattern Charlie it's no it it's a business that everybody's tempted to they love the idea of going in it you know and they get sort of on a psychic income but but I never own any resources either well I might follow on I used to talk about claiming wars and X-R-B button we never quite got around to it we had a lot of fun going to track together okay
Section six: Good afternoon, my name is Hannah Hayes and I'm a high schooler from Iowa. You said earlier today that transitioning to renewable energy has the people and capital to support it. So, with enough investment in renewables, the development of energy storage technology to soon meet our energy needs and support from the government system through inflation reduction act funding, why hasn't Berkshire Hathaway energy truly invested in the future by accelerating retirement plans for the coal plants which have high operating costs? And are currently Iowa's biggest carbon polluter and will continue to be until they're finally retired in 2049 which is too late to be curbing emissions according to the IPCC.
It's very interesting; we, in Iowa, actually produce more wind energy than it's used, the total amount of energy used by our customers. But it's not producing for 24 hours a day necessarily. So, there are problems, and incidentally, in Iowa, a significant majority of counties welcome us when we come around and want to put in wind, then some don't want it. I mean it is a "Not My Back Yard" (NIMBY) someplace.
There's other places where they love the money. They get from a small pot of grounds and people in the like; the taxes are paid. But, I would say that if there's one state in the union that stands out in the development, it's Iowa. But what's also interesting in Iowa is that we have one other major company. There's always loads of little co-ops and all kinds of things that sell electricity, but we have one major competitor and our prices are significantly lower.
As a matter of fact, we are now in the almost public power district and three miles or four miles away. We're selling electricity in Iowa and we are selling it cheaper even though public power was invented in Nebraska and it's been a, I think it's George Norris did it back in the 1930s, and you know, Nebraska has resisted, to some extent, wind power more than Iowa. But, like I said, our competitor or Aldrin of Source hasn't really pursued it the way we have. But, I wouldn't, I would say that our record in wind and solar has not been taught by any utility in the United States.
And, of course, it's been aided by the fact that most utilities payout 70 or 80 percent of earnings and dividends. And we haven't taken a common dividend out of a little tiny prefer. We haven't taken a common dividend out of it for 20 years. We reinvested, I don't know how many billion. That's the reason why the earnings have gone from 200 million to four billion. But, we're not earning a higher rate of return out of capital than we were when we started. We just put way more capital into the businesses as we went along, kept reinvesting the capital.
So, I wish I could tell you more details about it, but I would say that we put up we'd really put a Berkshire Hathaway Energy's record against any utility in the United States.
Buffett: You watched it. Well, I have, and I'm not personally at all sure how bad the global warming is going to be. I think, I don't think anybody knows for sure whether the seas are gonna rise two inches or 20 feet. And so, I think there's a lot of fault claims here in the world where much is not known. Yeah, we, Wyoming, there is a lot of wind in Wyoming, and we are building a transmission line that extends out through the West. But, it was World War II, and they told us to do it, and somebody, and we had a czar in Washington, could say, you know, just get it done, like I said, the Henry Kaiser on building ships. You know, you can't believe how far ahead we would be down from where we are.
But we've got some money, we've got the know-how, and we do spend about, this year, our depreciation in our utility companies on the order of four billion dollars, and we spend maybe three billion additional left. So, maybe we spend seven billion, and there are very few companies in the utility industry that are spending that percentage of their depreciate, but we'd love...
to be spending more but there are people there people all over that don't want you know wants the pipeline to go through there or they don't want to the tower if whatever it may be and that is the problem of a democracy and and even as I mentioned within I we've got a great many counties that majority great majority of the counties are welcome the wind power and you've got some counties that don't like it and we're obviously gonna work with the ones that don't want to work with us we do not have the ability to go in and and tell anybody what to do I'm not and there's a public utility commission in every state that basically governs what we earn on what we do and that's the way the industry is developing that's not bad unless you get into things that that in effect you know extend their part of a countrywide system rather than statewide system.
I think also that even if we weren't worried about global warming it would make sense to shift to renewables to conserve our hydrocarbons there's certain things higher hydrocarbons can do nothing else can do and there only so much of them there why not be cautious in conserving them and the cost they've gotten so much more efficient to them the wind stop
I mean if you look at what we're doing now those towers are way more efficient and but there's a lot of a lot of people that are talking that that there are my things that can't be done and then there's there's a lot of nonsense in this field yeah you like nonsense this is the field for you well we're in the field so I know I know okay Becky this is a question from Monroe Richardson the Wall Street Journal reported in March that oil producers are producing less oil and may have reached their peak in the Permian basin given the major positions of both Occidental petroleum and Chevron in the Permian would you please explain the rationale for Berkshire's significant holdings of both those companies considering that future outlook for oil there well there's no question it's really interesting about oil Charlie knows way more about oil on them what when did you buy that royalty and your bankers feel the way it is but that was before I met you right yes no it wasn't before it was but it was yes it was it was just before you're right yeah and and
That got him early still paid me $70,000 a year would you pay for the money $1,000 yeah yeah now that's the opposite of the Permian my dad bought 1,000 or $1,500 with the royalties before he died in 1964 he left in my mother my mother left him to her two daughters and my older sister died and my younger sister's here today and she gets these checks every month and she knows about all these different fields and what they're producing and that's the that's the reality of half of the oil productioners something around that in the United States and then the other half is shale and and you know if you've gone to the movies and ever watched oil you've never watched the things that are pumping out Charlie's royalties in California you see these you see these gushers of oil well in the Permian I'm like this should sink in on you and the first day the first day when you bring in a well you know it may be 12,000 barrels or maybe 15,000 barrels and it's even it's dangerous that Oxygen oil had one come into I think a 19,000 barrels or something I got one day and in a year year and a half it becomes just partly nothing it's just it's a different business in effect and the United States it's interesting we use what are we use maybe 11 or a fraction well we produce 11 or a fraction million barrels of oil equivalent a day but if shale stopped I mean it would drop to six million very fast well just imagine taking five million barrels a day out of the production in the world and and then we're also taking down our strategic petroleum reserve uh strategic petroleum reserves the ultimate oil field you don't have to drill it's just that we've got it and it was supposed to be strategic but it gets involved in politics and so there's there's all went to a mostly oil business you're talking about different kinds of businesses basically and and we like Oxygen annals position in the Permian and we we wouldn't like that position that well it got to minus one day it got to minus thirty dollars a barrel that was crazy of course but but if oil sells it at X you know you do very well and the cells at half of X you know your costs are the same and it doesn't change the production and it doesn't work as well but it also brings down the oil production of the United States very fast so we don't know what oil prices will be but we do very much like.
