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The people buying and selling, well, some of them, but they basically don't know what day of the week it is or what hour or anything like that. And and they react to news, they react to the market itself. Uh the very fact that we talk about the market, you know, on bad days and everything may tend to accentuate it for all I know.
Who Who Who knows? It really doesn't make any difference. I mean, if I if I owned a McDonald's stand here in Omaha, I would not get a quote on it every day, you know, I would I would try to make my service the best, you know, I would I would hope too many competitors didn't move in close to me, and and I would hope that McDonald's did great advertising and came up with some new products occasionally.
And what I would think about is how's this going to work over 5 years or 10 years? I mean, people going to keep eating hamburgers, they're going to like ours, and all of that sort of thing. And you'd be better off in stocks if you did not get a quote on them, you know, and and quotations cause people to do things they wouldn't otherwise.
If I I've got this farm 40 miles from here. If I'd gotten a quote on it every day since I bought it 30 years ago, you know, I might have done something dumb. I mean, as it is, I've never had a quote on it, and it produces a little more every year, and generally the prices of its products go up. So, focusing on the prices and what they're doing is a terrible way to go to invest in in businesses.
You said in the annual letter this year that Berkshire Hathaway is obviously an an interest rate sensitive company, and therefore consequently uh when rates go up, the company will do very well. Do you think we're ever going to see rates going up again? Well, that's that's the What's happened with interest rates is really extraordinary.
I mean, it you could go back and read everything Keynes wrote and everything Adam Smith wrote or Ricardo wrote or Galbraith wrote or you name it. Uh Paul Samuelson, I mean, uh you won't see a word of in my view I anything I've ever seen about sustained negative interest rates. I mean, we are doing something the world hasn't seen.
It does have the effect of making all assets more valuable. I mean, interest rates are like gravity in valuations. I mean, if interest rates are nothing, you know, values can be almost infinite. Uh if interest rates are extremely high, that's a huge gravitational pull on values. And we had that in the early 1980s.
So, we have gone into this period where Berkshire Hathaway is sitting with billions of dollars of euros in an insurance company that we have in Europe and they will bear a negative rate. I mean, we would be better off if we had a big mattress in Europe that we could stick all this stuff in. And if I could just find the person who I trusted to sleep on the mattress, you know, that's what we would do.
If we have a billion of euros at minus 35 basis points, that's, you know, three out of billion, it would it would be three three and a half million euros a year that it's costing us just to have that. Well, that means you don't want to collect your receivables. I mean, why would you want to collect your receivables?
It goes into a negative, you know, it it it distorts everything. Now, there's a good reason why they're doing it, but nobody has really gone through an extended period like this. We We do not know how this movie plays out. So, when you start thinking of potential scenarios, how do you play it out? Well, it I mean, we thought when we started it that that it would end fairly soon and then Europe, in particular, uh needed further, you know, further uh jolts in the in the arm and uh they extended it and we can't get too far away from it.
We talked about that a year ago with the problems of this country raising rates while Europe was at negative rates. And what that might do to the dollar and what that does to trade and what trade does to business and I mean, there in economics, the most important thing to remember, it's important in other areas of life, but after anything that happens, if somebody tells you, "This is going to happen," you got to say, "And then what?" There's always It's like in physics or anything else.
There's always an and then what. It's the question I always ask myself, and then what? And in terms of sustained low interest rates, when I say and then what, I don't know the answer. Maybe Watson knows the answer. I'll ask him next time I see him.
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