Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett
Warren Edward Buffett is an American business magnate, investor and philanthropist. He is considered by some to be one of the most successful investors in the world. Buffett is the chairman, CEO and largest shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway, and is consistently ranked among the world's wealthiest people. He was ranked as the world's wealthiest person in 2008 and as the third wealthiest in 2015. In 2012 Time named Buffett one of the world's most influential people...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth30 August 1930
CityOmaha, NE
CountryUnited States of America
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.
As long as you have markets, you'll have excesses. People went crazy with tulip bulbs. They went crazy with the South Sea Bubble, they went crazy internet stocks, they went crazy with the uranium stocks back when I was first getting started. I mean, you know, you're not going to change the human animal. And the human animal really doesn't get a lot smarter.
Capitalism is not a perfect system. It may be better than all the other systems, but it's not a perfect system.
Resolution Trust Company was set up to liquidate a bunch of assets that the government had inherited because the savings and loans went broke. So the savings and loans went broke, the government stepped in, paid off depositors, and now they're left with this mass of assets to sell. We're not talking about selling here, we're talking about buying intelligently. They were selling what they got handed to them by a bunch of savings and loan operators that had in many cases had done some very dumb thing. But their job was to liquidate it. And they liquidated.
Beware of geeks, you know, bearing formulas.
The American worker is more productive than he's ever been. We've got more people to do it. We've got all the ingredients for a sensational future. It's just that right now the athlete's on the floor. This is a super athlete.