the oxidant position they have and that's why we financed them a few years ago and it looked like it was a terrible mistake when the oil market just totally collapsed and and then it changed around and we bought a lot of the common stock in the last few months they've reduced our preferred which wouldn't we don't like obviously we'd be disappointed in them if they didn't reduce it since I was from their standpoint so we've taken of the ten billion dollar preferred we've gotten maybe four or five hundred million dollars of it retired at a hundred and numbers on a par but thinking of them is a she's an extraordinary manager of Occidental her first job was with a city service that was the first stock I bought in 1942 she knows what happens beneath the surface I know the I know the math of it but I wouldn't know I wouldn't have a finished idea what to do if I was in an oil field I mean I don't I can dig two to feed down I can't in my backyard and I can that's my that's my understanding of subsoil in the world I can't picture the field that Charlie has been collecting that monthly check from from 50 plus years 60 60 years roughly or my sister getting at various fields where they just keep pumping and pumping and pumping in and we in the United States are lucky to have the ability to produce the kind of oil we've got from Shell but it is not a long-term source like you might think by by watching movies about oil or something of the sort Trump's damn it again
Yeah, it really dies fast, those Shell wells. If you like quick death of the URL, well, so we have them for you know. But Occidental, they're doing a lot of good things. Yeah, they do a lot of new wells in the yeah, they're doing it on a profit but it's a different kind of oil, it's just different. Yeah, yeah, and that's true of almost half the oil produced in the United States. And those times of oil down there that nobody knows how to produce, and they've been working out it for like 50 years. But they worked at the at the existing Shell production for about 50 years before they figured it out, and it was weirdly complicated when they found they were able to do it. There's only one type of sand that works. Can you imagine a horizontal pipe, you know that maybe a mile and a half or something? I mean, it's just so different than what you think about. It goes right literally for three miles two miles down. How the hell do you drill two or three miles laterally when you're already two or three miles under the earth? They've mastered a lot of very tricky technology. Do we only get any oil out of these wells at all? And we love the position with Oxidone on, yeah, we love having Becky run it, and they've been and there's a lot more oil down there if anybody can figure out another magic trick. That's all we need is another magic trick. But Oxidone will have some other things too. Yes, yes, but it's the price of oil still is incredibly important in terms of the economics of short-lived oil. I mean no question about that and all of it's.
We, incidentally, know there's speculation about us buying control. We're not gonna buy control. We don't want to. We've got the right management, money. We can we wouldn't know what to do with it. Charlie wouldn't mind know what to do, oil building your buying coal would be like going out and seeking to what acquire a cancer or something. You can't even borrow to expand a coal mine now. It's really, they get got very unfashionable. Yeah, and we think frankly some of the things that are ridiculous and on, both sides on both in both extremes, I mean just, I mean you're dealing with physics, you're dealing with, you know, it's the politicization of positions on something that's enormously important in terms of energy is just it's just lends itself to demagogues and and fundraisers and advisory organizations and everybody inside. But we will make rational decisions and we do not think it's un-American to be brewed producing oil, and there is no oil basin in the United States that compares to the Permian in terms of promise.
Yeah, we were lucky. We didn't know it was there until yes not that many years ago. It's sort of been used up, and they always knew the share oil was there, but they thought it was going to stay uncoverable forever. The second or third stock I bought this Texas Pacific land trust, and they owned all three million acres down there and PN they were they were grazing revenues of 10,000 years something like that. They were sitting on this incredible amount of oil, and basically that company is now actually part of Chevron, and it went through Texaco and did all kinds of things, and there's still there's still a Texas Pacific land trust, but a lot of that property is it's fee-owned by by their minerals are owned by by Chevron, which is somewhat vanished, but it's an interesting subject. I'll put it that way. And we will not be making any offer for control of a lot of Sonana, but we love the shares we have, and we may or may not own more in the future, but but we certainly have warrants on which we got as part of the original deal on a very substantial amount of stock around fifty nine dollars a share and move once last a long time. And I'm glad we have them.
Okay, station seven. My name is Max Jo and from Toronto, Canada. I have a question for Charlie regarding a statement you made in the past. You once mentioned that you would prefer to hire someone with an IQ of 130 who believes is 120 over someone with an IQ of 150 who thinks is 170. And understand that you are referring to Elon Musk given the recent success of his ventures such as Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink. I'm curious to know if you still hold a view that Elon Musk overestimates himself. Thank you so much.
Well, yes, I think Elon Musk overestimates himself, but he has he is very talented. So he's overestimating somebody who doesn't need to overestimate to be very talented. There's a Bill Maher program about a week old, maybe two weeks old, but he interviewed Elon, and Elon does a terrific job told us all with Bill Maher, who it's worth watching. And Elon is, he's a brilliant, brilliant guy. And I would say that, you know, he might score over 170, but he, you know, it's he dreams about things, and they his dreams have got a foundation.
You would not have achieved what he has in life if he hadn't tried for unreasonably extreme objectives. He likes taking on the impossible job and doing it. We're different. I and Warren are looking for the easy job. that we can identify yeah if we can do it playing TikTok though we'll do it you know I mean we have a totally different way of going the whole way but we don't want to compete with the Elon and a lot of things I mean it you know and we don't want that much failure yeah yeah and and it takes over your life and I mean in a way that it just doesn't fit us but but you know they're gonna be well there have been important things done by Elon already and it requires fanaticism isn't the word yeah it is the word well isn't quite the word but yeah but it's a dedication to solving the impossible and and every now and then they'll do it and but it would be torturous to Mayor Charlie and I like the way I'm living and I wouldn't enjoy being in his but he wouldn't enjoy being in my shoes either so what's what's the Belmara interview okay
Becky this question comes from Foster Taylor at the 2010 Berkshire annual meeting you said the one question that you would ask of the Berkshire CEO would be about the distribution of cash to shareholders as the Berkshire cash pile grows larger and larger so let me ask that question do you still feel confident of the future prospects for our over a hundred billion dollars and cash on hand or are we getting closer to cash distributions well
I prefer you know the one thing at Berkshire shares are selling for less than we think they're worth that's a pretty that could be a pretty big way to distribute cash to the but we'd rather what we really like to do is buy great businesses if we could buy a company for 50 billion or 75 billion a hundred billion we could do it and we can do it in our words good it's difficult with a public company because in effect if you've been on a company you make the bid and their shareholders vote months later and you're giving an option if we're good for it and the other guy has a way to top you or all kinds of things they can get out of it you get paid 2% for that or 1% for that that that is not an appropriate price on the other hand Delaware will decide whether whether they should do it or not and that's that's the way the world is I mean that's that's the law so be easier to do with a private company and and there aren't very many that are big on the other hand there aren't very there's nobody else that can quite make a deal like we can under certain under the right circumstances and there could be a situation where a bunch of very a number of very decent companies I've got a very uncomfortable borrowing structure and money comes to do do to them at the exact wrong time and that's when they pick up a phone who's dead Tiffany and Harley Davidson and you name it I mean a whole bunch of companies in 2008 that's sort of thing will happen again whether whether results in us getting the calls or what the world is exactly at that time but the one thing we know is that that the number of phone calls that you can make at a time like that is very very limited and and there can be good companies they don't want to sell the company necessarily but they may want they just may need five or ten or twenty billion dollars depending on what company you're talking about and that can happen in our own shareholders can be selling the stock to shape and we'll never do anything to make them sell a shape and we'll tell them the truth about what the business is but if market circumstances result in us being able to buy in fifty billion of our own stock will buy it so we'll see what we'll see what the world holds but I don't I don't we don't have the opportunity we used to have but we've got we've got enough and and we're making money with what the things we have
It isn't killing us to hold 130 billion of of bills at 5% plus bond equivalent yields. Everybody says, "Well, you know you'll are going to get out of the future." I don't have a famous idea of yield through the future, and you know the prime rate was 21 and a half percent in 1981 or two, and people were worried that it was going to go totally out of spin-off control, and Boker kept it from happening. But if Boker hadn't been in there, who they all knows what would happen. So we're running Berkshire so that we'll do okay and maybe we'll do a little bit better than okay, Charlie, okay? Maybe fine, okay, station eight.
