[y66]

Excerpt from Sunday NY Times story by David Segal:

Quote

The renowned investor Warren E. Buffett was uncharacteristically critical of himself and the business world at large in his annual letter to the shareholders of his holding company on Saturday, as he sifted through the wreckage of his worst year in four decades.

Mr. Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, reported a 62 percent drop in net income for 2008 and posted negative results for only the second time since he took control in 1965.

Mr. Buffett took the blame for some of that grim performance, stating that he “did some dumb things,” but he also registered anger at the decisions and practices in the rest of the business world that he predicted would leave the stock market a shambles through 2009.

The letter, as ever, gives shareholders an overview of Berkshire’s annual performance, but it also doubles as a folksy state-of-the-economy address from one of the country’s most revered investors.

In language that was by turns blunt and witty, he lamented what he called “a series of life-threatening problems within many of the world’s great financial institutions.” His heaviest scolding was reserved for the heads of private equity firms and mortgage issuers.

Mr. Buffett, an inveterate optimist about the American economy, also found reasons for cheer.

“As we view Geico’s current opportunities,” he wrote, referring to the insurance company that Berkshire Hathaway owns, he and his company’s chief executive “feel like two hungry mosquitoes in a nudist camp. Juicy targets are everywhere.”

Reviewing the performance of Clayton Homes, a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary that sells manufactured homes, he noted that its lending arm had managed to keep foreclosure rates to less than 4 percent, even among subprime borrowers, or those with weak credit ratings.

Rest of story here.

[Winstonm]

A legend in his own mind.

[Al_U_Card]

Winstonm, on Feb 28 2009, 08:07 PM, said:

A legend in his own mind.

Fueled by press clippings, no doubt.

[y66]

WB is still one of my heroes. Mortal? Mos def. Hope he turns things around and goes out swinging.

[kenberg]

Commenting on Warren Buffett's investment skills would be like commenting on Bob Hamman's bridge skills. I'll take a pass on that. He has made comments over the years that I have admired, one of them being an observation that it is desirable if parents can leave to their children enough money so that they can do anything but not so much that they can do nothing.

The list of those who are hard hit is stunning. I understand that Brandeis is hurting badly, having invested with Madoff. Harvard has lost a lot, not through investing with Madoff but just through the general collapse.

Seems that the country is in some deep stuff! It may be time to plant some beans in the back yard.

[luke warm]

kenberg, on Mar 2 2009, 04:46 PM, said:

Commenting on Warren Buffett's investment skills would be like commenting on Bob Hamman's bridge skills. I'll take a pass on that. He has made comments over the years that I have admired, one of them being an observation that it is desirable if parents can leave to their children enough money so that they can do anything but not so much that they can do nothing.

The list of those who are hard hit is stunning. I understand that Brandeis is hurting badly, having invested with Madoff. Harvard has lost a lot, not through investing with Madoff but just through the general collapse.

Seems that the country is in some deep stuff! It may be time to plant some beans in the back yard.

it'll be okay... just raise taxes

[hanp]

I think the $250,000+ incomes are really starting to feel it in their wallets.

[kenberg]

luke warm, on Mar 2 2009, 06:04 PM, said:

kenberg, on Mar 2 2009, 04:46 PM, said:

Commenting on Warren Buffett's investment skills would be like commenting on Bob Hamman's bridge skills. I'll take a pass on that. He has made comments over the years that I have admired, one of them being an observation that it is desirable if parents can leave to their children enough money so that they can do anything but not so much that they can do nothing.

The list of those who are hard hit is stunning. I understand that Brandeis is hurting badly, having invested with Madoff. Harvard has lost a lot, not through investing with Madoff but just through the general collapse.

Seems that the country is in some deep stuff! It may be time to plant some beans in the back yard.

it'll be okay... just raise taxes

Raising beans is more satisfying.

[Winstonm]

luke warm, on Mar 2 2009, 06:04 PM, said:

kenberg, on Mar 2 2009, 04:46 PM, said:

Commenting on Warren Buffett's investment skills would be like commenting on Bob Hamman's bridge skills. I'll take a pass on that. He has made comments over the years that I have admired, one of them being an observation that it is desirable if parents can leave to their children enough money so that they can do anything but not so much that they can do nothing.

The list of those who are hard hit is stunning. I understand that Brandeis is hurting badly, having invested with Madoff. Harvard has lost a lot, not through investing with Madoff but just through the general collapse.

Seems that the country is in some deep stuff! It may be time to plant some beans in the back yard.

it'll be okay... just raise taxes

Do you have knowledge of who benefited from the Bush tax cuts and what those cuts meant to you personally? Do you understand to whom the benefits go of reducing capital gains taxes?

Do you not grasp the reasons this country has polarized, that the disparity between rich and poor grows yearly and the middle class is disappearing?

