• 2011年伯克希尔·哈撒韦年度股东大会
  • 上午场
    • 1. 欢迎致辞
    • 2. 董事会成员介绍
    • 3. 亚洲灾难拖累第一季度收益
    • 4. David Sokol与Lubrizol：“不可原谅”且”无法解释”
    • 5. 介绍媒体记者
    • 6. 巴菲特关于David Sokol的时间线
    • 7. 美联储结束刺激措施时的市场反应
    • 8. 伯克希尔下一任董事长的角色
    • 2011年股东大会
    • 第二部分/共六部分
    • 11. 使用伯克希尔的股票进行收购
    • 11. Using Berkshire’s stock for acquisitions
    • 12. 巴菲特始终对美国资本主义持乐观态度
    • 12. Buffett is always optimistic about American capitalism
    • 13. 通胀环境下最好的资产
    • 13. Best assets in an inflationary environment
    • 14. 不支付股息，所以如果需要现金就卖掉一部分伯克希尔股票
    • 14. No dividend, so sell a slice of Berkshire if you need cash
    • 15. 仍然看好银行股富国银行和美国合众银行
    • 15. Still bullish on bank stocks Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp
    • 16. 生产性资产永远胜过黄金
    • 16. Productive assets will always beat gold
    • 21. 投资伯克希尔还是指数基金？
    • 21. Buy Berkshire stock or a mutual fund?
    • 2011年度股东大会
    • 第四部分/共六部分
    • 12. “愿你活到A股拆股的那一天”
    • 13. 巴菲特的最佳交易：聘用阿吉特·贾因
    • 14. 评估企业时“忘掉商誉”
    • 15. 芒格真心热爱好市多
    • 16. 激励孩子
    • 17. 伯克希尔下任CEO的薪酬激励
    • 18. 社会问题很重要但不影响投资决策
    • 19. 我们不会参与任何公司的拍卖
    • 20. 如何判断巴菲特是否在资本配置方面做得很好
    • 21. 不要把现在的机会和你最好的交易相比
    • 22. 你不需要读得快，但你应该阅读
    • 23. 巴菲特：甚至不应该有债务上限
    • 24. 核电“重要”且“安全”
    • 25. 慈善项目因压力团体而终止
    • 26. 为什么我们讨厌预测
    • 27. 巴菲特持有少量股票和大量债券
    • 27. Buffett owns a few stocks and lots of bonds
    • 28. 评估一家美国以外的公司
    • 28. Evaluating a company outside the U.S.
    • 29. 伯克希尔的短期现金去向
    • 29. Where Berkshire’s short-term cash goes
    • 30. 风电需要政府补贴
    • 30. Wind power needs government subsidies
    • 31. 我们绝不会让NetJets破产
    • 31. We would not have let NetJets go bankrupt
    • 32. 巴菲特的建议：投资于你自己的技能
    • 32. Buffett’s advice: invest in your own skills
    • 33. 再保险远比看起来难得多
    • 33. Reinsurance is a lot harder than it looks
    • 34. 巴菲特第一次见到托德·库姆斯
    • 34. How Buffett first met Todd Combs
    • 35. 收购与股票
    • 35. Acquisitions and stock
    • 36. 为什么我们不会为收购而发行股票
    • 36. Why we won’t issue stock to make an acquisition
    • 37. 房地产市场很糟糕，但我们会从反弹中获利
    • 37. Housing market is terrible, but we’ll profit on the rebound
    • 38. 正式业务会议前的短暂休会
    • 38. Short adjournment before formal business meeting
    • 39. 伯克希尔正式年度会议开始
    • 39. Berkshire formal annual meeting begins
    • 40. 选举董事
    • 43. 关于减少温室气体排放的股东动议
    • 44. 正式会议休会

WARREN BUFFETT: Good morning. I’m Warren. He’s Charlie. I can see, he can hear. That’s why we work together. (Laughter) Have trouble remembering each other’s names from time to time. (Laughs) We’re going to — we’re going to introduce the directors, we’re going to give you some information on the first quarter earnings. We’re going to talk briefly about the David Sokol/Lubrizol situation, and then we’re going to open it up for your questions. Anything as it relates to the Lubrizol matter is going to be transcribed and will be put up on the website — the Berkshire Hathaway website — just as promptly as we can, maybe this evening or this afternoon, maybe tomorrow morning, but very promptly, because we want to be sure that all shareholders hear — or get to read every word of what has been said here about the matter.

WARREN BUFFETT: First thing I’d like to do is introduce the directors. And if they’d stand and remain standing, you can withhold your applause as they stand, but you can go crazy at the end, or you can continue to withhold your applause. That will be your call. (Laughter) Charlie and I are up here, and we don’t like to stand up too often so we’ll skip our standing. The — Howard Buffett, Stephen Burke, Susan Decker, Bill Gates, Sandy Gottesman, Charlotte Guyman, Don Keough, Tom Murphy, Ron Olson, and Walter Scott. (Applause)

WARREN BUFFETT: Now, we have a few slides that deal with the first quarter earnings. I think Marc Hamburg would like me to emphasize that these are preliminary. This is about as early as we ever have a meeting, in relation to the quarter. Normally it’s always the first Saturday in May, so they had to work a little harder than usual to get these numbers together. And I will tell you as background that basically pretty much all of our businesses, with the exception of those that are related to residential housing, are getting better, and you can almost see it with most of them quarter by quarter. We have a wide diversity of businesses. We have more than 70 companies we list, but then Marmon itself has over a hundred businesses. So we are a cross section of not only the American economy, but to some extent we see a fair amount about what’s going on internationally, too. And in the first quarter, as has been the case, really, since the fall of 2009, both our nonresidential construction businesses, except for those nonresidential construction businesses, our other businesses have generally gotten better quarter by quarter, and there was no exception to that in the first quarter.

What was very different in the first quarter was that we had a — probably the second worst quarter for the insurance industry, in terms of catastrophes around the globe. Normally, the third quarter of the year is the worst period because that’s when hurricanes tend to hit the U.S. with most of them — well, about 50 percent of them occurring in September and then sort of forming a normal curve on either side of September — so the third quarter usually is the record quarter, and the third quarter was the record quarter back at the time of Katrina. But in the first quarter of this year, we had some major catastrophes in the Pacific Asian areas, and that hit the reinsurance industry particularly hard. No one knows at this point. I mean it’s a wild guess, but probably those catastrophes cost the reinsurance industry on the order of $50 billion, and we usually participate to the extent of 3 to 5 percent. First of all, I’ll give you our overall earnings the way we normally present them. And if we’ll put the first slide up. You can see that our insurance underwriting suffered an after-tax loss of $821 million.

Now, when I wrote the annual report, I postulated normal earning power of Berkshire at about 17 billion pretax and about 12 billion after tax, assuming breakeven on insurance underwriting. Our insurance underwriting has done better than breakeven. In fact, it’s made quite a bit of money for eight consecutive years. But I would say with a start of these catastrophes in the first quarter — or the catastrophes experience we had in the first quarter — I would say that it’s unlikely that we would have an underwriting profit for 2011. If it was remarkably catastrophe-free from this point forward, including hurricanes in the United States, it’s conceivable we would break even or make a tiny profit. But that’s an improbable assumption, so I think for the first time in nine years we will likely have an insurance underwriting loss this year. I think our record may very well be quite a bit better than, certainly, most other reinsurers and it does not change my expectation that over time, our insurance underwriting should at least break even.

And if you have followed the — what I’ve written in the annual reports — if insurance breaks even, we get the free use of float, and that’s been enormously valuable in the past and I would expect it to be in the future. And if you look at the other lines, insurance investment income is down a little. That will go down more because our Goldman Sachs preferred was called in April. Our General Electric preferred is almost certain to be called in October. So we have lost — and we lost a — we had called a note from Swiss Re that was paying us 12 percent and came to something over $360 million a year when the Swiss franc went above par. So we have lost, or are losing, at least three very high-yield investments, which we cannot replace with similar investments at present. So that line will go down. On the other hand, at the end of the quarter we had 38 billion in cash, and that does not count the 5 1/2 billion that we were going to receive in April from our Goldman Sachs preferred. So that money is earning virtually nothing now, and I would not expect that to be part of the longterm picture, either.