Hello, Mr. Buffett and Mr. Monger, my name is Carlos Anchez, and I'm for honor to be here from Wala Haram Mexico. Mr. Monger, as a fellow lawyer, I have a question regarding corporate law. Considering your experience and success, if you were to offer guidance to someone like Ralph Torrella when he was at the beginning of his career and before becoming Berkshire Hathaway Company's lawyer, what key principles or lessons would you suggest to help him excel in his professor?
Well, I'm not sure I quite caught all of that, but yeah, what? I don't think I have a lot of advice about how to succeed as a lawyer. I have a son-in-law who describes modern law practice on the big firm. He says it's like a pye eating contest where you win, you get to eat more pie, and I advise you to avoid that kind of a law firm. Life is too short to just do nothing but eat pie.
Yeah, yeah. Charlie has not practiced law since what, 1964, maybe, or whatever it was, but 1962, and Charlie has given me four or five pieces of advice. They don't really come from his legal background, but because he knows the system so well and really did do quite well at Harvard Law School despite his taunting of teachers and a few things, he has given me four or five solutions on things that nobody else in the world would have given me, law firm or otherwise, and it's been us within a set within us almost a nanosecond. I want to describe the problem to him, and he just gave me the answer that nobody else would have come up with, and I told you one of them last year, so I won't repeat it at this meeting, but it's we've got the best lawyer in the world, and Charlie, if it's something that really matters, and there have been times when I've taken advantage of that, and I...Charlie didn't want to be a lawyer, he didn't want to sell his time, maybe a 20 bucks an hour or something, the people he thought were making the wrong decisions, and he knew more about it, and that just did not strike him as a good way to go to life, and I think he's probably right on that. I think he'd he'd have really gotten to be miserable if he had to keep doing that. It's just no fun be like me giving investment advice to somebody that or taking it from somebody I had to, it just I just wouldn't want to do it right, and Charlie figured that out, and so we decided to work for ourselves, and this worked been happy happily ever after. We have no complaints, yeah, none.
Okay, we're at Becky. This question comes from Ryan Harding. It's about the new 15% corporate minimum tax rate. As he sees it, its implementation is currently understood. He thinks that as he understands it to apply over rolling three year periods and to be based on reported earnings. First, is the inclusion of unrealized gains and losses and reported earnings under the current financial reporting standards contribute to the calculation for corporate minimum tax rate purposes, and could it potentially convert some of those notional deferred taxes into cash taxes even if a rise in the market price of a major holding is only temporary? But rather extreme, and then second, could it reduce the effect of some of the renewable energy tax incentives and others?
Yeah, I think the answer on the second part probably is no, but I don't want to say it is for sure because he's asking the same questions I asked a Mark Hamburg, who's the smartest guy on combining understanding of business, understanding of the tax code, understanding SEC rules, and everything else that you'll find in corporate America. And these questions that the particular question is unmarvable securities, I don't think it's been answered yet. And I think that there are a number of things about the new tax act that were not enacted, but I would say this. We have said ourselves what we think the proper approach to operating income, we didn't design that because this tax law came along with some years back, so we would think that you wouldn't include capital gains unrealize capital gains in, but we've got enough I think no matter how things turn out, you know, the 15% tax doesn't bother me in the least, and we can figure ways once we know the rules where we will pay the 15% tax, and you know, we were paying 52% taxes federal income taxes one I bought control in the partnership up Berkshire Hathaway.
I mean, the tax rate come down dramatically, and the deferred tax that was embodied, for example, a sandborne. map when I was involved in a system that was allowed under the tax law to avoid that tax but that was a huge tax 52% so we we will we will live with this tax code and we do not think corporations are overtaxed in the United States and you know and I think that the conversation about how we lose out to the world and all that sort of thing is really nonsense but we've got we've got a new law that hasn't yet the regulations haven't been written on and when when we know what the game is we will absolutely figure out a way to paying 15% every year and which generally we've been paying anyway and as I pointed out if there were a thousand corporations in the United States to pay what Berkshire has been paying nobody else in the United States no individual no corporation whatever pay any income tax social security tax gift tax the state tax anything else a thousand like Berkshire Hathaway would produce the revenue that's being produced by the federal government that's being derived into the present tax code from everybody in the United States and I don't feel badly about that and I love to get out of the waters one five hundred or something in the sort done what I'd like to do it you can do it at this rate I'm happy to do it.
I think we are privileged to live in the United States but we also have to control spending and that's something that Congress doesn't quite quite like to give them like to do and they didn't like to do it my dad wanted Congress but but they've dug in more years have gone by Charlie well we would cover this subject earlier yeah okay station nine am I right on this yeah my name is Avlon Gross and I am from Los Angeles California I am a shareholder and it's my fourth year coming to the Woodstock of capitalism okay we're glad you came thank you so much for everything worn and both worn buffet and Charlie Munger what is the funniest story that you have never told about each other and also what is the hardest part of your business I'll answer the second part of your question is that we don't have a hard business we love our business every morning when I get up I feel good I don't know what's gonna happen that day maybe nothing will happen but maybe something will happen and if nothing else I'll roll some tea bills or something but it it I work I work with the greatest group of people you can imagine I mean we we we like each other and nobody is after anybody else's job or anything of the sort it's ideal working conditions and it's five minutes from my home or thereabouts so I'm spent my life commuting I just can't imagine having it I mean anything better and and Charlie's got a lot of funny stories you haven't heard but we'll say what you want me comes up with well I they worn I are naturally so ridiculous that we don't need very many funny stories I be each do things that are peculiar enough so we can keep one other amused tell them what you told the lawyer when we were buying a Hosehle cone I don't remember you tell them well you remember it was in 1966 and we were down in Baltimore buying a ball department store and we needed a lawyer and we needed a lawyer who was nearby and would do exactly as told and Charlie came up with a very good lawyer from one of the cutlers I believe and I don't know whether Charlie remembers the instructions he gave the lawyer or not no I don't well Charlie told the lawyer who we never met before and he said well he just he says treat worn like I was 36 at the time or 35 he said treat treat worn like any other 90-year-old client this guy knew exactly what he meant and we made the deal on a hurry and then we we went to the bank first national bank I believe it was a Merrill national bank actually and it was following Cammy Slack there wasn't it Charlie and we we wanted to borrow six million bucks against a twelve million dollar purchase and Cammy looked at us and would be world or meant he says you want to borrow six million dollars and that's a little little Hosehle cone and Charlie and I said something to the effect well the Merrill national was our first column if they didn't want to do it we had another bank we go anyway they love the money but but when he said a little Hosehle cone we immediately started thinking maybe this isn't the bus deal we've ever seen in our lives and from that point on we were trying to figure out how to sell it so we've had but we we had as much fun standing out as one was involved with us then too and we had as much fun out of deals that didn't work in a certain sense as the ones that did work I mean it's it you know if you knew you were going to play golf and you're going to hit a hole in one on every hole you just hit the ball and then went in the holes 300 yards away or 400 yards away you would nobody play golf I mean part of the fun of the game is the fact that you hit them in the woods and sometimes you had them get them out and sometimes you don't know so we are in the perfect sort of game and we both enjoy it and we we have a lot of fun together and we we don't have to do anything we don't really believe in doing how we we we are not dictated to by by any group and so we get to follow our own we like to get the foreground destiny and and and since towards the only principle by which we can run the company and that's a huge luxury in life and and we don't want to be president of any other company in the world or CEO or anything else where we have to conform to certain things that we don't want to conform to.