[mike777]

Winstonm, on Mar 3 2009, 02:00 AM, said:

luke warm, on Mar 2 2009, 06:04 PM, said:

kenberg, on Mar 2 2009, 04:46 PM, said:

Commenting on Warren Buffett's investment skills would be like commenting on Bob Hamman's bridge skills. I'll take a pass on that. He has made comments over the years that I have admired, one of them being an observation that it is desirable if parents can leave to their children enough money so that they can do anything but not so much that they can do nothing.

The list of those who are hard hit is stunning. I understand that Brandeis is hurting badly, having invested with Madoff. Harvard has lost a lot, not through investing with Madoff but just through the general collapse.

Seems that the country is in some deep stuff! It may be time to plant some beans in the back yard.

it'll be okay... just raise taxes

Do you have knowledge of who benefited from the Bush tax cuts and what those cuts meant to you personally? Do you understand to whom the benefits go of reducing capital gains taxes?

Do you not grasp the reasons this country has polarized, that the disparity between rich and poor grows yearly and the middle class is disappearing?

I hope all......I mean alll benifit,benift alot, from tax cuts for 250K and higher.



for sake of facts.......if most....all most all..do not........think about 100%......tax

[Gerben42]

I cannot grasp how someone who has more money than he can possibly spend can talk about 2008 as being the toughest year of his life...

What I like about Buffett is that although he has all his sheep safe, that he is still worried about the rest of us who haven't.

[Al_U_Card]

Investments are all about security and value is all about confidence.

You can't eat jet planes and yachts. When the economy goes into the crapper, you just have more ***** on your hands, is all.

The crisis of confidence that is occurring happened because the "free" market was free in terms of access by and the influence of greed and insouciance. We are paying the price of a lack of vigilance and understanding. We looked the other way so that we wouldn't have to "understand" that betting on the performance of under-performers (sub-prime loans and their hedge-hog derivatives) is sheer speculation and therefore gambling....but not based on probabilities...based on faith...and God only knows where that hand-basket goes to.

[barmar]

kenberg, on Mar 2 2009, 04:46 PM, said:

Seems that the country is in some deep stuff! It may be time to plant some beans in the back yard.

Front-page story in my town's weekly paper was about a movement to legalize raising hens on residential property.

[kenberg]

barmar, on Mar 3 2009, 04:39 PM, said:

kenberg, on Mar 2 2009, 04:46 PM, said:

Seems that the country is in some deep stuff! It may be time to plant some beans in the back yard.

Front-page story in my town's weekly paper was about a movement to legalize raising hens on residential property.

Simultaneously humorous, interesting and scary.

[PassedOut]

Frank Rich quoted from Buffet's letter in his excellent piece in today's Sunday Times: Some Things Don’t Change in Grover’s Corners

Quote

It’s a trace memory of an American faith we soiled and buried with all our own nonsense in the first decade of our new century.

Retrieving that faith now requires extraordinary patience and optimism. We’re still working our way through the aftershocks of the orgy of irresponsibility and greed that brought America to this nadir. In his recent letter to shareholders, a chastened Warren Buffett likened our financial institutions’ recklessness to venereal disease. Even the innocent were infected because “it’s not just whom you sleep with” but also “whom they” — unnamed huge financial institutions — “are sleeping with,” he wrote. Indeed, our government is in the morally untenable position of rewarding the most promiscuous carrier of them all, A.I.G., with as much as $180 billion in taxpayers’ cash transfusions (so far) precisely because it can’t be disentangled from all the careless (and unidentified) trading partners sharing its infection.

Buffett’s sermon coincided with the public soul searching of another national sage, Elie Wiesel, who joined a Portfolio magazine panel discussion on Bernie Madoff. Some $37 million of Wiesel’s charitable foundation and personal wealth vanished in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. “We gave him everything,” Wiesel told the audience. “We thought he was God.”

How did reality become so warped that Wiesel, let alone thousands of lesser mortals, could mistake Madoff for God? It was this crook’s ability to pass for a deity that allowed his fraud to escape scrutiny not just from his victims but from the S.E.C. and the “money managers” who pimped his wares. This aura of godliness also shielded the “legal” Madoffs at firms like Citibank and Goldman Sachs. They spread V.D. with esoteric derivatives, then hedged their wild gambles with A.I.G. “insurance” (credit-default swaps) that proved to be the most porous prophylactics in the history of finance.

The simplest explanation for why America’s reality got so distorted is the economic imbalance that Barack Obama now wants to remedy with policies that his critics deride as “socialist” (“fascist” can’t be far behind): the obscene widening of income inequality between the very rich and everyone else since the 1970s. “There is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few,” the president said in his budget message. He was calling for fundamental fairness, not class warfare. America hasn’t seen such gaping inequality since the Gilded Age and 1920s boom that preceded the Great Depression.

Obama is right (as was Thomas Jefferson) to recognize the importance of "spreading the wealth around." And I say that as a conservative business owner who thinks it vital to maintain a large and strong middle class in the US.

Frank Rich said it well.

[H_KARLUK]

Beatin' th drums sounds mostly nice from far away.