So there would — you know, just a few percent on that would be many, many hundreds of millions of dollars. So I think over time, our insurance investment income, even though it will dip throughout this year, I would expect that if we have a similar level of investments, to actually grow from the level we show here. We had the full ownership of BNSF in the quarter this year. We only had it, I think, from February 12th last year, so that, in a significant way, accounts for the gain in that next line of railroad, utilities and energy. But the BNSF also had a significant gain in earnings and the railroad business looks to me like it will have a very good year this year, not just our railroad but all railroads, and the competitive advantage of railroads is becoming more and more evident, almost by the day, particularly as fuel prices increase. And in the remaining lines, we also had gains in most of our businesses. So overall, we got hit very hard in the insurance business.

And if we’ll move to slide 2, we list the three major catastrophes that occurred, which in aggregate we estimate we have a total loss of a billion, 673 pretax, and that figure, as with all estimates — early estimates about major catastrophes — is subject to a lot of change. Nobody knows what the insured losses will be from the Japanese earthquake. But this is our best estimate now. You’ll notice that over 40 percent of the underwriting loss comes from a contract we have with Swiss Re where we get 20 percent of their business. That contract is in the fourth of its five years. They have indicated that they will not be interested in renewing it. I just wish they told us that a few months ago. (Laughs) But we’ve enjoyed the relationship with Swiss Re, it’s just that we enjoy it some quarters more than others. Our estimate — we’ve added a little something into their estimate because on balance we feel that most catastrophe losses develop upward. It’s sort of the nature of the business.

But that — incidentally, the tornadoes in April, just at GEICO, we expect — and all we’re talking about is automobiles here, cars, because we don’t insure homeowners. We act as agent in placing insurance for people, but we do not take the insurance risk. We estimate that 25,000 cars will get automobile claims. That’s a lot of automobiles when you think about it, and our market share is about 9 percent, although it varies by state. But it’s been an extraordinary tornado season, as you know. That does not hit — I do not believe that that hits the reinsurance business particularly hard, because there are multiple, multiple events but no one event is anything like, say, the New Zealand earthquake. The New Zealand earthquake estimated at $12 billion of insured damage. Charlie, how many people are in New Zealand?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well —

WARREN BUFFETT: We don’t practice these things, as will become evident here. (Laughter)

CHARLIE MUNGER: I’d guess —

WARREN BUFFETT: What, about four million? Three million?

CHARLIE MUNGER: I’d guess a little more than that.

WARREN BUFFETT: Four?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Five, maybe.

WARREN BUFFETT: Five, OK. Five million people. So that’s 1/60th of the population, we’ll say, of the United States. And if you take 12 billion and multiply it by 60, you come up with 720 billion, which is 10 times Katrina, in terms of the impact on a place like that. So those — there’s been some really extraordinary earthquakes. And as I say, the worst part of the season is, generally speaking, for reinsurers, is yet to come. So this may be a year that the reinsurers will remember, although they might prefer to forget it. There’s some good news on the insurance front. On the next slide I show the growth in policies at GEICO month by month this year versus last year. Now, if you’ll remember, in the annual report I gave an explanation, in talking about goodwill value, about how the goodwill of GEICO is carried on our books at about a billion dollars. And no matter how successful the business becomes, that goodwill value is never increased on the books, but it does grow.

And as I put in the annual report, I estimate its value currently, using the same sort of yardstick we used when we purchased the second half of the company back in 1995, I estimate that value has grown, maybe, to 14 billion. I mean, every policyholder at GEICO, on average, has a value to us, the way I calculate it, of something on the order of $1,500. And when we add 318,000 — and as of yesterday it was up to 381,000 — when we add that, we’ve added something approaching $500 million to the goodwill value. That does not count the earnings from underwriting, which were substantial for GEICO. That does not count the investment income from the float, it does not count the investment income from the net worth we have attributed to it. That is added goodwill value, the same sort of goodwill value that a Coca-Cola has, or a Mars has, or any company like that. And people think of it differently when they think of most consumer products. But a policyholder to Berkshire at GEICO has very, very significant value. There’s a very significant percentage have been there for 10 years or more.

And it’s something that we do not realize on our balance sheet or income account, but it’s an asset that’s every bit as real as the numbers that we do put on the balance sheet. So there’s good news at GEICO. We are gaining market share every day. As a matter of fact, if you think about it, we have some people in the adjacent room that will be glad to sell you GEICO policies, and if only 66 of you sign up, that’s a goodwill value of about $100,000, so it will take care of some of the expenses of this meeting. (Laughter) Not that I care whether you do it or not but — (Laughs) Now, there’s one more item I want to go through on the earnings picture, just because it illustrates to some extent the capriciousness of accounting and how we value our securities — or whether we take write-downs on them, I should say. There’s something called “other than temporary impairment,” which is an accounting rule.

It’s kind of a fuzzy accounting rule, but it says that if you own a security for a while, and you paid X for it, and it’s been selling at, say, 80 percent of X for quite a while, nobody knows exactly what quite a while means, and I’m sure they phrase it differently in the accounting textbooks, but anyway, if it sells there for quite a while, you’re supposed to mark it down to that new valuation and have that markdown go through your income account, through your profit and loss account. Now we mark it down in any event for the balance sheet, and the balance sheet is what gives you the number for book value and is our reference point. But only when it meets this other than temporary thing does the mark down actually get run through the profit and loss account. Now, on March 31, as is shown, I believe, on the next slide, we owned some Wells Fargo stock, which had a cost of about 8 billion and the market value was 11.3 billion.

But some of the Wells Fargo stock we bought had been bought at higher prices than the March 31 figure, whereas, as you can see, a lot of the stock, which had a gain in it of 3.7 billion, had been bought at lower prices. Well, under the rules, we were required to mark down the stock we bought at a higher price by 337 million, whereas we ignored, in the income account, the 3.7 billion of gain. Now, interestingly enough, there’s two ways you can account for securities, as I understand it, both fully meeting GAAP accounting requirements. And if we had — if we had used the average cost method, we would not have had to mark down. But we use what they call the specific identification method. Now the specific identification method is actually useful to us from a tax standpoint, because it means whenever we sell a security we can pick out the highest priced security and attribute the sale to that. So it actually saves us money, or the time use of money, to get into specific identification.

But we could just as easily use the average cost method and then we would not have a writedown like we have and that’s why I — one of the reasons I emphasize that — the fact that you should ignore gains or losses in securities or derivatives on a quarterly basis, or even an annual basis. The important thing is what the operating earnings of our businesses are doing and what the gain in book value, generally, has been. And then on top of that, you have to make your own estimate for what intrinsic value is, which would include things like the goodwill value that has been developed at GEICO. I apologize for taking you through the accounting lessons, but the headlines often just say what the final net income is, as if that’s the all-important figure. And sometimes it’s the all-deceptive figure. I mean, it really bears — if you include gains and losses — it bears, really, no connection to the reality of whether a quarter has been satisfactory from our standpoint. But it does get a lot of attention in the press and that’s why we spend, perhaps, an inordinate amount of time trying to explain what really takes place in our financials.

Now, I think we’re going to get to the questions and answers here in just a second. We’ll alternate between the press group on my right and 13 stations that — microphones that have been placed. I think a dozen of them in this room and maybe one in one of the overflow rooms.

WARREN BUFFETT: I’d like to just comment for a few minutes — and this will be transcribed and up on the internet at our web page — I’d like to comment for just a few minutes, and I’d like to ask Charlie then to give his thoughts, on the matter of David Sokol and the purchase of Lubrizol stock. You saw in the movie a clip from the Salomon situation, and that occurred almost 20 years ago. It will be 20 years ago this August. And at the time, it was a Sunday, Charlie was there, and I was elected the chairman at — what, about 3:00 in the afternoon or so I think on a Sunday at Salomon, and I went down to address a press group. And almost the first — somewhere in the early questions, somebody sort of asked me, you know, what happened? Well, A) I’d just gotten to Salomon fairly recently, so I didn’t know too much about it, but the phrase that came out of my mind then — out of my mouth then — sometimes my mind and my mouth are coordinated — (laughter) — the phrase that came out of my mouth then was that what happened was inexplicable and inexcusable. Now, it’s 20 years later, and looking back on Salomon, I still find what happened inexplicable and inexcusable. You know, I will never understand exactly why some of the events that transpired did transpire. And to some extent, in looking at what happened a few months ago with Dave Sokol’s failure to notify me at all that he’d had any kind of contact with Citigroup. In fact, he directed my attention to the fact that they represented Lubrizol and never said a word about any contact with them.

