Howard Warren Buffett
Howard Warren Buffett
Howard Warren Buffettis a faculty member at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and was previously the executive director of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, a private philanthropic foundation that funds initiatives aimed at improving the standard of living and quality of life for the world’s most impoverished and marginalized populations. He previously led agriculture-based economic stabilization and redevelopment programs in Iraq and Afghanistan while at the United States Department of Defense, and as a policy advisor...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth14 October 1983
CountryUnited States of America
I love to tell how I'm suffering because one percent we're paying 25 percent of the total. We're not paying 25 percent of the total taxes on individuals. We're paying maybe 25 percent of the income tax, but the payroll tax is over a third of the receipts of the federal government. And they don't take that from me on capital gains. They don't take that from me on dividends. They take from the woman who comes in and takes the wastebaskets out.
You could have these crazy Internet valuations in the late 1990s, but they prove themselves out in the market. The next day they were selling for more than they were the day before, and people said, you know, you're crazy if you don't get in on this. So it's very human.
I don't think it would be crazy to have a model or an entity model on the Reconstruction Finance Corp. That goes back to 1932, although it was really implemented in '33 under Jesse Jones, and it invested in mostly banks initially and preferred stock and that sort of thing.
When the Federal government buys the mortgages, they're not spending it, they're investing it.
I mean, the job is Pearl Harbor. And you better not spends weeks and weeks and weeks trying to assign blame or deciding on a complete plan for fighting the whole war, you know, and letting a committee decide where the battleships should go and all of that. You better spring into action with the best people you have.
You may be very mad at some guy that walked away with a huge golden parachute, but that really isn't the important thing. I mean, if Pearl Harbor came along, you could have said the planning was wrong by the military ahead of time or maybe the battleships shouldn't have all been in the harbor and all that kind of thing.
We have a terrific economy, it's like a great athlete that's had a cardiac arrest.
You want to be greedy when others are fearful.
If you owe money, you can't pay them out. You just pay for everything, you do smart things, you eventually get very rich. If you do smart things and use leverage and do one wrong thing along the way, it could wipe you out, because anything times zero is zero. But it's reinforcing when the people around you are doing it successfully, you're doing it successfully, and it's a lot like Cinderella at the ball. And everybody thinks they're going to leave at two minutes to 12.
Confidence is key. You're not going to leave your money with me unless you're confident I'm going to give it back to you. And at this point, when treasury bills, seven day treasury bills at 1/20th of one percent, it's not because people want to earn 1/20th of one percent, it's because they trust the fact the treasury will give it back to them next week.
I mean the whole economy just comes to a grinding halt. Competence in markets and in institutions, it's a lot like oxygen.Indispensable. You can go years without thinking about it. When it's gone for five minutes, it's the only thing you think about. And the oxygen has been sucked out of the credit markets.
I think it's terrible for people in effect to say that income from investment should be taxed at a much lower rate than income from labor.
You get in a lot of trouble when you start putting fictitious numbers on value. I think to just say, we're going to say a dollar of cash is worth $2 all of a sudden, it isn't worth $2. It's worth a dollar today. And I think once you start putting phony figures into financial statements, you get in a lot of trouble.
People love leverage when it's working. I mean, it's so easy to borrow money from a guy at X and put it out at X.