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the second part of my question is this um given your your assumptions on gold um if you were to factor a significant decline in the value of the dollar against gold let's say 40 or or more um and given the correlation of 1929 48 and 64 81 eras positively to decline of the dollar and the negative correlation in the other two areas that you had studied would you care to adjust the seven percent total annual return you were quoted as expecting for common equity in the com in the coming decade and in conjunction with that would you care to comment on your expected rate of return on all other major asset classes perhaps like bonds real estates and which would you believe offers the best value for investors thank you very much except under unusual circumstances my expected rate uh my expectancy on something like bonds is what bonds are producing at a given time i don't think i'm smarter than the bond market now you can say when they when those rates swing all over does that mean i swing all over the answer is pretty close to yes i mean that i don't know what the right rate uh for bonds uh is i i think that if there's i'm i'm very leery of economic correlations i mean i i spent years fooling around with that sort of thing and i mean i i i correlated stock prices with everything in the world and you know the problem was when i found a correlation i mean it's uh you know you've seen these things on on on whether the afc or the nfl wins the super bowl and all that sort of thing you can find something that correlates with something else but in the end a business or any economic asset is going to be worth what it produces in the way of cash over its lifetime and if if you own this if you own an oil field if you own a farm if you own an apartment house you know with the oil field it's the life of the oil field and what you can get out of it maybe you get secondary recovery maybe you get tertiary recovery well whatever it may be it's worth the discounted value of the oil that's going to come out and then you have to make them estimate as the volume and that's the price with a farm you might make an estimate as to crop yield and costs and and and crop prices and the apartment house you make an estimate as to rentals and operating expenses and how long it'll last and when people will build other new apartment houses that that potential renters in the future will find preferable and so on but all investment is is laying out some money now to get more money back in the future now there's two ways of looking at the getting the money back one is from what the asset itself will produce that's investment one is from what somebody else will pay for it later on irrespective of what the asset produces and i call that speculation so if you are looking to the asset itself you don't care about the quote because the asset is going to produce the money for you and that's how that's what society as a whole is going to get from investing in that asset then there's the other way of looking at it is what somebody will pay you tomorrow for even if it's valueless and that's speculation and of course society gets nothing out of that eventually but one group profits to at the expense of another and of course you had that operate in a huge way in the bubble of a few years ago you had all kinds of things that were going to produce nothing but where you had great amounts of wealth transfer uh in the in the in in the in the short term as investments you know they were a disaster as means of wealth transfer they were terrific for certain people and they were for the other people that were on the other side of the wealth transfer they were disasters uh we looked solely we don't care whether something's quoted because we're not we don't buy it with the idea of selling it to somebody we look at what the business itself will produce we bought seized candy in 1972.
the success of that has been because of the cash it's produced subsequently it's not based on the fact i call up somebody at a broker's house every day and say what's my seized candy stock with and that that is our approach to anything on interest rates i'm no good uh i bought some reits a couple of years ago because i thought they were undervalued why did i think they were undervalued because i thought they could produce 11 or 12 percent in terms of the assets that those companies had and i thought an 11 or 12 percent return was attractive now the reiks are selling at higher prices and you know they're not as attractive as they were then but you just look at every asset class every business every farm every reit whatever it may be and say what is this thing likely to produce over time and that's what it's worth it may sell at vastly different prices from time to time but that just means one person is profiting against another and that's not our game charlie what makes common stock prices so hard to predict is that a a general liquid market for common stocks creates from time to time either in sectors of the market or in the whole market uh a ponzi scheme in other words you have an automatic process where people get sucked in and other people come in because it worked last month or last year and it can build you perfectly ridiculous levels and the levels can last for considerable periods trying to predict that kind of thing sort of a ponzi scheme which is if you will accidentally thrown into the valuation of common stocks by just the forces of life by by definition that's going to be very very hard to predict that's what makes it so dangerous to short stocks even when they're grossly overvalued it's hard to know just how overvalued they can become in addition to the over-evaluation that exists and i don't think you're going to predict uh the ponzi scheme effect in markets by looking at the price of gold or any other correlation charlie and i i mean i you're pulling a figure out of the air we we have probably agreed on at least a hundred companies maybe more that we felt were were frauds you know a bubble type things and if we'd acted on shorting those over the years we might be broke now but we were right i'm probably just about a hundred out of a hundred it's it's very hard to predict how far what charlie calls the ponzi scheme will go it's not exactly a scheme in the sense that it isn't concocted there's most cases by one but it's sort of a natural phenomenon that seems to nursed along by promoters and investment bankers and venture capitalists and so on but it's it's it's it they all sit in a room and work it out it just it it plays on human nature in certain ways and it creates its own momentum and eventually it pops you know it and nobody knows when it's going to pop and that's why you can't short at least we don't find it uh makes good sense to short those things but they are it is recognizable you know when you're dealing with those kind of crazy things but you don't know when how high they'll go or when it'll end or anything else and people who think they do you know sometimes playing and other people know how to take advantage of it i mean there's no question about that you don't you do not have to have a 200 iq to see a period like that and figure out how to have a big wealth transfer from somebody else to you you know and and that was done on a huge scale uh you know in recent years it's not the you know it's not the most admirable aspect of capitalism area four
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