And then the purchases of stock immediately prior to recommending Lubrizol to Berkshire, I think I — for reasons that are laid out in the audit committee report, which I urge you to read and which is on our website — I don’t think there’s any question about the inexcusable part that Dave violated, and that the code of ethics, he violated our insider trading rules, and he violated the principles I laid out — I lay out — every two years in a direct personal letter to all of our managers and which I’ve been doing for a long time. So I — you can read the audit committee report about that. The inexplicable part is somewhat — well, it’s inexplicable, but I’d like to talk about it a little bit because I will tell you what goes through my mind in respect to it. Certainly — well, one interesting point is that Dave, to my knowledge, at least, made no attempt to disguise the fact that he was buying the stock.

I mean, you know, you read about insider trading cases and people set up trusts in Luxembourg, or they use neighbors who know neighbors, or they use third cousins — I mean, they have various ways of trying to buy the stock so that when it’s later — FINRA is a supervising organization — looks at the trading activity in the months prior to a deal, they do not see names that jump out at them as being associated with the deal. To my knowledge, Dave did nothing like that, so he was leaving a total record as to his purchases. Now, I think at least usually — and maybe always — we are queried after any deal. We are asked who knew about it when, and we supply a list of whether it’s people at the law firm or people that are in a secretarial position at our place or the law firm. We give them a list of everybody that might have known or did know about the deal prior to the public announcement. And I don’t know whether they do that 100 percent of the time, but certainly it’s my experience that you get that.

And then a while later, you get a list of names of people that FINRA, again, has picked up as trading it, and they ask you whether any of those names ring a bell with you. So they’re trying to put together whether anybody did any inside trading ahead of time. So the odds that if you’re trading in your own name, and you’re on that list of people who know of a deal ahead of time, the odds that it’s not going to get picked up seem to me are very much against you. But, to my knowledge, Dave did not disguise the trading. Which, you know, that’s somewhat inexplicable that if he really felt he was engaging in insider trading and knew the penalties that could be attached to it, that he essentially did it right out in the open. The second fact, which is less — perhaps less — puzzling, but Dave obviously has a net worth in very high numbers. He made, I think, close to $24 million. He earned it from Berkshire last year, and we got our money’s worth, but he did get $24 million, too.

So I would say that there are plenty of activities in this world that are unsavory that are committed by people with lots of money. So I don’t regard that as, you know, totally puzzling. But I will give you one instance that does make it puzzling. It makes it very puzzling to me. We bought MidAmerican at the end — Berkshire Hathaway bought MidAmerican — at the end of 1999. Berkshire Hathaway bought about 80 percent. Walter Scott, who I just introduced, and his family was the second largest holder, I think something over 10 percent, and then two operating people, Dave Sokol the senior one, owned or had options on a big piece, and Greg Abel, a terrific partner of Dave’s, also had a piece. And Walter Scott — and I’ve told this story privately a few times but not — I don’t think I’ve done it publicly. Walter Scott came to me a year or two after we’d bought it, and Walter said, I think we ought to have some special compensation arrangement for Dave and Greg if they perform in a really outstanding manner. And he said — I think maybe he suggested something involving equity and he saw me turn white.

So he said, “Why don’t you design one and let me know.” So I just scribbled something out on a yellow pad. It didn’t take me five minutes. And we call it, sort of in honor of Charlie, although he didn’t know about it, we called it the Lollapalooza. And it provided for a very large cash payout, which I’ll get to in a second, based on the five-year compounded gain in earnings. And we were starting from a high base, in other words this was not from any depressed level, and we set a figure that no other utility company in the United States was going to come close to. But if that figure were achieved, we were going to give $50 million to Dave and $25 million to Greg Abel. And I had Dave come to the office and I said, “Here’s what Walter and I are thinking,” and, “What do you think of this plan?” And it had these figures on per share that — that like I say, move forward at 16 percent compounded per year, and then I say, “Here’s the payout.”

And he looked at it for just a very short period of time and he said — he said, “Warren, this is more than generous.” But he said, “There’s just one change you should make.” And I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “You should split it equally between me and Greg, instead of being 50 million for me and 25 for Greg. It should be 37 1/2 apiece.” So I witnessed — and Walter witnessed, you can talk to him about it — we witnessed Dave voluntarily, without any — Greg had nothing to do with it, he wasn’t there — we saw Dave transfer over 12 1/2 million dollars — getting no fanfare, no credit whatsoever — to his, in effect, junior partner. And I thought that was rather extraordinary, and what really makes it extraordinary is that $3 million, you know, 10 or so years later, would have led to the kind of troubles that it’s led to.

I find — that is really the fact that I find inexplicable, and I think I’ll probably — you know, it’s 20 years after Salomon — 20 years from now Charlie will be 107 — (laughter) — and we won’t mention what I’ll be — but I think 20 years from now, I will not understand what causes a man to voluntarily turn away 12 1/2 million dollars to an associate without getting any credit for it in the world, and then 10 or so years later, buy a significant amount of stock the week before he talked to me. And when he talked to me about Lubrizol, it was either the 14th or 15th — he says it was 14th, I have no reason to disagree with that. The only reason I couldn’t say specifically was I had eight university groups, 160 students, in on that Friday. That’s the only thing that shows, and I spent most of the day with them. And the 10K and the 10Q that got printed out on Saturday have that date on them, the 15th, when I looked at Lubrizol for the first time.

You might be interested in knowing, I’ve been looking up 10Ks and 10Qs for 20 or 30 years, but I don’t know how to print them out. So, fortunately, Tracy Britt was in the office, and I said, “Tracy, would you print this damn thing out? I don’t know how to do it yet.” (Laughter) But that is why I don’t know whether it was the 14th or the 15th. The 10Q says the 15th. But, at that time, when Dave called me on it, he said nothing about contact with Citigroup or anything of the sort and he — and I said, “I don’t know anything, really, about the company.” He said, “Well, take a look at it. It — you know, it might fit Berkshire.” And I said, “How come?” And he said, well — he said, “I’ve owned it and it’s a good company. It’s a Berkshire-type company.”

And, you know, I obviously made a big mistake by not saying, “Well, when did you buy it?” But I think if somebody says I’ve owned the stock, you know it sounds to me like they didn’t buy it the previous week. So there we are with a situation, which is sad for Berkshire, sad for Dave, still inexplicable in my mind, and we will undoubtedly get more questions on that. We’ll be glad to answer them. Charlie, do you have any thoughts on this?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, I think it’s generally a mistake to assume that rationality is going to be perfect, even in very able people. (Laughter) We prove that pretty well, regularly.

WARREN BUFFETT: Do you have any explanation for the irrational?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah. I think hubris contributes to it.

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, we’ve gotten quite a bit out of him, folks. (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: OK. Let’s go to work. We’ll start with Carol Loomis of Fortune Magazine. I might as well — I should introduce our group here. Oh, we didn’t go alphabetical this time. We’ve got Carol, and then we’ve got Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times, and we have Becky Quick of CNBC. (Applause) In terms of my check-off system, I’m still going to go to Becky. That’s alphabetical. So, Andrew, it didn’t do you any good to try to move over there into the center spot. (Laughs) Carol, you’re on.

CAROL LOOMIS: Good morning from all of us, and I will make the small preamble that I’ve made before. We’ve been getting questions for a couple of months, each of us on our e-mail. Sometimes a question will be sent to all three of us and sometimes they’ll just send to one of us, therefore it becomes very hard to count how many we’ve had, but certainly it’s in the many hundreds and probably in the — up into a thousand, 2000. And obviously we aren’t going to be able to ask every question — every good question. We have a lot of good questions we won’t be able to get to. But it’s just that you had to pick and choose. And the other thing I should say is that whatever we do ask, Warren and Charlie have no idea of the question. None. No hint.