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That'll refer to description, yeah it is yeah okay back he this question comes from David Cass who is a professor at the Business School at University of Maryland he says at last year's annual meeting Warren mentioned that Berkshire had taken a large stake in Activision Blizzard as a merger arbitrage play since the UK regulator has blocked its acquisition by Microsoft his Berkshire reduced or sold its stake.
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Well I think in terms of what we do with stocks we don't get information except one required to which is in the 13 out for whatever we file and and there's some there's certain things you can actually figure out by looking at our 10 or yeah 10 Q which we followed this morning which you have to look pretty hard but I would say this it's I think Microsoft has been remarkably what's the word? willing to cooperate with governing bodies and I mean they want to do the deal and they met the the opposition it seems to me more than halfway but that doesn't mean that it gets done if if a given country in this case the UK wants to block it there they're in a better position to block it than the United States but just the way the world works and that doesn't get solved by offering more money or so it it I don't know how it how it turns out but if it doesn't go through I don't think it's through any any shortcoming by either Microsoft or Activision.
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But not everything that should happen does happen and well we weren't we ran into it when we when we bought would make the deal with dominion energy 18 months ago and that they let us buy a good bit of what we wanted to buy and and then the other government in the fact said you can't buy something else which I think we would have done a better job with them anybody else did and which the states involved they're not object to it which the customers didn't object to it but you don't you don't take on the United States government you know and then you try and figure out things that that you won't have a problem with and I think in that case the NOS government made a mistake I think the British government's making a mistake in this case but but that's that's life in the big city of Australia I would say and what we do will depend on a lot of things.
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Charlie well I think what we do yeah we we you kiss that one off beautifully okay station 10 hi Warren hi Charlie my name is Anderson Fuller and I'm from Avonport Nova Scotia in Canada and before I ask my question I just want to thank you for all you've done to give us insight into your minds as investors so for me the most compelling takeaway from Berkshire is your guys's emphasis on and successful use of properly aligned incentives in my view owning and leading a business has two central benefits first you directly benefit as the company goes through your equity in it and second you have autonomy incentives for employees are a bit easier to understand such as offering benefits fair pay and creating a strong culture but I've always struggled to understand them at the highest level even though you say Berkshire gives its managers significant flexibility it must be less than what they have when they were independent.
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Additionally you would think passion and a willingness to sell would be inversely correlated so how exactly does Berkshire Bridges gap and incentivize owners of its subsidiaries to give up these benefits to Berkshire thank you well what we really hope to find is managers who love their business but don't like a lot of what comes with it as a public company I mean if they have to spend a lot of time listening to people tell them what to do about this or that and they can't afford to irritate them or they have to go along with their trade association because you know whatever they may call it because you don't want to look like a free rider and there's all kinds of things compromises that people have to make in most jobs and Charlie and I solved that problem.
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I had five bosses in my life and I liked all five of them and two of them were just huge factors in making my life better but I like all five of them a couple of them are you know some people there are Gacy Penny Cooper Smith you know works with 75 cents an hour I love I love working at pennies
我一生中有五个老板,我喜欢他们五个,其中两个是让我的生活变得更好的重要因素,但我喜欢他们五个。其中几个人,例如Gacy Penny Cooper Smith,挣每小时75美分,我非常喜欢在这些地方工作。
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well I didn't love working at pennies but I love working for Cooper Smith and you know with 75 cents an hour but I had to do what they told me to do which was to sell men's shirts first and men's clothing and children's clothing and so on and I love working for the newspaper and I had a great manager when I was immersed in Nebraska got to work for Ben Graham I made everything worked out
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but but there's nothing like working for yourself and if you can't own a big company working at Berkshire Hathaway for running a company is the closest thing you will get you don't have to spend time courting animals who you probably have contempt for in many cases you don't have to spend time with banks you know getting money and particularly in terrible times yeah there's all kinds of you get a. lot in the way of freedom that I would think would be meaningful to me and it might be better if you own the whole place yourself but maybe you've got siblings the one I hope maybe I'm just a million reasons why you may not be able to achieve that
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unless you're so to Berkshire and that's easier probably if you have a family business where people want to go in different directions than it is with a public company but there's still possibilities there so that's that's why that's why I I think if I owned a public company and it was what's many great many billions of dollars and Berkshire Hathaway wanted to buy it and shareholders were willing to vote it I would you know consider it the way I would feel about life but one thing I wouldn't want to retire 65 I want to keep working
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and you know we we just we there's there are reasons to solve the Berkshire which Charlie and I in certain positions if we were on the other side would take the deal and but it isn't for everybody Charlie I think we have a pretty good one we've been very lucky in and I don't know it seems to be that most of the people who are going to end up the way we did they almost already know how to do it
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well the most important purchase and retrospect that we may have made was national and dominate not because specifically what did they go what it led to and Jack Ringwall controlled the company and I knew him and liked him and he knew me and once a year he'd get irritated when the Nebraska Department of Insurance or something would come come around and he said they always came around when the Charbonne racetrack was open you know so they could I mean he had all these theories about why was a pain in the neck to be regulated and I and I told Charlie Heider next time Jack is in that mood where he's ready to sell just because he's tired of pulling around with all these guys
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be sure and find him and so Charlie called me one day and he says Jack is in the heat and I said bring him over and we made a deal but that's why Jack sold and he was happy after he made the deal and I was happy after we made the deal so there's a man that controlled the business but just decided these people didn't seem to bother him as much once they were my problem and not his and you just can't tell when lightning will strike and and that didn't do magnificent things for us initially but just look at what it led to you know and then so you never you know if you knew if you knew how you were going to again if you know how you're going to shoot all 18 holes it wouldn't be any fun playing you wouldn't get on the first tea
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I mean it's it's it's the it's the uncertainty the fun of playing the game the appalled with all kinds of things that make a game interesting and and I think Charlie are higher in the most interesting game in the world okay Becky here's a question from Simon Withers in Perth in Western Australia it's been a long time since we've heard about C's candy and netchets could you please give us an update on C's performance and when you project it will run out of places to open stores in the United States and could you also give us an overview of how netchets has performed since its acquisition and whether it's achieved the potential you saw at the time of that acquisition
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Well with C's it hasn't been a question of opening stores we found out that we we've tried about we've had this wonderful brand that doesn't travel you know and the mystique the actual product the feelings people have about some things as we said before I mean it sometimes is it's limited to give them Marcus doctor pepper cells at a huge rate in Dallas for it worth and maybe I maybe ten times the percentage per cap of the maybe that it has in Detroit or Boston and you say well how can that be with the product been around for century and people travel and you have national advertising and I'm not sure but I keep learning more as I watch different brands and Charlie and I are economics were so good and California that week tried to in many cases the same experiment over and over again it doesn't cost much to experiment we've tried everything in the world to cause a band brand to travel and we always think we were right for the first week and then we find out that that the magic we can we can beat any other candy store pretty much but there aren't any candy stores I think more to speak of it the world has changed
