50 best things Warren Buffett told investors over past 50 years
It’s been 50 years since Warren Buffett — a.k.a. the Oracle of Omaha — took control of Berkshire Hathaway BRK.A, -0.21% BRK.B, +0.07% and turned a sleepy textile company into a powerful conglomerate with multiple businesses and investments. And that means it’s been 50 years since Buffett started writing his annual letter to shareholders.
The 2014 edition — the epistles always refer back to the previous year — gives us the perfect excuse to review all 50 letters and find 50 of the most memorable quotes from them.
Keep in mind that Buffett’s early letters — some of which were not actually signed by him — featured little more than straightforward accounts of Berkshire’s finances. But by the late 1970s, the oracle started, well, oracle-ing, offering pointed, humorous and sage-like commentary on the markets. And along the way, the cost-conscious billionaire wasn’t afraid to make fun of himself (and his one indulgence — namely, a private jet).
Read and enjoy.
US debt is north of $18 trillion. (Amazingly, *cough*, it hasn’t changed in months *cough*.) Forward promises are north of $200 trillion, meaning that a child born today is responsible to repay $625,000. And since roughly half the US population pays no income tax… and presuming that this newborn will be a member of the productive half… he or she is born $1.25 million in debt. Such repayments will never happen. Most of those debts will not be repaid.
It did so for all the reasons that I’ve mentioned before — namely that Germany cannot allow a Grexit from the euro zone without ultimately destroying the German economic miracle of the last few decades … and the Greeks outside the euro would see their modern lifestyles crumble in the face of sharp inflation and radically reduced access to the imported goods they take for granted today
The confederation, which represents some 280,000 small and medium-sized businesses, has been badly hit by capital controls. More than half of Greece’s food and raw materials are imported, but without a functioning banking system there was no way to wire money abroad and pay for supplies, said Korkidis.
“Multinationals can, but local companies can’t,” he sighed. “Shortages are manageable this week because traders have stock, but next week that won’t be the case. We are experiencing things we never thought we’d see.”
To quantify the volatility the following chart shows the (absolute value of) percent deviation from silver’s 200 day moving average. A spike higher or lower is volatility. The six spikes in volatility above 40% deviation from the 200 day moving average are quite large.
Eurozone consumer prices rose for the first time in six months during May, a victory for the ECB in its campaign to avoid a debilitating period of deflation, during which businesses and households might hold back on spending in the expectation that they will get better deals in the future.
Tuesday is the final day of the state's current budget year, and top officials turned to planning for a Wednesday in which Illinois government has limited authority to spend money. It's also the day a cash-strapped CPS is due to make a $634 million pension payment
Financial soundness of South Korean households worsened in the first quarter as their debts snowballed on the back of low interest rates, a report showed Tuesday, adding to persistent concerns that a looming U.S. rate hike may unleash credit risks.
As systemic solutions fall short, we must grasp the nettle of making our own arrangements in a time characterized by burgeoning demands and diminishing resources, capital and security.
The idea that our large-scale problems could be fixed with systemic reforms is enticing: replace the thousands of pages of tax code with a simple flat tax without deductions, for example, or the replacement of too big to jail/fail banks with community-owned banks that served the public, not shareholders.
But the attraction of reforms is a siren song, because our system is run by vested interests for vested interests, period. Any real reform is Dead On Arrival (DOA) because any real reform threatens the swag and security of vested interests.
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