저자: CharlieMunger/워런버핏등 · 외국인
요약 보기
버크셔는 자산배분을 카테고리로 나누지 않고 기회를 찾는 방식이며, 시장이 비싸면 자금을 쌓고 싸면 매수한다. 사모펀드·헤지펀드 경쟁으로 좋은 딜 찾기는 어려워졌지만 장기적으로 미국 경제 성장에 낙관적이다. 시장 방향은 예측하지 않는다고 강조한다.
다듬은 글
Well, if you look at Berkshire, you 'll see that it doesn't really do traditional asset allocation by category. We look for opportunities, and we don't care what category they fall into . And we certainly don't want our search for opportunities to be limited to some pre-defined, artificial set of categories.
In this sense, we are completely out of step with modern investment management, but we believe they are wrong. Yes. By the way, 80% of our money or more, much more than 80%, is tied to this country and to the dollar. So, it's not like we left the country or anything like that. But when have you applied a great asset allocation strategy?
Never. Yes. Yes. We end up with strange combinations of assets. I mean, if the junk bond story had lasted a little longer, instead of 7 billion, we could have invested 30 billion. But we did it simply because the market was literally screaming for it. And we do the same with stocks. I mean, for many years we had more stocks than Berkshire's net worth, but they were cheap.
And I want you to remember one of my favorite sayings as you go about this asset allocation. If a thing isn't worth doing at all, then it isn't worth doing well. Yes. You can understand why Ben Franklin passed the baton to Charlie. He tried to buy warehouses with large family funds, and then just stopped.
Any of his bets were always interrupted by some professional manager who managed other people's money for a commission. So, this is a very strange era where all these asset classes have been driven to extremely high valuations by all historical standards. Some investment companies are very ethical in this regard.
Howard Marks is here today. He returned a lot of money and stopped raising funds from clients for certain areas where opportunities had disappeared. This is the right way to behave, but it is not normal. Yes, I don't think he would mind. I didn't know Howard was here today, but these are actually Howard's numbers for one of his funds.
And, as I said, we did similar things. We did n't know it at the time, but later discovered that we had similar positions. About five or six years ago, when the terms of these deals were a little different, I got a call from a man whose name most of you would recognize. And he started asking me about the reinsurance business, because he was in it.
He said he was thinking about buying a certain company that was eventually sold. He actually didn't know much about this business , but he knew that if he didn't spend those $100,000, he would have to return them to the investors in a few months , because the initial term was ending, and any unused funds were subject to return , and he would receive 2% per annum on these funds regardless of the results.
So he looked at businesses he didn't understand, hoping he could invest that money somewhere. Charlie and I are at a disadvantage when buying businesses because almost all of our equity is exposed to both the ups and downs. So, you know, if there's a 2% commission and 20% of the profit, and losses are "goodbye," then that's a completely different model than what exists at Berkshire.
We manage it as if it's 100% our money, and it's almost 100% of our capital, and we're responsible for losses, and we don't get paid to spend money, we get paid to make money, and it's not easy. It's difficult and probably quite futile to compete right now, although we have one or two cases that may require spending real money.
Yeah, I don't think any business sold to us over the years, run by people we want to do business with, would want to sell to a hedge fund. So there is an asset class that doesn't want to deal with hedge funds or private equity funds. Thank God. Yes, we haven't seen a single deal that anyone else has made in the last year that we would want to make ourselves.
Although 15 or 20 years ago this was not the case. There were a lot of deals we had made with other people that we would have gladly signed if they had come to us, but I didn't see anything that, if sold for 10% less than the advertised price, would have made us interested in buying. So now we live in a different world.
I'm one of those doctors who really doesn't understand anything about money or finance. The money is coming in, but I don't know what to do with it . I cannot objectively assess the financial stability of a company, but I can assess its ethical component. That's why I feel quite at ease, and I think most of us here are quite happy with our savings in Berkshire Hathaway.
Thank you. This question has probably been asked in various forms before, but a few years ago, a friend of mine, a former manager of the Magellan Fund, warned that we were in for a terrible decade in the stock market because of all the things that have already been mentioned: rising interest rates, uncontrolled spending, a devaluation of the dollar, possible stagflation, problems with Social Security, and even what Charlie Munger said: most of our most talented graduates are going into wealth management instead of becoming doctors, molecular biologists, or chemical engineers.
So, whereas a year or two ago people were still full of euphoria about the stock market going up and making everyone rich just through investments, that euphoria seems to have faded, and I sense a premonition of a " bear" market. You wrote a few years ago that it is difficult to make money in a " bull" market, and real opportunities appear in a " bear" market.