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so seize is a 101 years now it has magic and it has limited magic in sort of the adjacent west you can almost as gravitational almost and and then you get to the east and incidentally in the east people prefer dark chocolate to to melt chocolate in the west people prefer milk chocolate to dark the easting some ministers and dark the west I mean there's all kinds of crazy things in the world that consumers do but you want to keep observing it because you do learn a little and with Charlie and I'm sorry the the temptation to keep trying things because the economics were so good if we succeeded so we tried various things and of course every manager wants to try as it comes along because they have one you know it should work but it doesn't work so but that's that's what makes it very interesting and yet just we we have really learned how to distinguish and justifiably distinguish a service to people
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so that if you can you have to be very well to do to use it but if you're very well to do you're in effect you're spending your airs money that minutes what I told my analyst after she went from teaching to be worth millions and millions of dollars and she came to see me she never been married and she she said can I afford to buy this for a coat in 1968 or nine and I said Alice you weren't buying it your nieces and nephews are buying it because that's who you're leaving your money to and speaking on behalf of your nieces and nephews I've said we want you to buy it and it's the same way you know do your errors want you to fly around in that gesture do you want to leave a little more money to your foundation or your kids and and what to solve that when this law for your kids a few hours themselves and their attitude can change so it's it's in a class by itself
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it's it's done what Ferrari has done in a different sort of way in cars Ferrari sells eleven thousand cars here I mean maybe twelve thousand and you know there's no one throughout the world and we'll have a Chevy dealership in Austin or something we'll sell as many cars but we're not Ferrari had net jets has six hundred and well counting Europe I mean it's maybe six hundred fifty but we're gonna buy a hundred planes this year and we won't sell any because we got a backlog and we took we took a net jet flight over to Tokyo and we arrived in good shape and we spent a couple days there and we flew back and there's just nothing to it now you can say well you're getting sort of decadent all out in your old age but the money won't go to philanthropy and the money will probably be under billion or more and and I forget the philanthropy is wanting me to spend a few bucks on myself and it all it has to do is be better than the last dollars that are spent by various philanthropy
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which have plenty of problems finding things to do that make lots of sense so net jets there isn't any competitor I mean we looked at the other day wheels up stock came out of ten dollars a couple years ago it was selling at 48 cents the other day and they got twelve thousand six hundred people they've given a billion dollars little over a billion dollars unprepaid pre paid cards where they they've given them money and they get a certain number of hours later on and they don't I think there's a good chance that some people are going to be very disappointed later on when they have money to do net jets they they know they'll get they'll get on the same planes with the same pilots as I and my family have blown on since before we bought the company so it's not it's not shaped by wasn't the decision was shaped by some commercial objective
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a couple years before I never heard of net jets and Frank Rune mentioned it to me and I've bought share media lane and then we bought the company and and every well my kids have to fight commercial sometimes because they sometimes they get to use hours too but I've never flown anything else and why would I I mean it's it's the goal center and nobody will match our fleet I mean if you got you got six hundred planes you've got them a lot more places in the United States than anybody else will have theirs I think with the second largest fleet coming to commercial airliners and and our fleet's growing like I say the rate of 100 planes a year or something it's it's it's a marvelous company and Adam Johnson has performed it you just can't believe what he's done with the business and it was a tough model for a long time but he's brought it where it is and we've got we should have a wonderful company for forever
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Charlie well net jets has been remarkable you can argue that it's worth as much as any airline now oh it's it's so different and Charlie we had a hard time selling Charlie and that just membership and then we figured the way to get him to buy a membership was to put a coach seat in the fuel slot that really knocked him off I mean I think he's the only one we saw the basis I used to come to the virtue annual meetings on coach from Los Angeles and it was full of rich stockholders and they would clap when I came into the coach section I really liked that but I got to tell you we semi corrupted him he he he he he feels he kind of has to explain it but he still flies at that judge that was up and it'd be crazy not to you know it's it be a rare is our paying for it I mean if you find me anybody who's the state came in at less than zero because what's they spending on that jets threw him into that position let me know but I've I've never seen a case yet won't be the case with the Buffett Valley and and it's the residual bottom beneficiary that's paying for your your membership and it's a little hard to get used to paying that much money though I'm going to live like Charlie I have most of my life
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okay we will go to section 11 hello my name is Humphrey Liu I'm from Charlottesville Virginia first I wanted to ask to wanted to add my thanks to you and Mr. Munger and Mr. Buffett and all of Berkshire for throwing this grand event each year looking at the global trends it increasingly does seem that zero mission vehicles may have finally reached the cusp of mass adoption do you see any opportunities in this space either in specific vehicle manufacturers or in related technologies
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well I would say that that Charlie and I were long afel with the auto industry it's just too tough you know the Ford Motor Company I mean Henry Ford looked like he owned the world with the Model T and then and he brought down the price dramatically he took away just dramatically he was he might have been with a different personality or some different views he might have been elected president of the United States I mean there's there's a good book that came out on that recently that told about the story of what tells a little about Nebraska in terms of what Henry Ford and and Thomas Edison joining up but but maybe a year or two was it if you're interested in auto industry ought to read that book but Henry Ford did that and you know and 20 years later that they were losing money and that a guy with a gun in his pocket I think Harry Bennett you know that was was running the Ford Motor Company it was honest way to the junk heap when the whisks came in and and Henry Ford the second Hank the deuces I call him brought in Texort and my friend or jay might learn a few people but it's just it's I read it reading the other day actually the 1932 annual report of General Motors and it's one of the best annual reports of a relative totally honest you know assessment of exactly where they were they had 19,000 dealers them and the population as I mentioned earlier was about 120 million or so and now with 330 million people all brands in the United States have like 18 thousand dealers or something it's just a business where you've got a lot of worldwide competitors they're not going to go away and they're look like it looks like there are winners at any given time but it doesn't get you a permanent place although as I mentioned I would say Ferrari is in a special place but I only sell up in there 12,000 cars a year and US last year I think there were 14 million something and it's not a business where we find a fast name to be in we like our dealership operation but I don't think I can tell you what the auto industry will look at look like fiber ten years now
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I do think that you're right that we're at peak earnings in the newspaper business and I think that I always like big figures and things and it's amazing to me how big declines can have in the newspaper business I mean I don't think there's ever been anything quite like it and I did not anticipate anything like it. And I thought I understood the economics pretty well as recently as five or six years ago. But I don't see any good answer to the problem. And I don't think it's a temporary problem. I think where the newspaper business is the Internet came along everybody's there everybody's able to communicate with everybody else and the amount of print and advertising is going down and it's going down in a big way and I think it's going to continue. And uh it's a very sad thing because it does diminish informed citizenry to some extent.
