저자: WarrenBuffett · 외국인
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결론: 버핏은 배당보다 기업이 재투자로 1달러당 1달러 이상의 가치를 창출할 수 있는지가 핵심이며, 그렇지 않을 때 배당이 맞다고 본다. 배당 정책 원칙: 시즈캔디처럼 자본 재투자 여지가 적은 기업은 번 돈을 거의 전부 지급하는 것이 옳다. 주주 입장에서도 재투자로 가치가 늘면 배당받는 것보다 유리할 수 있다. 투자 기회와 인내: 좋은 기회는 놓치면 안 되며, 인생에서 투자 결정권이 20장뿐인 펀치카드처럼 신중하게 골라야 한다. 잦은 매매는 장기 수익을 해친다. 할인율과 금리: 모든 증권에 동일한 할인율을 쓰는 것이 이론상 맞다. 단기금리가 낮다고 3~4% 수익률 자산에 투자하지 않으며, 최소 기준 수익률을 두고 있다. 저금리 장기투자는 피하고 기다린다. 세금 관점: 배당 면세는 버핏 같은 고소득자에게 이득이 집중되어 불공정하다고 본다. 부시 행정부의 배당 면세안에 반대한다. 자사주 매입: 주가가 기업가치보다 크게 낮을 때만 최선의 자본 활용이다. 많은 기업의 자사주 매입은 주가 방어 목적이거나 비합리적 가격에서 이뤄진다. 배당 정책 일관성: 공개기업은 배당 정책을 한번 정하면 함부로 바꾸지 않아야 한다. 배당과 매매·자문 비용을 합치면 주주 실질 배당은 거의 0에 가깝다는 비판도 제시한다. 버크셔의 현재 입장: 약 300억 달러 자금이 있으나 재투자 기회를 우선한다. 주가가 저평가되면 자사주 매입을, 아니면 배당을 고려하겠지만 가까운 시일 내 배당 전환은 없을 것이라 본다. 예측 발언 여부: 종목·지수에 대한 1~3개월 가격 방향 예측은 없음.
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the um well the answer is I do believe in dividends and in a great many situations including many of the ones that companies in which we own stock to test about whether to pay dividends is whether you can can continue to create more than one dollar of value for every dollar you retain and there are many business we take See's Candy which we own See's Candy has paid everything virtually out to us that they've earned because they do not have the ability Within These candy to use large sums which they earn uh intelligently in their business so it'd be an enormous mistake for See's Candy to retain money so they distributed Berkshire and we hope that we move that around in some other area where that dollar becomes worth a dollar ten cents or a dollar twenty cents in terms of present value terms if we do that the shareholder whether they're taxable or whether they're not taxable whether they're a foundation or whether they're living on income even they are better off if if we retain the money because if in if they were going to get a dollar in dividends and it became worth a dollar ten or a dollar twenty and market value immediately on a present value basis uh they're better off selling a small percentage of their stock and and realizing uh the required amount that way and they will have more money when they get all through doing that than if we paid it in dividends but if the time comes uh and it will come someday when the if the time comes when we don't think we can use the money effectively to create more than a dollar a market value per dollar retained um then it should be paid out and like I say we do that individually within Berkshire but because we have this ability to redistribute money uh in a tax efficient way within the company we probably had more we had more reason to retain all of earnings if See's Candy were Standalone company we would simply pay out a lot of the the earnings practically all of the earnings and dividends just like we do now except it goes to Berkshire that we like our we like the companies in which we have Investments to pay to us the money they can't use efficiently in their own business in some cases that's a hundred percent of what they earn in some cases is zero percent of the earned we own some stocks that don't pay any dividends big opportunities in life have to be seized uh we don't do very many things but when we get the chance to do something that's right and big we've got to do it and even to do it in a small scale is just as big a mistake almost as not doing it at all I mean you've really gotta you gotta grab them when they come and because they you're not going to get 500 great opportunities you would be better off if when you got out of school here you got a punch card with 20 punches on it and every big Financial every financial decision you made you used up a punch you get very rich because you'd think through very hard each one I mean he went to a cocktail party and somebody talked about a company he didn't even understand what they did or couldn't pronounce the name but they made some money last week and another one like it you wouldn't buy it if you only had 20 punches on that card there's a temptation to dabble if uh particularly during bull markets uh uh and stocks is so easy you know it's easier now than ever because you can do it online you know just you click it in and maybe it goes up a point and get excited about that and you buy another one the next day and so on you can't make any money over time doing that but if you had a punch card with only 20 punches you weren't going to get another one the rest of your life you would think a long time before every investment decision and you would make good ones and you'd make big ones and you probably wouldn't even use all 20 punches at the in your lifetime but you wouldn't need to hi I'm uh Steve casbell from Atlanta um my question involves interest rates when you calculate the intrinsic value of a business and a period of low interest rates like we have currently do you use a higher discount rate to factor in higher rates in the future and also um when do you ever look at a company's free cash flow yield relative to current rates and if I could also get your thoughts on the dividend tax cut if by some miracle the politicians