So I'm wondering if you could give us a hint as to what your strategies would be if the market really gets that bleak in the coming years? Well, if the market becomes cheaper, we will have much more opportunities to do smart things with money. Whether we spend this money in the meantime is another question, but we will buy something anyway: operating businesses, stocks, high-yield bonds, whatever.
We will buy assets as long as I live. Just like I would buy groceries. Even longer than that. Yes, of course. Yes. Charlie is just waiting to take over after me. And I will be buying groceries for the rest of my life. So would I want food prices to go up or down if I were to buy them tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year?
The answer is obvious: if I am a pure buyer, then I prefer prices to be lower. We are not good at predicting markets. I mean......knew we were getting incredible benefits in the mid 70's. We knew that the market had gone a bit crazy in the late 90s, but we didn't spend much time on it. Charlie and I don't waste time thinking or talking about what the stock market will do, because we do n't know.
We only know that sometimes we get a very good price when we buy stocks or bonds. But we don't work based on any macro forecasts for stocks. And there is always a list of reasons, you mentioned a few. There is always a list of reasons why the country will have problems tomorrow, but there is also a list of opportunities that are not mentioned as often.
So we don't sit down and make a list of bad and good things happening in the economy, hoping for the market reaction. This may not be the case, it does not behave this way even if you correctly predict some bad or good events. Overall, I am a huge optimist about this country. I mean, over time, it became the most significant success in world history, if you think about it.
In 1790, there were fewer than 4 million people in this country. There were 290 million people in China at that time. There were 100 million people in Europe. And they all had the same intelligence as us. They had the same general climate. They had many natural resources. And 215 years later, these 3.9 million people, I think, now have about 30% of the world's GDP.
So there 's no point in playing against America. This doesn't mean that all of our policies are smart or anything. But I'm not becoming pessimistic about this country. I worry about one thing—the big concern is what terrorists or governments that have access to nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons might do.
But in terms of the country's basic economy, your children will live better than you, and your grandchildren will live better than your children. We don't focus on the macro factors that...Charlie. Well, I agree with you that the country's economy is likely to grow for a significant period of time. But I suspect that in very important ways we are at or near the peak of a great civilization.
You heard it here first, friends. If you dismiss the nuclear, chemical, biological threat, I don't think so, but, uh , you can see who's right in 20 or 30 years. But, uh, uh It's, I've seen more people miss opportunities, uh, because they, they focus on one economic variable or one problem that the country is facing, uh, and forget about, about the good.
I mean , if you can buy a really good business at a great price, it's crazy to say, " I think I'll wait because next year it might be a little cheaper or something , and because the world is going to hell." Uh, I, we just, we've never acted We've never refused to buy a business that we like because of macroeconomic views, right?
Not yet. Good. It's hard to get him to actually agree with you, I would , I've been working on this for years. Number 11. There's no doubt: there's significantly more money, uh, looking for deals now than there was 5 years ago, and they. And they are willing to pay more for good but ordinary businesses that, which, uh, we have managed to buy in the past.
And you mentioned private equity firms, they're bigger now than ever. Hedge funds have gotten into the game to some extent, uh, and if someone is putting a business up for auction today, that has changed only very slightly in the last four or five weeks because of some changes in the junk bond market, but not significantly.
There were people standing in line to bid on almost everything. In fact, private equity firms sell their businesses to other private equity firms, and, uh, uh, there are a lot of companies that are sold to someone who buys them to resell in a fairly short period of time. We can't, uh, compete, uh, in this area, and that's, you know, that's the source of our frustration, but that's the way it is.
Uh, we, it won't last forever, in our opinion. Uh, we still sometimes, like in this deal that I mentioned to you, uh , they, the other party, and we just, we made a deal that didn't go through an auction process. Well, we see it from time to time, but not at all like we saw it four or five years ago.
So, as far as Berkshire's near-term prospects are concerned, it's important that we find the...and for Charlie and for me, it's been amazing for decades how quickly things can change. Ahem. There have been at least three times, maybe more, during my career when it seemed to me that there was so much money around that doing anything sensible with it was simply impossible.
And I actually closed the partnership at the end of 1969 because, uh, I felt like money was coming in, you know, from everywhere. It was full of people who wanted to use them and compete. And I just didn't feel like we were going to be able to do smart things. Well, over the course of four years, I saw the biggest opportunities I've ever seen in my life, and we had a few of those situations.
Um, you know, in 1998, when Long-Term Capital Management got into trouble in the fall of 1998 and other things were happening. You've got incredible opportunities, uh, in the world of investments. But people were just as smart back then. There were all these people running around with 150 IQs. And they actually had money. But the world was paralyzed for a short period.
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