저자: Invest Avenue · 외국인
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Well, I plead guilty to being a little more conservative with the cash than other people and but I think that's all right. Uh we could have put all the money into a lot of securities that would have done better than the S&P of 2020 hindsight. Remember, we had all that extra cash all that period if something come along in the way of opportunities and so on.
I don't think it's a sin to have be a little strong on cash when you're as big a company as we are. Uh we don't have to I watched Harvard use the last ounce of their cash, including all their prepaid tuition from the parents and plunge it into the market at exactly the wrong moment and make a lot of forward commitments to private equity.
And they suffered like two or three years of absolute agony. We don't want to be like Harvard plus timber and a whole bunch of them. I mean plus timber and I mean Yeah. Yeah. We're not going to change, you know, we we we do like having a lot of money to be able to operate very fast and very big and we don't and maybe we won't we know we won't get those opportunities frequently.
I don't think uh certainly you know in the next you know in the next 20 or 30 years there'll be a two or three times when it'll be raining gold and all you have to do is go outside but uh uh we don't know when they will happen and and we have a lot of money to commit and I would say that if you told me I had to either carry short-term Treasury bills or have index funds and just let that money be invested in American generally I would take the index funds but we still have hopes and the one thing you should very definitely understand about Bergkshire is that we run the business in a way that we think is consistent with serving shareholders who have virtually all of their net worth in Berkshire.
I happen to be in that position myself but I would do it that way under any circumstances. We have a lot of people who trust us who who uh really have disproportionate amounts of Bergkshire compared to their net worth uh if you were to follow standard investment procedures and and uh uh we want to make money for everybody but we want to make very very sure that we don't lose permanently money from anybody for anybody that buys our stock somewhere around intrinsic business value to begin with.
We we just have an we have an aversion to having a million plus shareholders, maybe as many as 2 million, and having a lot of them uh ever really lose money if they're willing to stay with us for a while. And we know how people behave if when when the world generally is is uh upset. And uh they want to be with something.
I think they want to be with something that they feel is like the rocker roller and and uh we have a we have a dis we have a real disposition toward that group. We'd love to put more money uh into the UK. I mean, if I get a call tomorrow and somebody uh says, you know, I've got an ex billion dollar found company that I think might make sense for you to own and that I would like to actually have as part of Bergkshire.
You know, I'll I'll get on the plane and and uh be over there, but they'll have to name they'll have to tell me what their price ideas are and what it's earning. So, I'm not I'm not I'm not interested in in going over and talking about it and pricing it for them and then not making a deal. We we like to make deals when we when we actually get into action.
Uh we're hoping for it. Uh and we're hoping for a deal in the UK and inor Europe. uh uh no matter how Brexit comes out, I think it I I don't I'm not an Englishman, but I have a feeling it was a mistake to vote to leave, but I don't think it's I don't think it it doesn't it doesn't destroy my appetite in the least for making a very large acquisition in the UK.
Charlie. Well, all my ancestors came from Northern Europe, so I'm very partial to the place. On the other hand, if you ask me how I would have voted on Brexit if I lived in Britain, I don't even know. It just strikes me as a horrible problem. And I'm glad it's theirs, not mine. But if I called you tomorrow and said we had a deal in UK, you tell me.
Oh, I would go in in a minute. Yeah. Yeah. Those are my those are my kind of people. I understand them. Yeah. Okay, Greg. For a company as large and diversified as Bergkshire, why are investors being provided less information than previously? Well, I don't think we actually provide less information.
uh we may present it in a somewhat different form from year to year. Just this year, for example, you know, I I started my letter as usual in my mind as saying, "Dear Doris and Birdie, my sisters, to tell them what I would tell anybody that had a very significant proportion of their net worth in Bergkshire, who was intelligent, did not know all the lingo of our various businesses that would read a lot of words because they had they did have a large investment.
So if I explained anything and did a decent job that they would understand what I was talking about and uh uh I tell them that in the language that I think will be understandable to the to a significant percentage of a million plus people who have all kinds of different understanding of accounting and all that sort of thing.
I I tell them information I would want to hear on the other side. Now, if I was a competitor and I wanted to know what one of our furniture store was was earning or something of the sort, you know, I might love it. But it doesn't really make any difference if you're talking about a $500 billion organization if you understand our insurance business.
And in terms of giving you the picture, I think in three or four or five pages, you know, actually we've got a whole bunch of stuff that required by the SEC about loss reserve development. I I think you can write a 300page report that gives a whole lot less information than a 50-page report and you lose people.
Uh uh so I I try to tell them tell them like I say in my mind it's my sisters. Uh, I tried to tell them uh what I would tell them if we had a private business and they they owned a third of it each and I owned a third and once a year they like to get filled in and and they don't know all they don't know what a combined ratio means because it's a dumb term that everybody uses and they call it a profit margin.
uh they don't know what an the operating ratio is in in in in the uh railroad business and it's an obsolete term. It'd be better to call that a profit margin. But the lingo we're not writing it for analysts. We are writing it for for shareholders and we're trying to tell them something so they can make an addition.
they can not only get the picture as to what we own now, but how we think about the operation, what we're trying to do over time. And uh uh we try to do the best job we can every year. And I don't think it I think if somebody is terribly interested in the details, they really are missing the whole picture because you could have known every detail of our textile business in in 1965, but we could give you the information as how much we made from linings and how much we made from from handkerchiefs and uh it would you'd be in a different world.
I mean the important thing was how we looked at running money and what we would do about things over time and and uh uh it just you could have gotten very misled if you'd written it if you read it in 1980 or 85 and you look for great detail on how Seas Candy was doing and as they moved eastward you know we'll tell you that that overall that fell in terms of moving out the territory but going into a whole lot of detail that might be very interesting to an analyst, but really for a shareholder, they've got to make a decision as to who's running their money and how they're running it and what they've done over time and what they hope to do in the future and how to measure that.
And uh again, we're writing it for the individual. Charlie, well, I suppose I should be watching every tiny little business down to the last nickel, but I don't and I don't want that much detail. And I think our competitors would like it and it wouldn't do our shareholders any good. So we'll probably just keep reporting the way we do.
You can see how flexible we are here. Last week, China announced 12 new measures on further opening up the financial industry. All these measures will allow me more invested institutions to enter into Chinese financial market and to ensure the policies of foreign investment to be consistent with those of domestic investment.
What do you think about these new measures? Do you believe the foreign financial institutions will have more pricing power over the Chinese stock markets in the future? Do you have any plans to set up a company in China? If so, what time? Thank you. Well, we've got one now. Dairy Queen is all over China and it's working fine.
And we didn't wait for new laws. We did it under the old laws. But we're not that big net in China, right, Warren? We're not that big. What? In China? No. But we we had something, you know, that could have happened would have been quite sizable. China obvious. It's a big market and we like big markets.
I mean we really can only deploy capital on a major in a major way maybe in 15 or so countries just because of the size but generally I think the climate is getting better. It really makes sense for the two countries to get along. Think how stupid it would be if China and the United States didn't get along.
Stupid on both sides, I might add. Yeah, we we've done well in China. We haven't done enough. But
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