WARREN BUFFETT: Sometimes we have no idea of the answer either, but go ahead. (Laughter)

CAROL LOOMIS: So I will begin. I don’t think that anybody will be surprised that it is a Sokol question. And actually, the — this particular long-term shareholder believed, as Warren has believed, he says, “I do not see why he should have been expected to ask Sokol about his Lubrizol stock holdings when he said he owned the stock. That wouldn’t have been a natural question. “But when you found out the details of his stock purchases a short time later, I do not understand your reaction. “Surely you realized immediately that these facts were going to become known and that they were going to damage Berkshire’s reputation, something you had said repeatedly you would be ruthless in protecting. “Being ruthless probably would have meant your firing Sokol on the spot, but you didn’t do that. “And then you put out a press release that many Berkshire shareholders that I have talked to found totally inadequate. “You have always been very direct in stating things. You were not direct in that press release, except in praising David Sokol. Otherwise you stated some facts and behavior that you said you didn’t believe was illegal.

“And then you ended the release, leaving us — now maybe you thought somehow we were going to read between the lines — without expressing any anger about what had happened. Why were you not incensed? “If you were, why did you not express your anger? Why did you handle this matter in the inadequate way you did?”

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. The — (applause) — it wasn’t really immediately thereafter. I learned on March 14th, which was the day we announced it. Now bear in mind his first conversation when he said he owned the stock was January 14th. In between January 14th and March 14th, Dave gave no indication that he’d had any contact with Citigroup of any kind, and as we learned later, I mean, he went — they met in, maybe, October or something like that where — and talked about possible acquisition candidates for Berkshire. But none of that — he told me at one point, he said Evercore and Citi represent Lubrizol. One of them represents the directors and one of them represents the company, and not a word about any contact. On March 14th, when the deal was announced in the morning, I got a call from John Freund. John Freund is probably here today. John Freund works for Citi in Chicago, and he handles — he’s handled the great majority of our business in equities for decades, and I’ve got a direct line to him. I talk to him frequently.

And he called and said congratulations and — you know and aren’t you proud of our — words to the effect. You can talk to John directly, although I’ve been told that the Citi lawyers have told him not to talk, but that — knowing the press, they probably can work something out of him. The — he’s — essentially his words were that Citi’s team had worked with Dave on this acquisition, and they were proud to be part of it, et cetera, et cetera. And this was all news to me, so that set up some yellow lights, at least. And the next day, I had Marc Hamburg, our CFO, call Dave, and Dave readily gave him the information about when he had bought the stock and how much. Marc also asked him what the participation of Citi had been in reference to Berkshire’s side of the transaction, and Dave said that he thought he called a fellow there to get their phone number, which turned out to be somewhat of an understatement. Now, during the period when we announced the deal on March 14th, Lubrizol is the one that needed to prepare a proxy statement. We were not issuing shares at Berkshire.

So there was no proxy statement, no — nothing of this — that sort — on our part. The Lubrizol legal team, Jones Day, went to work with Lubrizol management to start preparing the proxy statement. We eagerly awaited to see the first draft of that because I was going to be leaving for Asia on Saturday, which, I guess, would be the 19th, and I wanted to see what Lubrizol had to say about this whole Citi matter or anything else. The most interesting part of every proxy statement is something that says — it’s basically the history of the transaction, and it’s the first thing I read on any deal because it gives you a blowby-blow of what has taken place. And as Marc Hamburg can tell you, I kept — and our law firm can tell you — I kept urging them to get that to me before I took off for Asia. We got that the afternoon of Friday the 18th, and it had a fair amount of material in it about Dave’s involvement with Citigroup.

Then at that point — I believe it was at that point — our law firm got involved, Munger Tolles got involved, in their input to the Lubrizol lawyers as to what we had seen that was different or what we had seen that they didn’t know about that we could add. Ron Olson, the director of Berkshire and partner of Munger Tolles, was on the trip to Asia. So we got on the plane on Saturday the 19th and traveled over the next week until the 26th. And we knew at that point that his partners at Munger Tolles were interviewing Dave, as — maybe some other people too, but certainly Dave — and I believe that he was interviewed at least three times about both the stock purchases, the history of things with — of his relationship with Citigroup, and they were assembling this information. I don’t have a BlackBerry or whatever it may be. Ron does. So he would get some information as we were over there. And he was getting some input but — and we decided that when we got back we would need to have a prompt meeting of the Berkshire board about this matter.

And we would also learn what — the full details, at least — of what Bob Denham, and maybe other attorneys at Munger Tolles learned from their interviews with Dave. And we back on — I guess it would be Saturday the 26th — and on the 28th we were going to bring Charlie into it before calling a board meeting. But there would have been a board meeting that week. And then about five or so in the afternoon, a letter was delivered by Dave’s assistant, which really came out of the blue. And I — he said to me he felt he was retiring on a high point and he gave the reasons why he was retiring, which I laid out and so on. I don’t know whether the questioning the previous week had affected his attitude. He would say not. But in any event, we had that resignation. That resignation as is — I believe it may have been put in the audit committee report — may have saved us some money.

If we’d fired him, the question would be whether it was with cause or not with cause, and we would have said it was with cause, but that might have very well gotten litigated, and a retirement did provide, in effect, the same non-level of severance payments that a firing with cause provided. So I drafted up a press release, which has since been the subject of at least mild criticism — (laughs) — and I laid out the good things that Dave had done, which he had done for the company. He’d done many good things, some extraordinary things. And then I laid out some actions which I said, based on what I knew then, did not seem to me to be unlawful, and incidentally, I talked with both Charlie and Ron about that. Ron would have been more careful in that wording. I’m not sure Charlie would have been. I’ll let him speak for himself on that.

And we ran it by — I ran it by Dave Tuesday morning, just to be sure the facts were accurate, and he said — he objected very much to something I’d put in where I said that I thought that he was, in effect, had had his hopes dashed for succeeding me and that was part of the reason, and he said that was absolutely not true, that he had no hopes ever of succeeding me and that I — you know, basically he was telling me what was in his mind, and I shouldn’t be trying to second-guess what was in his mind. So I took that part out. But he affirmed all of the other facts in that letter, and then I took it out, I sent it to him a second time to make sure that he was OK with the facts, and he said they were accurate. Now, in there was included the fact that Dave had no indication that Lubrizol had any interest in an approach from Berkshire and that, at least according to the final Lubrizol proxy, is not the case.

I have not talked to anybody except John Freund at Citigroup, so I have no idea what took place with the investment bankers at Citigroup, except for what I read in the Lubrizol proxy. But the Lubrizol proxy now says that Dave did know that Lubrizol had an interest on December 17th. But, both in the two chances he had to review it, and then when he went on CNBC on a Thursday and he talked for a half an hour, he made no attempt to correct any of the facts in it. Now, on Wednesday, when we put out the report, we had to have a board meeting first. It was news to the board. They got the release a little bit ahead of time and then we had a board meeting. We also delivered — well, through our law firm, we phoned the head of the enforcement division of the Securities and Exchange Commission and told him exactly the facts regarding the stock purchases and anything else that they might have cared to know. So I think we acted in that case, very, very promptly, to make sure the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the top of the enforcement division, was well-versed on what had taken place, to our knowledge up to that point.

So, from our standpoint and my standpoint, Dave was gone, minimum severance costs, minimum chances for lawsuits about compensation due him, and we had turned over some very damning evidence, in my view, to both the public and to the SEC. What I think bothers people is that there wasn’t some big sense of outrage or something in the release, and, you know, I plead guilty to that. I — this fellow had done a lot of good things for us over 10 or 11 years, and I felt that if I’m laying out a whole bunch of facts that are going to create lots of problems for him for years to come, that I also list his side of the equation, in terms of what he’d done for Berkshire. And I — and as I said a little bit earlier, you know, one thing I didn’t even lay out was this extraordinary act where, in effect, he turned over 12 1/2 million dollars to a fellow employee. So that’s the history of my thinking on it. Charlie, do you want to add anything? (Applause)

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yes. Well, I think we can concede that that press release was not the cleverest press release in the history of the world. (Laughter) The facts were complicated, and we didn’t foresee, appropriately, the natural reaction. But I would argue that you don’t want to make important decisions in anger. You want to display as much ruthlessness as your duty requires, and you do not want to add one single iota because you’re angry. So, Tom Murphy, one of our best directors — (applause) — one of our best directors, always told the people at Cap Cities, you can always tell a man to go to hell tomorrow if it’s such a good idea. (Laughter) So the anger part of it — and I don’t think it was wrong to remember the man’s virtues as well as his error. (Applause)

WARREN BUFFETT: I might add as an aside, Charlie and I have worked together for 52 years, and we have disagreed on a lot of things. We’ve never had an argument. I need Tom Murphy’s advice to remind myself of it a lot of times on other things, but with Charlie it’s never even been necessary. It was long before I met Murph.

