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for the average investor uh who wants stone equities over a 20 or 30 year period we think regular investment in some kind of very low cost uh pool of money which might well be an index fund probably makes as much sense as anything my name is esther wilson i live in south sioux city nebraska my husband and i will have some new money in the early 80s of our live would we have a daughter 50 years old who will inherit anything we have my question is is i also have a 4 percent interest on mutual fund that is non-taxable are there any better ways to invest our money well those are tough questions i mean i i i you know i run into friends of mine all the time where they they come into a lump sum at a given time and uh you know charlie and i do not have great answers about about uh uh investing sums of money i for people who are not really active in the process i mean if as we said earlier if we were working with small sums now we would start looking at a whole bunch of very small situations and some things that we might know how to do on a small scale but for the for the average investor uh who wants stone equities over a 20 or 30 year period we think regular investment in some kind of very low cost uh pool of money which might well be an index fund probably makes as much sense as anything but it's important to keep the costs down you know i have close to 100 of my net worth in berkshire i'm comfortable with it because i like the businesses we own and uh but you know i didn't buy it at this price either so i don't like to go i never recommend anybody buy or sell it and charlie do you recommend anything i i think it's if there's anybody in the room who thinks it would be very easy to come up with a one-liner for a great no-brainer investment tomorrow with a great slug of new money i wish they'd come up and tell me what it is we don't have any solution to that one it's harder for us now than it has been at other times yeah there's been a couple of times in 1974 there was something in forbes and 69 the reverse of that situation and then i think i wrote an article for forbes i can't remember exactly when it was about how equities almost had to be more attractive than bonds at that time and bonds weren't that unattractive i mean every now and then you can you can say you are getting a great deal for your money in equities or sometimes you can say you're getting a great deal for your money in fixed income investments uh you can't say that now so what do you do you know in terms of new money we we find ourselves sitting and waiting for something and and we continue to look but we are forced to look at bigger ideas so if we were working with smaller funds we would be much more likely to find something than we we are in our present situation uh as charlie says we we we really don't have any great one-line advice on it i wish we did zone four go ahead the real long term rate of return from saving money and investing it has to go down from recent experience in america particularly equity related recent experience the wealth of the world can't increase at the kind of rates that people are used to in the american equity markets and the american equity markets can't hugely outperform the growth of the wealth of the world forever we ought to have reduced expectations regarding the future generally because you know we mentioned earlier 53 percent of the the world's stock market value is in the us well if u.s gdp grows at four percent five percent a year with one or two percent inflation which would be a pretty it would be a very good result i think it's very unlikely that corporate profits are going to grow at a greater rate than that corporate profits as a percent of gdp are on the high side already and you can't constantly have corporate profits grow at a faster rate than gdp and uh obviously in the end they'd be greater than gdp and it's like somebody said that new york has more lawyers than people i mean they're certain you run into certain conflicts and the terminology as you go along if you say profits can get bigger than gdp so if you really have a situation where the best you can hope for in corporate profit growth over the years is four or five percent how can it be reasonable to think that equities which are a capitalization of that corporate of corporate profits can grow at 15 a year i mean it is nonsense frankly and people are not going to average 15 or anything like it uh in equities and i would almost defy them to show me mathematically how it can be done in aggregate uh i looked the other day at the fortune 500 they earned 334 billion dollars on and had a market cap of 9.9 trillion at the end of the year which would probably be at least 10 and a half trillion now well the only money investors are going to make in the long run are what the businesses make i mean there is nothing added the government doesn't throw in anything you know nobody's adding to the pot people are taking out from the pot in terms of frictional costs investment management fees brokerage commissions and all of that but the 334 million is all that it's all the investment earns i mean if you want to farm the what the farm produces is all you're going to get from the farm and if it produces you know fifty dollars an acre of net profit you get fifty dollars an acre of net profit and and there's nothing about it that transforms that in some miraculous form if you own all of american if you own all of the fortune 500 now if you own 100 of us you would be making 334 billion and if you pay 10 10 and a half trillion for that that is not a great return on an investment and then you say yourself can that double in five years it can't the 334 billion it can't double in five years with gdp growing at four percent a year or some number like that it would it would it would just produce things that are so out of whack uh in terms of experience in the american economy it won't happen so anytime you get involved in these things where if you trace out the mathematics of it you bump into absurdities then you better change expectations somewhat charlie well there are two great sayings uh one is if a thing can't go on forever it will eventually stop and and the other i borrow from my friend fred stanbach who i think is here people who expect perpetual growth and real wealth in a finite earth are either mad men or economists
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