저자: 미상 · 외국인
요약 보기
버핏은 대기업도 실수를 하며 중요한 것은 문제를 발견 후 신속히 바로잡는 것이라고 강조. GEICO(1970년대 준비금 부실 후 회복)와 아메리칸익스프레스(1963년 현물창고 스캔들 후 회복) 사례를 들어, 그런 문제 이후 두 회사가 오히려 강해졌다고 설명. 웰스파고는 큰 실수를 했지만 향후 행동이 미국 주요 은행 중 가장 나을 수도 있다고 평가하며 CEO 팀 슬로안을 긍정적으로 언급. 버크셔에도 향후 불쾌한 뉴스가 있을 것이라고 인정.
다듬은 글
We do a lot of dumb things in this world. And uh Geico, as I say, in the in the early 1970s, they they just ignored uh then you can do it the setting of proper reserves, which mean they charged the wrong price to new customers because they thought their losses were less than they were. And I'm sure some of that may have been a desire to please Wall Street or just because they didn't want to face how things were going, but it came out incredibly stronger, you know, and now it didn't it's got 13% of the households in the United States insured and and and uh and it's it it came out with an attention to reserves and and that sort of thing that that was heightened by the difficulties that they found themselves in when they almost went bankrupt.
corrupt uh 40 40 a lot more stupid than Wells Fargo. It was really stupid what they did way back, right? Yeah. They had the world by the tail and then they Yeah. Then they uh quit looking at at the reserve development, but it was American Express was just picking up a few dollars by having the Field Warehousing Company in 1963.
And you know, they were worried whether it was going to sink the company. and uh with some guy named Tino D'Angelus in I think it was Bon, New Jersey. In fact, I went to the annual meeting in 1964 of American Express after the scandal developed and somebody asked if the auditor would step forward and the auditor from one of the big firms which I won't mention came up to the microphone and somebody said, "How much did we pay you last year?" The auditor gave this answer and then the questioner said, "Well, how much extra would you have charged us to go over to Bayon, which was 10 miles away, and check whether there's any oil in the tanks?" So it, you know, here was something in a tiny little operation.
Some guy was calling in from a bar in Bon and telling them the funny stuff was going on and they didn't want to hear it. They shut their ears to it. And then what emerged was one of great company after this kind of what they felt was a near-death experience. So it's it we're going to make mistakes. I will guarantee you that we will get some unpleasant news at Bergkshire.
I don't know what it'll be. You know, most important thing is we do something about it. And there have been times when I've I procrastinated and Charlie has been the one that jabs me into action. And so he's performed a lot of services. you don't know about. You can't have 377,000 employees and expect that everyone is behaving like Ben Franklin or something out there.
They we I don't know whether there are 10 things being done wrong as we speak or 20 or 50. The important thing is we don't want to insin any of that if we can avoid it and if we find that it's when we find it's going on we have to do something about it and that is absolutely the uh the key to it and Wells Fargo didn't do it but Solomon didn't do it and the truth is we've made a couple of our greatest investments where people have made similar errors we bought our American Express that was the best investment I ever made in my partnership years.
We bought our American Express stock in 1964 because somebody was incented to do the wrong thing in something called the American Express Field Warehousing Company. We bought a very substantial amount of GEICO. We bought what became a half a half of GEICO for $40 million because somebody was incented to meet Wall Street estimates of earnings and growth.
And they didn't focus on having the proper reserves. And that caused a lot of pain at American Express in 1964. It caused a lot of pain at GEICO in 1976. It caused a layoff of a significant portion of the work workforce. All kinds of things. But they cleaned it up. They cleaned it up. And look where American Express has moved since that time.
Look at where Geico has moved since that time. So the the fact that you are going to have problems at some very large institution is not unique. In fact, almost every bank has all the big banks have had troubles of one sort or another. And uh I see no reason why uh uh Wells Fargo as a company from both an investment standpoint and a moral standpoint going forward is in any way inferior to the other big banks with which it competes.
It they made a big mistake. it costs. I mean, we've still got I mean, we we have a large unrealized gain in it, but that doesn't that doesn't have anything to do with our decision making, but the uh uh I like it as an investment. I like Tim Sloan as a manager, you know, and it it he is correcting mistakes made by other people.
I tried to correct mistakes at Solomon and I had terrific help from Derek Mourn as well as uh as well as number of the people at Mertols and I mean that that that is going to happen. You try to minimize it. Charlie says that an ounce of prevention isn't worth a pound of cure. It's worth about a ton of cure.
And we ought to jump on everything. He's he's pushed me all my life to make sure that I attack unpleasant problems that surface and that's sometimes not easy to do when everything else is going fine. And at at Wells they clearly and I don't know exactly what but they they did what people at every organ it got accentuated to an extreme point but I I see no reason to think that Wells Fargo going forward is uh other than a a very very large well-run uh bank that that had an episode in history it wished it didn't have but it Geico came out stronger American Express came out stronger uh uh the question is what you do when you find the problems Charlie well I agree with that I think Wells Fargo is going to be better going forward than it would have been if it if these leaks had never been discovered or happened.
Yeah. So I I think it it uh but I think Harvey Weinstein has done a lot for improving behavior too. It it's they it was clearly an error and they're acutely aware of it and acutely embarrassed and they don't want to have it happen again. No, I I I if I had to say which bank is more likely to behave the best in the future, it might be Wells Fargo of all of them.
This New York Times that I have here from March 12th, 1942. If you go toward the back of it in the classified section, you have one big section says help wanted male and another one that says help wanted female. You know, was the New York Times doing the right thing in those days? You know, I think the New York Times is a terrific paper, but that people make mistakes and and you know, the idea of classifying between taking ads and saying, "Well, we'll take them and divide them up between men and women what jobs we think are appropriate, you know, or that the employ the advertiser thinks appropriate." That
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