원문 보기
how worried are you by the declines in the share price of Berkshire Hathaway the difficult zeros this is the third time that Warren I have seen our holdings in Berkshire go down top tick to bottom tick by 50% I think it's in the nature of long-term shareholding with the normal vicissitudes and in worldly outcomes and in markets that the long-term holder has his quoted value of a stock go down and then by say 50% fact you can argue that if you're not willing to react with equanimity to a market price decline of fifty percent two or three times a century you're not fit to be a common shareholder and you deserve the mediocre result you're going to get compared to the people who do have the temperament who can be more philosophical about these market fluctuations you can never take all the boom-and-bust out of a capitalist economy but they could be enormous li dampened if there were wise legislative restraints on human conduct that eliminated more of the semmen folly that will inevitably come without the wiser strains and what happened in America is that the people who were making money out of a lack of wise restraints just got more and more power by doing more and more lobbying and making larger and larger political contributions and and being aided by a certain ideological nuttiness which assumed that because free markets worked so well compared to say communism it automatically followed that if there were no laws at all restraining financial conduct the economy would work better and that's not so the economy works worse if you allow unrestrained sin and follow him in finance that goes back all the way to the South Seas bubble without a system of wise restraints gross immorality and extreme craziness will happen in markets they need to be dampened sin and folly needs to be stepped on both parties have wings that are full of idiots that is the nature of the game and the reason it's worked as well as it has is that the people in the middle have sort of over time tuned out the idiots on both side and but every once in a while the idiots get in control and of course that has terrible consequences so you realize the nature of the system you're thinking of the loss and we went way too far in financial deregulation we and people were making so much money and the economy was doing so well because it was being puffed up by this idiot boom and idiot expansion of consumer credit but everybody thought it wasn't this wonderful and of course it was your life for the next three weeks would be more pleasant if you went on heroin but it would totally destroy you over the long pole and that's what an economy does when it allows itself to be seduced by the potential for an idiot boom into allowing all this gross immorality in this and this craziness to take over to his credit of all the major figures he's the only one who promptly said I was a horse's ass I'm ashamed of my lack of foresight I missed this who else but Alan Greenspan is talking that way so and in my book he's sort of a hero and that it is hard at his age to look back at a career as distinguished as his was as much success and adulation and basically say I was a horse's patoot and that's what he's done so to me he's a hero we need more of that sort of thing Wall Street tracks and rewards what I call a locker room culture tell the people who just have to win the football or soccer or something like that and they in the nature they're just so competitive that whatever a is doing they have to be as good or better than a and of course war and I don't have those compulsions and I would rather live my way than theirs they do enormous damage to the rest of us with their damn locker room culture that has to win and doesn't is not very squeamish about what they have to do to win we have to deal on things that were capable of understanding and then once we're over that filter we have to have a business with some intrinsic characteristics that give it a durable competitive advantage and then of course we would vastly prefer a management in place with a lot of integrity and talent and finally no matter how wonderful it is it's not worth an infinite price so we have to have a price that makes sense and gives a margin of safety considering the natural vicissitudes of life that's a very simple set of ideas and the reason that our ideas have not spread faster is they're too simple the professional classes can't justify their existence if that's all I have to say it's all so obvious and so simple what would they have to do with the rest of the semester well at the time we bought it it was succeeding mightily on multiple fronts and it was cheap in relation to what was plainly going to happen that was a valuable insight there are times when even a company as big as coca-cola is too cheaply priced by the market considering what it's going to do for the shareholder and there are times when we can figure that out and there are times when we can't and the times when we can't figure it out we tend to go in heavily for many many months we were buying as much coca-cola as we could buy roughly a third of the volume trading every day for months so we were very aggressive in buying into coca-cola we have the mindset of the person that's buying the whole business at the price you would realize by multiplying the price we're paying by share by the number of outstanding shares and and we want the price for the whole business so calculated to look very attractive so we like buying individual shares at a price that's lower than we think a rational person would pay if he could buy the whole business born would have been a huge success of charlie munger never lived how often do you speak to him well in the early days it was almost every day and now it's maybe once a week only once a week yeah I'm not very much but sometimes it's a long conversation you and Warren very much a double act in the Chairman and vice chairman of the company at some point you want to probably retire don't you step down rest a bit well I don't think either of us wants to quit except as the laws of physiology force it and that no doubt will be soon on us but you got to remember that Berkshire is probably the most decentralized big corporation in the world I think the very decentralization of Berkshire and the extreme pockets of talent and all the subsidiaries will give Berkshire a very respectable future long after we're gone and you've got to remember that we started a little nothing and our successors are starting with something that is not a little nothing and you ought to be able to achieve a lot more when you're given a mighty hand then you were when you start with a little nothing now they won't be able to multiply money as fast per share because that can't happen when you're working with such large sums but in terms of a creditable institution that serves the wider world I think Berkshires contribution after Warren is dead will utterly dwarfed the contribution made while he was alive
Comments 0