WARREN BUFFETT: OK. Let’s go to area 1.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Mary Broderick, Berkeley, California. Good morning, Mr. Buffett. Good morning, Mr. Munger. And a big thank you. You probably aren’t aware of this, but you’ve been my personal financial and investment advisors for years. I would like to know what you think the effect of the government ending the POMO program mid-July this year will have on the stock market and the economy in general.

WARREN BUFFETT: The government ending the — QE2 or —

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Permanent open market operation.

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, you’re one acronym ahead of me. (Laughter) The — well, just as we’re discussing it now, it’s no secret what they’re going to do. I mean, it’s sort of the most advertised open market purchase in history, and probably in terms of defining the amount per month and when it comes to an end, you know, what the balance sheet will look like at the end of the Fed. So I don’t think — you know, if something is that well known by all participants in a market, I think any effect of it has been discounted by this point in time. I mean, if you say you’re going to increase tax rates in a year, we’ll say, on corporations or decrease them or whatever it may be, and it’s really done and locked in stone, the market doesn’t wait until the date when the tax increases or decreases go through to build that into market prices.

So I don’t — I see no reason — there may be some other things that happen then — but I see no reason why simply having that program come to an end will cause any significant change in stock or bond markets at that time. You know, obviously, a huge market force will be withdrawn. I mean you buy $600 billion worth of Treasurys and, you know, you probably leave a few traces along the way that you’ve done it. And it has been 100 billion or so a month, and that purchasing will not be in the market but the government issuances of debt will still be at a level that are consistent with what they are now. So it will be a different market, but I think it’s a different market that’s already been anticipated. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: I have nothing to add. (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: Yep.

You know, every time I look at a business — when we bought See’s Candy in 1972, I said to myself, if I had a hundred million dollars and I wanted to go in and take on See’s Candy, could I do it? And I came to the conclusion, no, so we bought See’s Candy. If the answer had been yes, we wouldn’t have done it. I asked myself that same question, you know, can I start a soft drink company and take on Coca-Cola if I have a hundred billion dollars, you know? Richard Branson tried it some years ago in something called Virgin Cola. You know, the brand is supposed to be a promise. I’m not sure that’s the promise you want to get if you buy a soft drink but — laughter) — in any event, I felt after my conversation with Dave, subject to a second conversation with James Hambrick, but covering the same ground, that it’s not impossible at all for people to enter this business.

But in terms of the service that — and the relatively low cost of what Lubrizol brings to the party, and in terms of people trying to break into a market and take them on — and it’s not a huge market, it’s probably only about a $10 billion market overall, I decided that there was a pretty good-sized moat around this. They’ve got lots and lots of patents, but more than that, they have a connection with customers. They work with customers when new engines come along to develop the right kind of additive. So I felt that I had an understanding — didn’t understand one thing more about chemistry than when I started — but I felt that I had an understanding of the economics of the business, the same way I felt that when the ISCAR people talked to me — I mean, who would think you can take some tungsten out of the ground in China and put it in the little carbide tools and that you could have some durable competitive advantage? But I decided ISCAR had a durable competitive advantage after looking at it for a while.

That’s the conclusion — I have come to the conclusion that — and Charlie as well — that the Lubrizol position is the dominant — or the number one company, not dominant — but the number one company, in terms of market share, in that business — is sustainable and that it’s a very good business over time. It helps — you know, they are helping engines run longer, run smoother, you know. You know, when metal is acting on metal, the lubricants are important, and they’re always going to be around. And I think Lubrizol will be the leading company for a very, very long time. And that’s the conclusion I came to. And I did not have a fix on that, nor did Charlie, prior to Dave relaying on to me what he had learned at that dinner, which incidentally, Lubrizol had been telling the world — I mean they made investor presentations and all that quite extensively over the years. I simply hadn’t paid any real attention to it. And when it was explained to me, I thought I understood it, and I still think I understand it. I think Lubrizol will be a very, very good addition to Berkshire.

And I saw James Hambrick just yesterday, and despite the turmoil around this, they are very enthused about becoming part of Berkshire, that they regard it as the ideal home. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah, you know, ISCAR and Lubrizol, to some extent, are sisters under the skin. You’ve got very small markets that aren’t really too attractive to anybody with any sense to enter, and fanaticism in service. So if you have any more like that why, please give Warren a call. (Laughter)

11. Using Berkshire’s stock for acquisitions

WARREN BUFFETT: OK. Area 3.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: This is Hsiang Hsiao Chu (PH) from Ottawa, Ontario. Warren, Charlie, I admire you guys tremendously. I want to ask a question about the valuation of your company. You said, “Price is what you pay and value is what you get.” In your letter to the shareholders this year, each Class A share owns about — investment about $95,000, and each share commands an earnings of $6,000. So in my simplistic way of calculation, each share is worth $95,000 of investment plus the earnings discounted at 7 percent. That’s another about $90,000. So it adds up to about 185,000. Is that correct? Does that mean the complexity of your empire is a value trap?

WARREN BUFFETT: We give those figures because we think they’re important, both the investments per share and the operating earnings per share, excluding earnings that come from the investments, and leaving out insurance underwriting profits or losses, because we think at worst they’ll break even, but they do bounce around from year to year. Those figures are pretax on the operating earnings, so I’m not sure whether you’re applying your discount factor to pretax or after-tax. But we think they’re important. And I would expect — well, the operating earnings, you know, are almost certain to increase. How much, you know, who knows? But that number is likely to go up. The investments are still about the same as at year-end but that — they could go up or down based on whether we’re able to buy more operating businesses. Our goal is to build both numbers to some extent, but our primary goal is to build the operating earnings figures.

We never — we — if Charlie and I had to stick a number in an envelope in front of us as to what we thought the intrinsic value of Berkshire was, well, neither one of us would stick a figure, we’d stick a range, because it would be ridiculous to come up with a single specific number, which encompasses not only the businesses we own, but what we’re going to do with the capital in the future. But even our ranges would differ modestly, and they might differ tomorrow, in terms of how I would feel versus today, but not dramatically at all. I would say this: I think — I certainly — well, you’ve received signals once or twice when we said we would buy in our stock, we obviously thought that it was selling below the bottom of a conservative range of intrinsic value, and we did that once some years ago. And by saying so, of course, the stock went up, and so we never got any stock bought. So there’s sort of a self-defeating factor about taking the kind of approach to it that we do, in terms of really telling people that the only reason we’ll buy in stock is because we think it’s cheap.

That is not standard practice in corporate America at all. In fact, corporate America, to some extent, buys in their stock more aggressively when it’s high than when it’s low. But they may have some equation in their mind that escapes my reasoning power. But the — I would — we do not regard Berkshire as overpriced. And I would say that we had, very recently, we had a very, very large international company that might well have been interested in doing something with Berkshire, and it’s a very nice company, but it’s bigger than we can handle unless we would use a lot of stock. And we won’t use the stock. We just think our shareholders would come out behind. It would be a wonderful company and, you know, make a lot of headlines, but in the end our shareholders would be poorer because our stock is a currency, and unless it’s fully valued, it’s a big mistake to use it as a currency. Now, we used some in the Burlington deal, but we used a whole lot more cash, and, in effect, we only used 30 percent for stock, and it was worth doing, but it was painful.

And if Lubrizol had wanted to do a deal involving stock, we would not have done it. I told James Hambrick that right off the bat. So we had absolutely no interest in buying Lubrizol — we were perfectly willing to give, you know, close to $9 billion in cash, and in my view, we’re getting our money’s worth. But we would not have given a significant portion of it in Berkshire stock, because we would be giving away part of the businesses we already own, and we like Burlington, and we like See’s Candy. We like ISCAR. And to give away a portion of those, even to get another very good business, would not make financial sense for our shareholders. So you can draw your own deductions about our calculations of intrinsic value from that statement. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, he’s obviously looking at two right factors. And I think that we have not permanently lost the ability to do some interesting things eventually with our enormous wealth in cash and marketable securities. We won’t always be as inactive as we are now.