think logically and get rid of the dividend taxes would Berkshire ever pay a dividend the question on discount rates we we use the same discount I mean in theory we would use the same discount rate across all Securities because if you really knew the cash they were going to produce you know that would that would take care of we may be more conservative in estimating the returns of cash from some but the the discount rate we would use as a constant now in terms of where we commit you know we don't want to use the fact that short-term rates are one and a quarter percent to think that something that yields is three percent or four percent is a good deal so we sort of have a minimum threshold in our mind about which were below which were unwilling to commit money and we're unwilling to commit it with our interest rates are six or seven percent or whether they're three or four percent or whether they're on a short-term basis one percent we just we don't want to get hooked into long-term Investments at low rates just because they're a little bit better than than short rates would be or or low government rates would be so we we have minimum thresholds in our mind I can't tell you precisely what they are but they're uh they're a whole lot higher than present government rates would be and at other times we'd be very happy owning governments just because we feel that they offer attractive enough rates I would when we're looking at a business we're looking at holding it forever and and we want to be sure we're getting an adequate return on Capital we don't regard what we can get on short-term rates now is adequate but we'll still see then you know a little bit and start settling for lower rates for 30 years because rates for 30 days or so low we would rather just sit it out and wait a while um the tax on dividends uh you know I've used this illustration before but I'm paying about the same percentage of my income to the federal government as my secretary does now I pay more in income tax rates than she does I pay a higher marginal tax rate by some margin than she does but she pays way more in Social Security taxes than I do because I only pay out the first whatever it is 70 or 80 000 of income and so she's paying between what we pay at the company for and what she pays who are paying 12 or 13 percent of whatever it is of that so we both end up paying fairly similar percentages of our income to the federal government every year if Berkshire were to declare a billion dollar dividend and my Charlotte was 330 million and it were tax-free as the bush people originally suggested and it would be tax-free I mean we have lots of taxable earnings at Berkshire you know I might be paying one-tenth of the rate to the federal government of my income that she would be now I can make the argument about the fact that structure shouldn't govern tax rates that that sub chapter S and sub chapters and chapter C and Partnerships and all of these things that the tax code should be neutral between them and I've made those kind of arguments in the past but I can make no argument in my mind that says that I with everything that you know all the luck I've had in life you know I was wired a certain way at Birth that enabled me to make a lot of money and frankly it was better to be born a boy than a a girl in terms of money making possibilities in 1930 and probably still is but not to the same degree I mean the fact that that I would send one-tenth the portion of my income in the year to the federal government that my secretary would I it just it screams at Injustice to me in terms of what the society gives back to me so I am not I am not for the I'm not for the bush plan but um Charlie well I I agree with you even if you assume that that the whole economy would work better if we'd never gotten into this double taxation system on corporate earnings which I don't think is a clear thing anyway but even if you even if you assume that I think if you live in a democracy where there's lots of envy and resentment and what have you to have the absolutely most fortunate people paying practically no income taxes I I just think it's unacceptable I think there has to be some fairness in in some of these Arrangements uh even if there's some theoretical argument that the economy might work a little better some other way yeah there are IRAs now obviously that work very well for people with modest amounts of dividends that they they're getting tax deferred for a very long period of time which has huge benefits the big benefits of exempting dividends would go to fellows like me and Charlie you know and that's not going to stimulate the economy it's going to stimulate us but uh and it's going to result in US sending a very small percentage of the income of our income to Washington compared to what the people you know working in our shoe factories send and uh that you know when somebody says you know what did you do during the war Grandpa I'm not sure that's what I want to explain to them number three hi my name is Charlie rice and I'm a stockholder from St Louis Missouri appreciate hearing your comments on publicly held companies using their cash