저자: WarrenBuffett/CharlieMunger · 외국인
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효율적 시장 가설은 허구라는 비판과, 공매도·롱 양쪽 모두에 비윤리적 관행이 존재하며 회계사 책임도 크다는 논지. 버크셔의 BYD 투자 경험과 학습 필요성을 언급. 자회사 CEO 성과보상은 컨설턴트 없이 경제적 특성에 맞춰 설계하며, 경영진에게 '해자(moat)' 확대를 중시한다고 설명.
다듬은 글
Well, take the extreme example. If there were two banks in town and I own one of them and I was of kind of a devious type of mind, I might go out and hire 50 people to stand in line in front of the other bank and I would probably not have a competitor before long. Uh, so you you can do things on either side, the long side or the short side that I would regard as certainly unethical and in many cases should be illegal.
But uh anytime you attack the conventional wisdom uh you're going to meet with a lot of opposition because you're threatening people's positions. When we would talk about the efficient market theory 30 years ago when it was absolutely der that in virtually every finance department in the in the in the country major schools you either had to swear allegiance to it or you were not going to be promoted.
You know people don't like that. And uh any institution uh when they get a threat from the outside they they will attack both the threat and the threatener. But that exists on both sides. I I have no problem with with shortselling and I have no problem with speaking out uh responsibly about your reasons for doing so any more than I have on the on the long side.
Uh there have been some very bad practices on the short side and there have been some very bad practices on the long side in terms of people trying to to uh will spread things that are untrue, but that there's probably been more on the long side over the years than on the short side by some margin. Charlie,
yeah, I think to some extent you're criticizing the wrong people. In many cases, uh, the accountants that allowed the lousy accounting are the ones that ought to be held in the dock and and they get very little criticism in America and that's a mistake. Recently, you make investment in BYD, a company in China that makes batteries and also electric cars, which are arguably technology companies.
So can you sort of go through the example and see how you sort of like anal analyze the case and sort of ask questions that helped you make the decision to invest in such a company? Thank you. Charlie deserves 100% of the credit for BYD. So I'm going to let him answer that. Well, it's an interesting example because Bergkshire would not have made an investment in BYD if the opportunity had come along five or 10 years earlier.
And it shows that the old men are continuing to learn and that's absolutely essential. Bergkshire would have a lower potential than it does if we had stayed the way we were and and so you were absolutely right in calling attention to this this episode. Again, Dave Soal helped. I didn't I wasn't at all sure I could get Warren to do this all by myself.
So I invagled Dave into going over to China and the two of us were able to to help the learning process. Well put well put Becky. This question comes from Mark Wears and it has to do with Bergkshire's compensation. He says, "How does Berkshire structure the performance-based compensation of the CEOs of its subsidiaries?
Please be as specific as you can regarding the metrics on which you focus the most and how the degree to which those metrics are attained translates into compensation. Yeah. Well, the first thing we do is we never engage a compensation consultant. And the uh we have whatever it may be 70 plus or whatever number of businesses we have.
They have very different economic characteristics to try to set some Berkshire standard to apply to businesses such as insurance which has capital as a bull work but which we get to invest in other things we'd invest in anyway. So there's a minus capital involved to a BNSF or a utility business where there's tons of capital involved or in between C's where there's very little capital involved.
We have other businesses that are basically just so damn good that you know that a chimpanzeee could run them and we have other businesses that are so tough at times you know that if we if we had Alfred P. Sloan back you know we wouldn't be able to do very well with them. Well, there's enormous differences in the in the economic characteristics of our business.
I try to figure out what if I own the whole business, what is a sensible way to employ somebody and compensate them uh considering the economic character characteristics of the business. So, we have all kinds of different plans. It doesn't take it doesn't take a couple of hours of my time a year to do it.
We have managers who stay with us so they must be reasonably happy with the plans and uh you know it it is it is not rocket science but it does require it it requires the ability to differentiate it. If we had a human relations department it would be a disaster. you know, they they would be attending conferences and people would telling them all these different things to put in equations and so on.
And it just it it just requires a certain amount of common sense. And it requires incidentally an interaction with the managers that where you know I listen to them, they listen to me and and and uh we sort of agree on what really is the measure of what they of what they're actually adding to the company.
and and uh um I would what do you what do you say to that Charlie? Well I think the US Army and General Electric have centralized personality uh personnel policies that probably work best for them and we have just the opposite system and I think it clearly works best for us. Uh, and practically nobody else is entirely like us, which makes us very peculiar.
And don't you? Yeah, we we really like it that way. We get worried when people agree with us. The uh we pay people we pay some very big money on I mean, we have managers that that have made and will make in the tens of millions annually. And we we have managers uh that that uh you know when we suffer they suffer.
Uh but it you got to treat people fairly even though they don't need the money. They they everybody wants to be treated fairly and and uh so the rationale for how you're doing it should be understood but there is no cross berkshire rationale at all. I mean, if you run Seize Candy to to put a cost of capital factor in or something like that, what the consultant will tell you, it's nonsense, you know, and uh there is it isn't going to make any difference whether there's 40 million or 43 million or 37 million of capital in the business.
And uh the main thing to do is is in terms of market position and all of that sort of thing. The real thing I really want to pay managers for is widening the moat that separates our business from our competitors businesses over time. Now that's a that gets very subjective. So I I don't have any perfect way of doing that but that is always going going through my mind in trying to design compensation systems.
So far like I say I don't think I can't you recall any manager that's ever left us over compensation. journey. I think it's amazing how simple it's been and how little time it has taken and how well it has worked. And uh there's this idea that headquarters can do these wonderful things. Headquarters in a conglomerate kind of a company is frequently hated in the field.
We don't want to be hated in the field. We don't want an imperial headquarters with big costs that's imposed everywhere. And uh and averaged out, it's worked wonderfully well for us. Yeah, we make no headquarter charges. We we we charge for our credit with a couple of companies, but but most companies are, you know, are allocating a couple percent of sales maybe or whatever it might be to all the different operations.
And usually it's resented out in the field and uh is it ever. Yeah. So we don't do
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