WARREN BUFFETT: We’re not that inactive, Charlie. (Laughter)

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, I don’t know. You practically crawl out of your skin, sometimes.

WARREN BUFFETT: Nine billion is — you know, we say normal earning power is 12 billion. That uses up a good portion of one year’s quota. Although we’d like to use more. I mean, there’s no question.

CHARLIE MUNGER: Now you’re talking.

WARREN BUFFETT: Can you see us using stock in the next few years?

CHARLIE MUNGER: If the business were good enough, of course. Our trouble is — it’s a terrible trouble you people have — the businesses you already own are so good it’s not wise to part with them to get a business we don’t own. Ordinarily.

12. Buffett is always optimistic about American capitalism

WARREN BUFFETT: Carol?

CAROL LOOMIS: This is for Warren — and Charlie, too — from your longtime Omaha friend Dick Holland. “Whenever you talk in a general way about America’s economic future, your remarks are invariably positive, even glowing, despite the severe problems of growing public and private debt, the huge budget imbalances that result, and no real policies to solve these problems. “Some experts believe that we may reach the point where future bond offerings to cover the rising debt might fail. Many wonder if we are not entering a time of national decline. “How can a lousy long-term U.S. economy make you so happy, and why do you see gold nuggets where others see salt?”

WARREN BUFFETT: That’s from Charlie’s good friend as well, Dick Holland, who we both have known for 60-plus years. I don’t see how anybody can be other than enthused about this country. If you look back to 1776 or 1789, whichever one you want to date it from, you know, it has been the most extraordinary economic period in the history of the world. In fact, if you go back — I was born on August 30th, 1930. Now, if somebody had come to me in the womb and said, “Let me tell you what it’s like outside now. The stock market has just crashed, but you haven’t seen anything yet. 4,000 banks are going to fail. “The Dow Jones average is going to go down to 42. It was 381 back just a little bit before you were conceived, and it’s going to go to 42. They’re going to close the banks for a while. We’re going to have 25 percent unemployment. We’re going to have the dust bowl in the Midwest. The grasshoppers are going to take over.”

You know, it would be like in that Woody Allen movie where he says, “Go back, go back.” All that’s happened since August 30th, 1930, is that the standard of living of the average American has increased six-for-one. Six-for-one. You know, that’s absolutely incredible. I mean, you look at centuries where nothing happened for the average person. I mean, century after century. So we have a system that works magnificently. It gets gummed up periodically. And it always has troubles. I mean, you know, I — my father was very anti-New Deal, so my sisters and I sat around a dinner table from the first we can remember hearing how things were going to go to hell. As a matter of fact, my father-in-law told my wife-to-be and her mother that he wanted to have a talk with me before we got married.

And he was very much on my side, so I was not in a panic about this or anything, but I went down to his house shortly before the marriage and this wonderful man, Doc Thompson, sat in a chair for a couple of hours, and he said, “Warren,” he said. “I just want to tell you that you’re going to fail but it’s not your fault.” (Laughter) And he said, “You and Susie, my daughter, if you starve, she would have starved anyway. I mean, it is not your fault. It’s because — you know, it’s because the Democrats are in, you know, and they’re going to take the country down the road to Communism and, you know, and just don’t worry about the fact you’re going to fail.” And this went on for quite a while. And then he blessed me and we got married. It was a happy ending.

But ever since — when I got out of school in 1951, the two people I admired the most in the world, my dad and Ben Graham, both said, you know, you’ve got a good future but don’t start in stocks now because there’s never been a year when the Dow Jones average has not ended up below 200, and it’s above 200 now. It’s much too high, and if you start now selling stocks to people they’re going to have bad experiences. So why don’t you wait a while and go work in the Omaha National Bank or do something, park yourself on the sidelines. There’s always negatives. The country always faces problems. I mean, this country went through, you know, it went through a civil war, you know. It — it’s gone through all kinds of things. But what happens? You know, we have a few lousy years from time to time. We’ve had, probably, 15 recessions since the country started. And we will always have a list of 10 or 15 things at the start of the year that will tell you why this country can’t possibly work well.

But all I can tell you is that it doesn’t do it in a straight line, but the power of capitalism is incredible. I mean, you know, that’s what is bringing us out of this recession. I mean, monetary and fiscal policy add some utility, and certainly in the fall of 2008 the government was needed in a huge, huge way. It could do what — it was the only one that could do what was needed. But if you look at the history of the United States, you know, probably half of our recessions have occurred during — we’ll say in the 19th century — when people didn’t even know what fiscal or monetary policy was. I mean, what happened was that excesses would come in and then the resuscitative power of capitalism would set the country back on the right — on a stronger growth pattern — and that’s happened time after time after time. And the game isn’t over. I mean, it is not like the potential of America has been used up.

What has happened is the rest of the world has caught on, to some extent, so you’re seeing some state capitalism in places like China, and they are turning economies loose that have been dormant for centuries. But it’s not because the people are smarter. It’s not because they work harder. It’s just because they have tapped into a system that works marvelously over time. And I will tell you, in the next hundred years you’re going to have probably 15, maybe as many as 20 lousy years, but we will be so far ahead of where we are now that it will be unrecognizable. Charlie? (Applause)

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, I can go back a lot farther than that. You know, Europe survived the Black Death, where about a third of the people died. The world is going to go on.

WARREN BUFFETT: That’s wildly optimistic for Charlie. (Laughter) Have you got anything more encouraging than that to say, Charlie? (Laughter)

CHARLIE MUNGER: I don’t know. I kind of — I understand a little bit of Dick Holland’s point of view. And by the way, I’ve known him a long time. He aced me out of any hope of being the chief candle snuffer at the Unitarian church. (Laughter) He was so damn good at it. (Laughter) Anyway, what was the question? (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: Can you bring yourself to say anything optimistic?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, I have a little bit of a twist on that. And so I would say that you can be cheerful even if things are slightly deteriorating, and that’s a very good quality to have. I have a personal saying that has always amused me. I say, the politicians are never so bad you don’t live to want them back. (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, on that note of wisdom — (Laughter)

13. Best assets in an inflationary environment

WARREN BUFFETT: Let’s go to area 4.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Good morning. Angie Janssen (PH) of Cambridge, Massachusetts. My question is, aside from the need to put huge amounts of capital to work, do you still believe that a high return on tangible capital business, like See’s or Coke, is the best asset to hold in an inflationary environment, or do you now think an irreplaceable hard asset with pricing power, like a railroad or a hydroelectric dam, is superior?

WARREN BUFFETT: The first group is superior. I mean, if you can have a wonderful consumer product — doesn’t have to be a consumer product — a product that requires very little capital to grow, and to do more dollar volume, as will happen with inflation even if you don’t have unit growth, and it doesn’t take much capital to support that growth, that is a wonderful asset to have in inflation. I mean, the ultimate test of that is your own earning ability. I mean, if you’re an outstanding doctor, lawyer, whatever it may be, teacher, the — you — as inflation goes along, your services will command more and more in dollar terms, and you don’t have to make any additional investment in yourself. People think of that, you know, with a very long-lived real estate asset or something of the sort, or a farm, or anything where additional capital is not required to finance inflationary growth. The worst kind of businesses are the businesses with tons of receivables and inventories and all of that.

And in dollar terms, if their volume stays flat but the price level doubles, and they need to come up with double the amount of money to do that same volume of business, that can be a very bad asset. Now normally, we are not enthused about businesses that require heavy capital investment, just like utilities and the railroad. We think that, on the other hand, particularly with the railroad, that where you do not have any guaranteed lower rate of return, that you should be entitled to earn returns on assets that are becoming more and more valuable to the economy as — whether it’s because of inflationary factors or because of just natural growth factors, or in the case of the United States, I think it will be both. But the ideal business — See’s Candy is doing — it was doing $25 million of volume when we bought it, and it sold 16 million pounds of candy — a little more than — well, it retails $1.90, and we had some quantity discounts, so we were doing close to $30 million worth of business. Now, we’re doing well over $300 million worth of business.