for uh dividends versus stock BuyBacks well we the equation is pretty simple but the practice doesn't necessarily follow logic the it's obviously as long as you're telling the truth your shareholders about what's going on so that you aren't manipulating the stock downward or something when a stock can be bought well below its business value uh that probably is the best use of cash it's something the Washington Post did on a huge scale back in the 1970s Teledyne may have bought 90 or something or close to it of their stock back and that was the reason a very significant percentage of companies bought stock back in the past because they actually thought it was selling for less than it was worth uh like I say that that can be abused if you do various things to bury your stock in one way or another but but that wasn't the usual case um it stock repurchases were relatively unpopular in those days they've become quite popular now and and and to the extent that I've been around a good number of them and and been able to pick up on what I thought was the underlying rationale if not the professed rationale you know I think it's often done for people that that are hoping that it causes their their stock price not to go down and uh and they're you know and often done at prices that don't really make a lot of sense for continuing shareholders if we wanted to return a bunch of cash to shareholders we would if our stock was undervalued we would we would we would go to the shareholders and say we think it's cheap and and we think that this cash can be better used by you than by us and we will therefore have be repurchasing at what we think is a discount intrinsic value and the people that remain will be better off and the people that get out will get out at a little bit better price than they would otherwise um in terms of dividends you get into an expectational situation and for most companies that follow a that pay a cash dividend it doesn't make sense to be to bounce around the dividend from year to year although private companies frequently do that and we do it ourselves with our subsidiaries they've some some subsidiary can pay us a lot of money one year and not so much money the next year uh but with public companies the people do a lot of people do buy stocks to obtain dividends and they hope for regularity and there's a signaling aspect to it and everything so I would I would say that once you establish a dividend policy with a public company you should think a long time before you change that policy in a material way but I think the best use of cash if you don't have a good use for it in the business if the stock is underpriced as to repurchase it and if it's over a price you've got no business buying in a single share but a lot of companies do it Charlie yeah the Dividends are a very interesting subject if you count the unnecessary stock trading and the cost of investment advice and the cost of making a lot of errors in the trading costs in and out I don't think would be too extreme to say that now the total amount that's paid out in dividends is roughly equal to the amount that is wasted in all those trading and investment advice so that the net dividends that come to the shareholders are approximately zero this is a very peculiar way to run a republic and very few people comment about it yeah actually I did in an article some time ago and Fortune the frictional costs to American shareholders in sort of changing chairs uh for All American Business as a whole those fictional costs are probably not much different than the entire amount paid out by American corporations so but getting to the individual Corporation level a company that expects to regularly earn more than it than it can profitably employ in its business should be paying out dividends take a subsidiary of ours like See's Candy we would love to expand these candy to double or triple its present size but it doesn't work we've tried it a lot of different ways so it should be paying out attorneys if it was a public company and it was at one time you know you could argue that something approaching a 100 payout would would make sense there but most Management's worrying about earnings falling off at some time in the future would rather establish a lower level and and and and and and therefore ensure regularity of dividends uh by by going with it with a conservative level uh I you know we it's obviously something we think about at Berkshire when we have 30 odd billion dollars around if we can't figure out a way to employ that over time you know it's it's a mistake to keep it in corporate form but we have this expectation and I think it's a reasonable expectation that we get the put it to work if we ever came to the different conclusion if our stock we thought our stock was significantly undervalued we'd probably figure in terms of disbursing it through repurchases particularly we're now dividends and capital gains are are neutral for for individuals and if our stock was not underpriced and we thought we would we would probably do something by a dividend it's not going to happen soon however
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