저자: CharlieMunger · 외국인
요약 보기
찰리 멍거는 인플레이션과 통화 남발이 민주주의 붕괴와 포퓰리즘 확산으로 이어질 수 있다고 경고한다. 역사적 사례로 로마 제국의 화폐 가치 하락과 바이마르 독일의 인플레이션이 히틀러 등장의 배경이 되었다고 설명한다. 현재 각국의 대규모 통화 발행은 새로운 영역이며 위험이 커지고 있다고 본다. 볼커 연준이 금리를 20%까지 올린 사례를 언급하며, 현 정치권이 그런 긴축을 감내하기는 어려울 것이라 평가한다. 따라서 향후 문제는 과거와 다른 형태로 나타날 수 있다고 본다. 그는 장기적으로 법정화폐 가치가 0으로 수렴할 것이라는 작업 가설을 제시한다. 일본처럼 과도한 발행에도 문명이 유지되는 사례도 있지만 위기 가능성은 여전히 존재한다고 본다. 기술 발전으로 생산성과 생활수준은 크게 향상되었지만 사람들의 불만은 오히려 커졌다고 진단한다. 그 원인으로 절대적 빈곤보다 상대적 박탈감과 질투를 든다. 투자 조언으로는 현금을 쌓아두며 시기를 기다리지 말고, 최선의 자산에 투자할 것을 권한다. 분산투자는 과도하며 좋은 자산 몇 개면 충분하다고 말한다. 버크셔 해서웨이의 초과 현금 보유는 시장 타이밍이 아니라 적절한 투자처를 찾지 못했기 때문이라고 설명한다. 사모펀드의 과열 매수도 언급한다. 전반적으로 종목별 가격 방향에 대한 구체적 예측은 없고, 거시적 통화 위험과 장기 투자 원칙에 대한 견해가 중심이다.
다듬은 글
foreign is a very serious subject you can argue it's the way democracies die and democracy dies in Latin America inflation is a big part of it so it's a huge danger once you've got a populist that learns it can vote itself money if you overdo it too much you ruin your civilization a lot of course it's a big long-range danger if you look at the Roman Republic even after they went to a Empire with an absolute ruler they inflated the currency steadily for hundreds of years and eventually the whole damn Roman Empire collapsed so it's the biggest long runs danger we have probably apart from nuclear war I think the safe consumption for an investor is that over the next 100 years the in currency is going to zero that's my working hypothesis a very dangerous environment what brought in Hitler was the combination of the Weimar inflation where they utterly destroyed the savings of the middle class in Germany followed by the Great Depression it was a one-two punch and Hitler came in Crazy demagogue with 40 of the votes and pretty soon we had a dictator help hellbent for World War so the history is not pleasant and Germany was a very Advanced and Civilized Nation the Germany that Hitler took over so if you elect your nation deteriorate too much what you get as a Hitler we've proved it when you print money on the scale with modern nations are printing it Japan the United States Europe Etc we're getting into new territory in terms of size there's never anything quite like what we're doing now and we do know from what's happened in other nations if you try and print too much money it eventually causes terrible trouble and we're closer to terrible trouble than we've been in the past but it may still be a long way off I certainly hope so when volcker after the 70s took the prime rate to 20 percent and the government was paying 15 on its government bonds that was a horrible recession lasted a long time caught with a lot of agony and I certainly hope we're not going there again I think the conditions that allowed volcker to do that without an interference from the politicians were very unusual and I think in 2020 hindsight it was a good thing that he did it I would not predict that our modern politicians will be as willing to permit a new Volker to get that tough with the economy and bring on that kind of a recession so I think the new troubles are likely to be different from the old troubles you may wish you had a vulgar style reception instead of what you're going to get the troubles that come to us could be worse than what Walter was dealing with and harder to fix think of all Latin American countries that print too much money they get strong men and so forth that's what Plato said happened in the early Greek city-state democracies one person one vote a lot of legality and you get demagogues in the demagogues slather out the population I'm freezing you don't have your democracy anymore I don't think that was a crazy idea Plato's part I think that accurately described what happened in Greece way back then and it's happened again and again again in Latin America we don't want to go there at least I don't we've done something pretty extreme and we don't know how bad the troubles will be here whether we're going to be like Japan or something a lot worse and what makes life interesting is we don't know what's going to work out I think we do know we're flirting with serious trouble I think we also know that some of our earlier fears were overblown Japan is still existing as a Civilized Nation in spite of unbelievable excess by all former standards in terms of money printing think of how seductive it is you have a bunch of interest-bearing debts and you pay them off with checking accounts which you're no longer paying interest think about seducky that is for a bunch of legislators you get rid of the interest payments and use it the money supply goes up it seems like heaven and of course when things get that seductive they're likely to be overused if you start to think about it if you're going to invest in stocks for the long term or real estate of course they're going to be periods when there's a lot of Agony and other periods when there's a boom and I didn't just have to learn to live through them and Kipling said treat those two imposters just the same you have to deal with daylight and night does that bother you very much no sometimes it's night and sometimes it's daylight sometimes it's a poems sometimes the boss I believe in doing as well as you can and keep going as long as they let you we have a hugely strong economy and a hugely strong technical civilization and that's not going away and the knowledge and so forth and you can't believe what a modern Factory looks like when you fill it with robots and that's coming more and more and more and it's coming to China too for that matter and so those Trends are inevitable and I don't know how it's all going to play out but I think it does create adjustment problems you'll find unionized job and they replace you with a robot you've got a difficult problem and you've got a company like Kodak and they invent something new that obsoletes your product you have a problem too and you solve that by dying a lot of people don't like that solution because all those problems are real and because it's so tempting to get rid of your debt by just giving a non-interest bearing checking account where you used to have to pay them interest every month not only do we have a serious problem but the solution to it that is the easiest for the politicians and for the Federal Reserve too for that matter it's just to print more money and solve the temporary problems that way and that of course is going to have some long-term dangers and we know what happened in Germany when they weim our Republic just kept printing money the whole thing blew up and that was a contributor to the rise of Hitler so all this stuff is dangerous and serious and we don't want to have a bunch of politicians just doing whatever is easy on the theory that didn't hurt us last time