It took $9 million of tangible assets to run it when it was doing 30, and it takes about 40 million of tangible assets at 300-and-some. So we’ve only had to ploy back $30 million into a business which will make us — well, it’s made us, probably, a billion-and-a-half pretax during that period. And if the price of candy doubles, we don’t have any receivables to speak of. Our inventory turns fast. We don’t store it or anything like that. We gear up seasonally and the fixed assets aren’t big, so that is a much better business to own than a utility business if you’re going to have a lot of inflation. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: And what’s interesting about it is that we didn’t always know this. And so — (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: And sometimes we forget it. (Laughter)

CHARLIE MUNGER: That’s true, too. But it shows how continuous learning is absolutely required to have any significant achievement at all in the world.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, and it does show — you know, I’ve said in the past that I’m a better businessman because I’m an investor and I’m a better investor because I’m a businessman. There’s nothing like actually experiencing the necessity, particularly in the 1970s when inflation was gathering strength, and early ’80s, you would see this absolutely required capital investment on a very big scale that really wasn’t producing anything commensurate in the way of earnings. I wrote an article for Fortune called “How Inflation Swindles the Equity Investor” back in 1977. You really want — the ideal asset, you know, is a royalty on somebody else’s sales during inflation, where all you do is get a royalty check every month, and it’s based on their sales volume. And you made — you came up with some product originally, licensed it to them, and you never have another bit of capital investment. You have no receivables, you have no inventory, and you have no fixed assets. That kind of business is real inflation protection, assuming the product maintains its viability.

So even though we are going into some very capital-intensive businesses, part of that reflects the fact we can’t deploy the amount of capital we have in a whole bunch of See’s Candies. We just can’t find them. We would love to find them, but we can’t find them in that quantity. So we are not doing as well with capital when we have to invest many billions a year, as we would if we were investing a few millions a year. There’s no question. That’s true in investments. It’s true in operating businesses. There is a real disadvantage to size, and we just hope that problem grows.

CHARLIE MUNGER: Now you’re talking.

14. No dividend, so sell a slice of Berkshire if you need cash

WARREN BUFFETT: Becky?

BECKY QUICK: Aside from questions about Dave Sokol, the questions I’ve received most from shareholders have to do with dividends. And Dave Corneal (PH), who is a shareholder who couldn’t be here this weekend because he’s at his daughter’s wedding, writes in, “I know that Berkshire is a great allocator of capital, but as an owner of stock and as I get closer to retirement, there will be a time when I will need income from my assets. “Currently Berkshire does not pay dividends, yet it loves collecting on dividends on its investments. It also generates extensive cash flow in which it could pay dividends if it chooses to. “Currently the only real option to get income from your Berkshire investment is to sell a share or two of the stock. Is there a point in the future where Berkshire shareholders may expect a dividend payment, or what conditions would be needed for Berkshire to consider paying a dividend?”

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, we will pay dividend — as a matter of fact, there may be an argument that when we pay dividends we should pay out almost 100 percent, because it does mean that we lost the ability to find ways to invest a dollar in a manner that creates more than a dollar of present value for the shareholders. But let’s assume you had a savings account, and the savings account paid 5 percent. And you had your choice of taking $50 a year out, or letting the $50 stay in and somebody would pay you 120 percent of that savings account any time you wanted to sell a piece of it. Now, would you want to take the $5 out or would you rather let it accumulate and have the ability to sell at 120 cents on the dollar, that account?

Every dollar that’s been reinvested in Berkshire has created more than a dollar of market value, so it’s much more intelligent, if you control the dividend policy of Berkshire, it’s much more intelligent for people to leave the dollar in, have it valued at $1.20 or $1.30 or whatever it may be valued, and then sell off a little piece if they want the income, or if they want to receive some cash. And the logic of it, I think, is unquestionable. The execution of it is a problem. I mean, the question of whether we can keep investing dollars to create more than a dollar of present market value, you know, there’s an end to that at some point. But so far, people, by leaving 160 billion at the end of third quarter in the business, have $200 billion that they can cash out for at any time they wish. There will come a time and, you know, who knows how soon, because the numbers are getting big — there will come a time when we do not think we can lay out, you know, 15 or 20 billion a year and get something that’s immediately worth more than that for our shareholders.

And like I say, when the time comes where a dollar is only buying us 90 cents of value, we’ll quit spending the dollar. We’ll give it to the shareholders. But I predict that the day that Berkshire declares a dividend, the stock will go down. I mean, it will — and it should go down — because it’s an admission, essentially, that a compounding machine has lost its ability to continue on that course. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, and there’s nothing wrong with selling a little Berkshire stock to buy jewelry if you do it in the right place. (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: I would like to announce that my niece, Cynthia, visited Borsheims yesterday around — I guess around 3:00 — and she was there with her boyfriend, and he proposed, and they bought a ring. Congratulations. (Applause) Her mother did the same thing a few years ago. And, you know, these things become family traditions, so go out there and who knows what will happen? (Laughter)

15. Still bullish on bank stocks Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp

WAREEN BUFFETT: OK. Number 5.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Jeremy Pozen (PH), Newton, Massachusetts. Mr. Buffett and Mr. Munger, Berkshire Hathaway has had large investments in Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank. What are the revenue outlooks and business prospects for these two banks, given the backdrop of slow U.S. growth, an extended U.S. consumer, a tepid rebound in the U.S. housing market with foreclosures and write-downs lessening but still at historically high levels, and the potential for greater-than-expected inflation, or worse, possibly, deflation similar to Japan? Thank you for your time and consideration.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp are both among the best large banks, if not the best, in the country and they’re different than what you think of in terms of some money center banks, but they’re very large. Wells is four times as large as USB. Banking as a whole — U.S. banking — profitability will be considerably less, in my view, in the period ahead than it was, say, in the early part of this century. And a very important reason is that the leverage will be reduced. And that’s probably a good thing for society. It’s — it may be a bad thing for individual banks that could use leverage intelligently, but the trouble was that they all thought they could use leverage intelligently, and the actions of one, or more, that were unintelligent about it, you know, had consequences for everybody, which you can see if you view HBO on whatever it is — is it May 26?

The — so I would say that return on assets — even if return on assets were as good as it was some years ago, there will be less assets per dollar of common equity than before which means returns on common equity will be less. We still think that Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank are very good operations. We think they’re very decent businesses. They’re not as attractive as when leverage ratios could be higher. In terms of the troubles in banking, I think you’ve seen, by far, the worst in the past. And loan losses have been trending downward now for several quarters, and I think the expectation is that will continue, and I think banking is a very fundamental business. But as John Stumpf said a few years ago at Wells Fargo, he said, “I don’t know why we keep thinking of new ways to lose money when the old ones were working so well.” (Laughter) And banks periodically go crazy. It’s always on the asset side. I mean, here you’ve got cheap money.

You’ve got the federal government behind, although the federal government has never had to pay out anything on — in terms of the FDIC. The FDIC has handled 3800 since it was established on January 1, 1934. The FDIC has paid out probably 3800, 3900 by now, institutions, 250 of them or so in the last couple years. And that has not cost the U.S. taxpayer a penny. I mean, that has all come from FDIC assessments on other banks. It’s been a mutual insurance company. Banking, if you just keep out of trouble on the asset side, is a very good business because you get your money so cheap and, you know, because of the implicit federal guarantee, and you do get to leverage up to a fair extent, and America’s been a pretty good place to lend money. So I like our positions in there. You will see that — if you looked at those totals — you’ll see we’ve added to Wells Fargo.

And both those companies are very well run institutions, but they will not be able to earn — I don’t know what the figures were, but I think they were up 25 or — to 30 percent on tangible equity — and that’s not going to get repeated in the future, and it shouldn’t be. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, yeah, we might add that M&T Bank, which most people —

WARREN BUFFETT: Oh, yeah.

CHARLIE MUNGER: — never talk about, is headed by a really sensible fellow, and it’s been a wonderful investment for us.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, as a matter of fact, if you get the M&T annual report, it’s written by Bob Wilmers, the letter, the first part of it is about M & T specifically, but the second part is about particularly the American financial economy, and I would really recommend you read that. Bob is a very smart guy and he has a lot of good observations. And, frankly, the other one I recommend you read is Jamie Dimon’s letter, at JPMorgan, is a tour de force, in terms of describing the banking scene, the economic scene. He has some real insights in there about some very important subjects. We don’t own that stock, but it’s a letter that I think everybody could learn a lot from reading, as they could from reading Bob Wilmer’s letter at M&T.