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Well it's gonna be very hard for people that don't have something else really going for them in terms of their own interest of their readers people who have established terrific franchises we know the Wall Street Journal has done it The New York Times continues to do it but these are very exceptional people with exceptional franchises. You can't count on that as a given and I don't see any easy answers for the newspaper business. And I'm telling you that as somebody that has loved newspapers since they were children it's just very sad for me.
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Charlie and Warren I am an avid follower of Berkshire Hathaway and Buffett's investment philosophies. My question is in regards to the current turnaround of the auto industry in America how do you see this sector evolving in the future and what companies will be left standing? Well I don't think anybody at this table ever expects to see a new General Motors again and I think that the winner will be the people that come out of a post bankruptcy situation with the lowest cost structures that will allow them to make money at the type of market we have now. I don't think anybody will have as much as 20% of the market we have now. We had a total of what four down to three of what was once the big three. I think there was one year we had something like 95 point something percent of the car sales in the United States. The big three had lost market share for change but that market was not chopped up into it was not chopped up into maybe ten significant pieces. I mean you had you had other companies but the big three really ruled the roost and that's not gonna happen again. But I do think that they'll be money to be made in the auto business overall but not for everyone and not to the extent there was once.
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I do think that you're right that that you know there's a you will see a change in the vehicles but you won't see anybody that owns the market because they change the vehicle Charlie well the electric vehicles coming big time and that's a very interesting development at the moment it's imposing huge capital costs and huge risks and I don't like huge capital costs and huge risks and we're subsidizing in the United States and we're actually doing it try putting it up pro labor time I mean it is subject to politics like you can't believe to but but it's it's gonna be with us we're not gonna quit what driving cars and Merck and Public has a love affair with them and but I think I know where Apple's gonna be in five or ten years and I don't know what the car companies are gonna be in five or ten years and I may be wrong but that's uh we trying to have a part of the auto business with with intense interest Charlie's firm was the specialist and general motor on the Pacifico stock exchange and that was that was a franchise wouldn't it Charlie yeah we get by working very hard we can make a minor or a minor money yeah yeah wasn't minor at the time no come back but it wasn't minor at the time even you know.
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我是Berkshire Hathaway和巴菲特投资哲学的狂热追随者。我的问题是关于美国汽车业的当前转型,您认为这个行业未来会怎样发展?哪些公司会留下来?
我认为在破产后走出来的人拥有最低成本结构,让他们能够在现在的市场上赚钱的人将成为赢家,这个桌子上没有人期望看到一个新的通用汽车。我认为没有人会占有现在20%以上的市场份额。曾经的“三巨头”现在只剩下了三个公司,市场份额已经变化,但该市场并没有分割成10个显着的部分。我的意思是,你有其他的公司,但三个巨头确实还占据着主导地位,并不会再发生这样的情况了。但我认为汽车行业总体上仍然可以赚钱,但并非所有人都能赚钱,也不会像曾经那样赚钱。
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我认为你是对的,你可以看到车辆的变化,但你不会看到任何人拥有市场,因为他们改变了车辆。查理:电动汽车正在快速崛起,这是一个非常有趣的发展,目前面临着巨大的资本成本和风险,我不喜欢巨大的资本成本和风险,美国正在为此提供补贴,我们试图增加工时,这还是受政治影响的,但这将与我们同在,我们不会放弃驾驶汽车,梅克和普布利克(Merck and Public)热爱汽车,但我认为我知道苹果公司在五到十年内会去哪里,但我不知道汽车公司五到十年后会是什么样子,我可能错了,但我们非常关注汽车行业。查理的公司是太平洋证券交易所的通用汽车专家,这是一项特许经营,通过非常努力的工作,我们可以赚一点钱,不过当时并不是小数目。
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This question comes from Lindsay Peter Schumacher in Cedar Rapids Iowa does the current size of the Federal Reserve balance sheet concern you in particular the result of quantitative easing the Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet out of nothing the net effect in essence is a form of single entry accounting creating something a value out of nothing other than a series of book entries entries and wondering what Mr. Munger thinks about this as well well I don't think the Federal Reserve is the problem and I think they can't solve the fiscal problem and I don't I do not worry about the Federal Reserve and uh I think it's fulfilling the functions for which it was established I probably would not have been if they only they have two objectives and I would not have been one probably it would have changed the inflation objective to 2% a year from from zero.
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I think that you know Modern Monetary Theory says it doesn't matter how much debt you build up because you can print the money and interest rates will stay low and I think that that is true in the short run in the sense that if we wanted to we could pay off the entire debt gradually or pay off part of it by issuing long-term bonds and printing money and refinancing if you want to but if you did it in a big way it would be noticed and other people around the world say well if the United States can do it why don't we do it?
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And so everybody would be issuing in a big way. I mean we've got a virus now and in a sense, it's the modern version of a war – it’s equally destructive, it's disrupted people’s lives, it's taking people's lives and all of that but we've shut down the whole economy by order and nobody even ever thought of doing that in World War II for example so what has happened is you're seeing the kind of deficit spending that you would expect in a major war but nobody's looking at the revenue side at all.
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They're assuming they can just load up on debt and it doesn't make any difference because the interest rate will be negligible and since the debt can always be paid off with cheaper dollars in the future that it's the right thing to do in fact if we could issue enough long-term bonds at very low interest rates we could engage in a war against poverty or a war against anything that way and gradually monetize the debt over time and nobody would even notice it particularly in a period like this where people are afraid things are going to spin out of control.
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And I'm sympathetic to that view I'm just saying they may have a tougher time than they think I mean it's worked for a long time but still it has potential consequences. I don't know which way it'll go but in my life I have never seen such a dramatic change in in what people expect from monetary policy as what has happened in the last year or so.
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It's just become accepted that the deficits don't matter and that we can print money but it’s a new world nobody knows exactly what happens. You can't keep doing it forever but if you're the reserve currency of the world everybody’s watching it and nobody knows exactly when it all hits and it'll hit sooner or later.
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I think that you know I think that if you tell you people that you're shooting to depreciate your currency at 2% a year that has a lot of implications although it feels good to a lot of people want a little inflation but nobody wants a lot of inflation except somebody's got a lot of debts and I do not worry about the Federal Reserve balance sheet I enjoy looking at it and the numbers are big I always like big numbers but but it is not it's interesting the most one one one of the most interesting figures to me is currency and circulation I mean it is gone they were saying cash is trash back in 2008 seven and eight and all of that cash is going to disappear well if you look at the Federal Reserve balance sheet it's gone from 800 billion to 2.2 trillion and most of that's in $100 bills overwhelmingly and if you figure it out I think there's about $1,100 bills per person babies everybody in the United States and I would really like to know where all of that is.