so we can double it and do it one more time and then we double it again and so forth we know what happens on that Everlasting doubling doubling doubling you will have a very different government if you keep doing that enough you're flirting with danger somewhere unless there's some discipline in the process but I don't regard Japan as in some terrible danger having maybe the only huge amount of this and gotten by with it I don't think we'll be as good as handling our problems as Japan that is and my whole adult life I've never hoarded cash waiting for better conditions I've just invested in the best thing I could find and I don't think I'm going to change now and the daily journals used up its cash now Berkshire has excess cash quite a bit of excess cash but it's not doing that because he thinks it knows how to Time Investments you just can't find anything you can stand by so we don't have a solution to your problem we're just coping with it as I've described the reason when I'm buying this we can't buy anything the prices we're willing to pay it's just that simple other people are betting the price up and a lot of the buying is not by people who really plan to own them a lot of it is feed ribbon buying private Equity buys things so they can have more fees by having more things under management of course it's a lot easier to buy something you use somebody else's money we're using our own money at least that's what we think of it the shareholders who are worried about the future because it looks complicated and difficult and there have I want to say to them with my old torch professor said to me Charlie you'd say Charlie tell me what your problem is and I'll try and make it more difficult for you and he did me a favor by treating me that way I'm just repeating his favor to you when you're thinking the thoughts you're doing at least you're thinking in the right direction you're worried about the right things all you people are worried about the inflation and the future of the Republic and so forth of course you know modern democracy in the age of Keynes you're going to get big government reaction the reaction this time was bigger than it's ever been before in the history of the United States they just threw money at the problem and they were probably right to fear what was going to happen and to be quite liberal and throwing money at it but they probably overdid it a little they threw so much money so fast that it's hard for the restaurants to get people to do the work but I don't criticize it it's hard to make these decisions Under Pressure well you have to be optimistic about the competency of our technical civilization But there again it's an implicit thing if you take the last 100 years 1922 to 2022 most of modernity came in in that hundred years and in the previous hundred years that got another big chunk of modernity and before that things are pretty much the same for the previous thousands of years life was pretty brutal one short and limited and what have you no printing press no air conditioning no modern medicine no I don't think we're going to get things that were in what I call the real human needs think of what it meant to get say first you got the steam engine the steamship the railroad and a little bit of improvement farming and a little bit of improvement in Plumbing that's what you got 100 years it ended in 1922.
the next hundred years gave us why they distributed electricity modern medicines the automobile the airplane the records the movies the air conditioning in the South and I think what a blessing it was and you wanted three children you had to have six because three died in infants that was our ancestors think of the agony of watching half your children but it's amazing how much achievement there's been in civilization in these last 200 years and most of it in the last hundred years now the trouble with it is is that the basic needs are pretty well filled in the United States the principal problem of the poor people is they're too fat that is a very different place from what happened in the past they were on the edge of starving and what happens is it's really interesting is with all this enormous increase in living standards and freedom and diminishment or racial inequities and all the huge progress that has come people are less happy about the State of Affairs than they were when things were way tougher and that has a very simple explanation the world is not driven by greed it's driven by Envy and the fact that everybody's five times better off than they used to be they take it for granted the only thing about it somebody else has had more now when it's not fairly easy to have and they don't that's the reason that God came down and told Moses that he couldn't then be your neighbor's wife or even his donkey I mean even the the old Jews were having trouble with the envy and so it's built into the nature of things it's weird for somebody my age because I was in the middle of the Great Depression when the hardship was unbelievable I was safer walking around Omaha in the evening than I have in my own neighborhood in Los Angeles after all this great wealth and so forth so and I have no way of doing anything about it I can't change the fact that a lot of people are very unhappy and feel very abused after everything's improved by about 600 percent because there's still somebody else who has more think of the pretentious expenditures of the rich who in the hell needs a Rolex watch so you can get mud for it you know I mean yet everybody wants to have a pretentious expenditure and that helps Drive demand in our modern capitalist Society my advice to young people is don't go there the hell was a pretentious expenditure I don't think there's much happiness in it but it does Drive the civilization we actually have drives a dissatisfaction what's the best advice you have for individual investors to optimally deal with the negative impact of inflation other than owning quality equities well it may be that you have to choose the least bad a bunch of options that frequently happens in human decision making and the mongers have Berkshire stock Costco stock Chinese stocks a little bit of Daily Journal stock and a bunch of apartment houses do I think that's perfect no do I think it's okay yes I think the great lesson from the mongers is you don't need all this damn diversification you're lucky if you've got four good assets I think the finance professors and the sell the idea that perfect diversification is professional investment if you're trying to do better than average you're lucky if you have four things to buy and to ask for 20 is really asking for egg in your beer it's very few people have enough brains to get 20 good Investments
Comments 0