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I mean it nobody's hoarding euro dollars you know in South America or Africa or wherever and the demand for currency you know it's somewhat maybe use it be subtle drug dealers activities and all of that but anybody thinks cash is trash all they look at the look at the Federal Reserve balance sheet and actually you can look at how many five dollar bills and two dollar bills and ones and all that and the the action has been in one in one hundred dollar bills I mean it is it is just astounding the way that one hundred dollar bills have spread and of course we don't know where I don't know where they are I don't think the Fed can know exactly but they probably make a lot better guess than I could but I do know what's happened and you can watch it every week and you'll watch current sense or relation probably grow a little bit and believe me cash is not trash Charlie.
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Well I don't know where we're headed with all of this it's been very extreme I think that you could be pretty extreme in fighting depressions and so forth if you were murdered afterwards to a period of some discipline but if you just some discipline but if you're going to just keep borrowing the printing money and spending it I think eventually it causes bad trouble and you can see it Latin America Latin America let us currency get out of control all the time and of course it lagged the United States and economic achievement greatly so I think we pay a price if we if we ever give up our old ways entirely and go into a new world where we just try and print money just make it easier to get to get through the year we pay the price in World War II.
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I mean everybody school kids and everybody else myself included I mean we bought or originally called war bonds and defense bonds and savings bonds and all that but from 1940 to the 1944-05 you paid out of 1875 you got $25 back and every kid saved savings. and stamps and all that but when you got all through you know you had 120% of GDP in the national debt instead of 30 or 40% and we had a lot of inflation subsequently a lot so the people that really that bought those bonds and supported the war had a portion of their purchasing power taken away from them was it wasn't any wrong with that particularly but when the country gets in the habit of doing that I don't think it's I think it's tough to figure out where the breaking point is with society but I don't think I want to come anywhere close to it it's also tough to have a mass of people unemployed that's the tension yeah.
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Well that's that's why the bad has two objectives in terms of employment and inflation and but they're not the ones that that create the deficits and so far the system it worked pretty well although like I say it's been so far the man who jumped off a tall building yeah it's all right until he hits the ground yeah well but but you there could be ways we can stop now it's a third floor or the sixth floor we don't know what four is but we know what is having at the ground but the question. you know politically it's very very very tempting to to vote appropriations and it's not fun to vote taxes and Russell Long had the Senate Finance Committee they got a building very matter from now he said you know don't tax you don't tax me tax like I'm behind the tree and basically that is the attitude of I mean that it's the reality of what is useful in politics and so far this country's managed to work very well with a lot of things that could theoretically cause a lot of problems but it doesn't mean it doesn't guarantee us the future on it and and being the reserve currency let's just do a lot of things but it also creates
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a lot of consequences if we screw it up Charlie well we're bidding a subject to death but back it is a problem I wish we had a solution okay well that will go to station one to be hello my mr buffett and mr monger my name's Connor I'm an economic student the university in Nottingham my question for you today is during the pandemic we witness to supply change shortages especially for major as a result companies have chosen with political attentions to move production away
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shirt companies made these decisions and shirt the government support them Charlie well that's a good question yeah obviously it's logical if you're in business and you can make the thing in Mexico way cheaper it's natural to open a factory in Mexico and in Mexico and get your parts cheaper and a lot of the older manufacturers have done exactly that on the other hand nobody wants to hollow out the whole country so all the manufacturing jobs are elsewhere and we're all living with a bunch of farmers you know like English colonies in 1820 or something and and and these ideas are of course in in big tension uh we have we don't have that much foreign production right Warren
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yeah well but we've lost well originally Berkshire had the way the textile manufacturing lost because the South became feasible versus the North and of course then eventually the South got it's mentioned in China sure and and uh society benefits and some people get killed in that sort of a situation and a rich society should take care one way or another and of people who worked in our shoe factories people who worked in our textile companies I mean if you work in our textile operation in in 1964 when we took it over half our half our workers only spoke Portuguese and uh you know they and they weren't getting great wages at all but now you could do it in the South and we were doomed to go out of business and it wasn't the fall of the worker in any way shape or form it wasn't the hard fall we kept trying to compete
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well it was a tvA had cheap power down there sure and a textile is really congealed power and their conditioning changed everything but the heat in those them pledges were impossible that's a lot of things but then then it moves offshore in many ways and and net the country is better off because of it but it displaces a lot of people really can't do something else and like you can't talk about retraining if somebody does 55 or 16 speaks only Portuguese and really tell them they're going to have a great future a new bed for mass and you know and and so you don't want to be glib about it uh and we can afford to take care of those people and we've got some systems that work reasonably well but but there's a tension between you know what about the person that doesn't do anything and all that kind of stuff so
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these are not easy problems to solve but I would say that by and large we want the whole world to prosper we do not want to be a world we don't want the United States to be a country of extraordinary prosperity and have the rest of the world starving no it's it it isn't going to work and it particularly isn't going to work in a nuclear world so and you have your own feelings about it as a humane person but but it doesn't it it it it is not it can be done better and and we've got the resources to do it
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I mean the the output of this country what can be done with a lot fewer people and doing more specialized things and of course it has been the work week in the United States you know in my lifetime is dropped dramatically and people still feel busy and it will be the human lot to say you know how can I get all these things done but but my mother didn't die for kids any place I mean you want to go in place if you're lucky
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you've got old enough you had a bicycle the world just keeps looking at everything moving up as becoming sort of a base that leads them somewhat dissatisfied and with our prosperity we can do a lot of things we couldn't do in in 1930 and including taking care of people to get get displaced by the fact that somebody else can do that work and improve their lot in life and we got to be sure that we have the best system to take care of the people who who get displaced by that
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but doing that in a public system we have everything we'll make a lot of mistakes along the way but we got to keep moving in that direction and I think the interesting thing about it is that the Adam Smith was right that the the free market capitalism automatically with a lot of property and private hands and free trade and all that automatically creates GDP per capita of the grows and helps everybody including the people at the bottom helps everybody a lot but a inherent in the process is a lot of pain in that free market capitalism for instance to the Portuguese workers in a textile company in New Bedford and nobody's ever figured out how to take all the pain out of it
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we do have government safety nets to take some of the pain out we make those safety nets a little bigger as time goes by but apart from that if you try and take all the pain out you'll also take all the gains out of it you won't have it growing GDP per capita you'll have an economy like Russia which has been characterized as saying they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work yeah the other systems haven't worked better but yeah it also produces more and more disparities in wealth and people that do nothing but get assets under management without actually performing anything extra make fortunes and I mean that it's it's the job of government to keep the best aspects of capitalism while a lot causing people to only speak Portuguese to suffer in the process
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I mean the two aren't compatible politically over time and we stumble along making progress on things like social security and all that and and we are a lot better often we are when I was born. Net the United States has done a very good job of this tension between capitalistic growth and growing social safety net we can be pretty proud of our country looking backward. That may be why we have 25% of the world's GDP starting with a half a percent of the population in a few centuries I mean it's just it's a miracle and it wasn't because we're smarter well you got to say there must be something to the system it's worked pretty well even though it's produced a civil war and all kinds of things you know and women you know not getting a shot at anything you know even after they passed the the 19th Amendment it's it's it's a work in progress
我指的是,随着时间的推移,这两者在政治上并不兼容,我们在社会保障等方面取得了一些进展,我们比我出生时要好得多。总体来说,美国在资本主义增长和社会安全网之间的这种紧张关系上做得很好,我们可以为我们的国家感到自豪。这也许就是为什么我们拥有世界 GDP 的 25%,而我们仅有不到半个百分点的人口,几个世纪来,这真是个奇迹,这不是因为我们更聪明,你得承认这个系统肯定有它的优点,虽然它产生了内战和各种各样的事情,你知道,即使在通过第 19 修正案后,女性仍然无法有机会参与,这仍然是一个不断进步的过程。
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I think actually there's been progress but it's mankind's nature to see the see the things wrong with it if you've of course it's fancniature to take the progress as a right not something to be earned or strive for but something that's so automatically just flowing over the trancell and that attitude is rock is poison it doesn't do anybody any good okay now I ask you say an easy question Becky this question comes from Doug DeShield since the accounting rules changed requiring Berkshire to report the change and fair value of its equity investments through the income statement mr. Buffett has repeatedly told shareholders to ignore those changes as they're not reflective of the long-term returns that those investments will produce recently mr. Buffett has argued that holds a maturity accounting used by the banks to avoid reflecting the changes and fair value of bank investment portfolios and the income statement and the shareholder equity account do a disservice to its various stakeholders
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Commissioner Buffett elaborate on why he views market-market accounting differently for banks in comparison to Berkshire.
布菲特专员阐述了他为什么认为银行和伯克希尔采用市场会计方法的情况不同的原因。
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Oh I believe in in both cases in doing it on the balance sheet and not on the income statement and it's a very tough problem with the auditor's face as is that the obviously the income statement feeds into the balance sheet but the balance sheet tells you whether deposits can be paid it tells you a lot of things and we show it on our balance sheet we believe in showing market values on our balance sheet we just don't believe in running it for the income account and in getting there we would put it another comprehensive income like it was for a long time so I sympathize to some extent with the oh a far accident with the auditor world but they have to really decide whether they want they want the balance sheet to represent values except it doesn't reflect them on the upside if we buy a C's Canyon it's worth way more money so it's conservative in that sense but uh or whether they want to have a an income account that becomes meaningless to people because it really changes every five seconds you know I mean while we're normal markets close today but uh uh you know we have days well I guess Apple was up what you know some right points I'm in on Friday I mean that's seven billion dollars I mean you you uh that's a crazy income account it is a reflection of where we stand at that point and of course if you're a bank where you're putting out money brilliant and things that people sort of mortgages I mean the primarily uh uh they're a terrible instrument for a bank to own but a great instrument for a consumer to buy and build in the whole society now in a way that was entirely different than the past uh you've got to pay attention to whether whether they've gotten out of whack in terms of of what's the value of what they own and what can be demanded out in tomorrow morning and if we had all of our money that could be demanded from us tomorrow morning we'd have to behave a lot differently than than Berkshire does so I don't I don't I really think the way to do it is the way you recommend doing which is exactly what was being done until a few years ago I recommend the shareholders look out of that way but we're going to follow the rules obviously the SCC uh you know state authorities and everybody require of us but we'll still explain to the shareholders exactly what I would explain to my sister about what really counts of Berkshire and I think every management actually has an obligation to that and instead of it they go in the other direction and give them a lot of figures that are total nonsense you know I can't imagine some of the you know that even die I thought was about as bad as you could
get but they kept going you know earnings before everything uh EBE uh so uh uh but that doesn't change but I would tell my sister who's here in the audience I hope uh and uh I should tell you all the shareholders and we'll consistently do what is legal and we'll consistently say what does we think is right.
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Yeah We want owners who understand what they own now that doesn't mean that to understand the detail of it but that's why we have people that have been around 50 or 60 years that doesn't mean that they read the ten kills or anything like that but they they feel worth telling a tool like I don't know the next door to us.
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I'm not sure why people are so mystified by stocks. They sometimes think it's like trying to guess what will happen to a certain number of beans in a jar. They forget that they have a part ownership in a business. They need to look at stocks like they're shares in a company that's going to be around for many years.
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A lot of people talk about the stock market like it's a game, but it's not a game. You're investing in companies that you believe will be around in the future. You don't want to fool around and buy a stock just because it's going up or because it has a high P/E ratio. You want to find companies that have a good product or service and decent management.
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The problem most people have when they invest in the stock market is that they don't have a long-term perspective. They try to guess what's going to happen in the short term, but they don't take the time to really understand the business they're investing in. They should be looking at the company's financial statements and understanding the company's products and competitors.
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I don't know what the accountants were thinking when they made that change. It strikes me as bonkers, yeah absolutely bonkers. I don't see how anybody who understands how businesses really operated and shouldn't be operated by owning managers would have made that accounting change. The accounts did it just because they had a wild moment 20-25 years ago.
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I suggested to the audit production that they just ask the audit committee to ask owners four questions and the shareholders would know a lot more about the company if those questions were asked. But it wasn't good for the owners to be asked those questions because it might increase their liability if they answered them. And the client didn't want them to answer them because the man even didn't want them to know. They want a system where if they follow certain rules, they're safe.
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I don't think the past year this rule requiring changes and marketable securities to go through the annual account quarterly they didn't do that to protect themselves from liability. They just did that for some crazy reason of their own. Get a bunch of people who are all being growing a lot of pay out of a big complicated system arising in it like so many officers in the army. God knows what they'll do if you put them in a little room by themselves and tell them to invent new accounting standards.
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My name is Victoria Rantrop. I am 22 years old and I study in Munich at the CDTM, the center of digital technology and management. As your grandchildren are more in my age group, let me ask you, how do you transfer your wisdom to your grandchildren and heirs? How do you lead them to investing? Do you see value in investing as a family or individually? Thank you.
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I'm going to Charlie do the answering. I think you got more. Well, I have my grandchildren, but I am quite philosophical about my grandchildren not thinking exactly the way I do. It seems to me that's almost the natural course of life and I just live my life my own way, and they can observe it as an example if they want to, and if they don't, they can try some other way.
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I don't like it when they try some other way. I tap to pretend that I like some of the boyfriends and girlfriends. I don't like but I just struggle through like everybody else and usually I just bite my tongue and keep silent. That's my way of handling it. Well, I would say that I think my case my three children have grown a lot smarter than the last 30 years, and I think I've grown smarter.
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And I know but you needed a lot of help, that is for sure. No, I was totally acknowledged that's why I had the room to go, I mean, I had plenty of room for a group but I all had a lot to grow. I went to work here for U.S. steel which was in their fabrication department in Los Angeles with big operation. The thing was utterly doomed and three years later it went back to Greenfield so the whole thing was raised to the ground. I did not see it coming.
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Now I would be that ignorant and that as I was at that age. It was a sin, and my professors went large for even more ignorant than I was if we we just nobody had observed the basic economics of business in a scientific way at all when I was young. Well, if we're getting into confession time, I have to tell you it's 3:30, so we don't want to keep going on.
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Who knows what we'll be saying another half hour, so yeah so I thank you all very much for coming. At 4:30, we will have the shareholders meeting here and the we're continuing to sell those for another 20 or 25 minutes. We've already broken all kinds of records, but let's really make it tough for comparisons next year. And I think again I thank you for coming. Come next year and maybe we'll figure out the answer to the footballer of these questions.