CHARLIE MUNGER: And those people who like an element of morality in business, Wilmer sounds like an Old Testament prophet. I mean, he really doesn’t like it that all the really big banks are making so much money out of trading, because he says you’re really trying to outsmart your own customers, and he’d rather serve them in a culture of deserved trust in both directions. It’s hard to think he’s totally wrong.

WARREN BUFFETT: He also expresses quite a dislike for the fact that a market system creates a reward system where money sort of disproportionally flows to people who work with money, and that that tends to attract a disproportional number of people that — of lots of ability that he thinks might be — at least some of them — might be better deployed elsewhere. It’s an interesting read.

CHARLIE MUNGER: It’s one of the best annual reports that’s ever came out of banking. Right out of Buffalo.

16. Productive assets will always beat gold

WARREN BUFFETT: Ok. Andrew?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: This question who comes from Neil Steinhoff (PH) who writes, “The commodity market, and particularly gold, have appreciated astronomically over the last few years. “My Berkshire Hathaway stock is only slightly better — doing better — than it was in 2006. It’s barely kept up with inflation,” he says. “Please explain why you have not invested more heavily in commodities. As long as Ben Bernanke continues to print money and there’s no indication he’s going to stop any time soon, isn’t it right that commodities, and particularly gold, will continue to appreciate?”

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, I would point out that when we started with Berkshire, it was about 3/4 of an ounce of gold, and gold was $20 an ounce then, and it was 15. So gold, even at 1500, has a ways to go, and the — (Laughter and applause) I think he’s right about inflation. But if you think about it, there are three major categories of investment. And you ought to think very hard about which category you want to be in before you start thinking about the choices available within that category. Now, the first category is anything denominated in a currency. It could be bonds, it could be deposits in a bank, it can be a money market fund, it can be cash in your pocket. And the — if you will reach in your pocket — I don’t like to do this, but — and pull out your wallet — you’re watching an historic event. (Laughter) If you look at this — and I might point out this is a one. Charlie carries a — on the back of it, it says, “In God We Trust.” And that’s really false advertising.

The — if Elizabeth Warren were here, she would say, quite properly, it should say, “In Government We Trust,” because God isn’t going to do anything about that dollar bill, you know, if government does the wrong things, in terms of keeping it as valuable as it was when you parted with it to buy a bond or put it in a bank. Any currency-related investment is a bet on how government now, and in the future, will behave. And if you happen to be unfortunate to live — fortunate to live in Zimbabwe and you decided to make currency-related investments, you know, you — family would have left you by now, and it was not a good decision. Almost all currencies have declined in value over time. I mean, it may be built into almost any economic system that it will be easier to work with a value of currency that declines in value than a currency that appreciates in value, and the Japanese might reaffirm that here with their experience. So as a class, currency-related investments, whether they are in the UK, or the United States, or anyplace else, unless we’re getting paid extremely well for having them, we do not think make much sense.

The second category of investments regard items that you buy that don’t produce anything but that you hope someone will pay you more for later on. And the classic case of that is gold. And I’ve used this illustration before, but if you take all of the gold in the world — don’t get too excited now — and put it into a cube, it will be a cube that’s about 67 feet on a side. That would be 165,000 or 170,000 metric tons. So you could have a cube — if you owned all the gold in the world — you could have a cube that would be 67 or 68 feet on a side, and you could get a ladder and you could climb up on top of it, and you could say, you know I’m sitting on top of the world, and think you’re king of the world. You could, you know, you could fondle it, you could polish it, you could do all these things with it. Stare at it. But it isn’t going to do anything.

All you are doing when you buy that is that you’re hoping that somebody else a year from now, or five years from now, will pay you more to own something that, again, can’t do anything, but you’re hoping that the person then thinks that somebody else will buy something five years later from him. In other words, you’re betting on not just how scared people are now of paper money, you’re betting on how much they think a year from now people will be scared two years from then on. Keynes described all of this. I think it was in Chapter 12 of “The General Theory,” when he talked about this famous beauty contest where the game was not to pick out the most beautiful woman among the group, but the one that other people would think was the most beautiful woman, and then he carried it on to second and third degrees of reasoning. Any time you buy an asset that can’t do anything, produce anything, you’re simply betting on whether somebody else will pay more for, again, an asset that can’t do anything.

And actually, we did that with silver, but silver had an industrial use, and we — about 13 years ago I bought a whole lot of silver. And if you’ll notice, silver has moved recently, so my timing was only about 13 years off, but, you know, who’s perfect? The third category of asset is something that you value based on its — what it will produce, what it will deliver. You buy a farm because you expect a certain amount of corn or soybeans or cotton or whatever it may be, to come your way every year. And you decide how much you pay based on how much you think the asset itself will deliver over time. And those are the assets that appeal to me and Charlie. Now, there’s some logical follow-on to that. If you buy that farm, and you really think about how many bushels of corn, how much bushels of soybeans will it produce, how much do I have to pay the tenant farmer, how much do I have to pay in taxes and so on, you can make a rational calculation, and the success of that investment will be determined in your own mind by whether it meets your expectations as to what it delivers.

Logically, you should not care whether you get a quote on that farm a day later, or a week later, or a month later, or a year later. We feel the same way about businesses. When we buy ISCAR, or we buy Lubrizol, or whatever, we don’t run around getting a quote on it every week and say, you know, “Is it up or down or anything like that?” We look to the business. We feel the same way about securities. When we buy a marketable security, we don’t care if the stock exchange closes for a few years. So when we look at Berkshire, we are looking at what we think can be delivered from the productive assets that we own, and how we can utilize that capital in acquiring more productive assets. And there will be times, you know, cotton doubled in price, much to our chagrin at Fruit of the Loom, but, you know, if you own cotton for the right six or eight months in the past year, you came close to doubling your money. But if you go back a century and try to make money owning cotton over time, it has not been a very good investment.

So to pick a product, crude oil, cotton, gold, silver, anything that — and, of course, cotton has utility

21. 投资伯克希尔还是指数基金？

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，如果你不打算积极进行投资，我实际上建议人们购买指数基金。我的意思是，如果你只是——如果你有日常工作，并且想随着时间的推移存下一些钱，我认为普通个人持续购买指数基金，会比他们能获得的几乎所有其他投资都要好。我认为这将是一个完全令人满意的投资。它不会——它永远不会被视为一项伟大的投资，但它将是一项完全令人满意的投资。如果我个人在指数基金和当前价格的伯克希尔之间做选择，我更愿意持有伯克希尔。但是如果你告诉我必须把所有的钱都投入指数基金，然后余生都这样，我也不会不高兴——但我更喜欢伯克希尔。（笑）查理？

查理·芒格：嗯，我非常喜欢它，如果我不得不持有一个指数基金，我会非常不开心。我的志向更大。我认为，在所有因素考虑之后，未来50年，一个熟练投资者的平均回报不会像过去50年那么好。所以我认为降低预期是投资者拥有的最佳防御，在那之后，我认为伯克希尔是一个相当不错的赌注。

沃伦·巴菲特：查理非常热衷于降低预期。

查理·芒格：绝对没错。（笑声）我就是这样结婚的。（笑声）我妻子降低了她的期望。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：而他对得起这些期望。（笑声）

2011年度股东大会

第四部分/共六部分

查理·芒格：不过，就像我们的保险业务一样，我们资本密集型的铁路业务无疑是世界上最好的铁路之一。我们的公用事业运营也是世界上最好的公用事业运营之一。因此，在主营业务上达到世界级水平，这并非坏事。

沃伦·巴菲特：我们的铁路——政府一直在谈论在加州建设高速铁路系统。我认为他们说的轨道长约800英里，预估成本约430亿美元，而建筑等成本通常会大幅上升，很少会哪怕小幅下降。当然，我们为我们的铁路系统支付了430亿美元（包括承担的债务），该系统拥有22000英里的主线轨道、6000多台机车和13000座桥梁（如果你想买桥的话）。因此，这项资产在通胀期间的重置价值已经非常巨大，而且还会大幅增长。世界——我们的国家将始终需要铁路运输。所以，它是一项了不起的资产，我就说到这里。

12. “愿你活到A股拆股的那一天”

沃伦·巴菲特：好。又是第一区。

股东提问：我是马丁·格林伯格，来自加州大学洛杉矶分校安德森学院，研究颠覆性技术，而非金融。

沃伦·巴菲特：这没关系。请讲。（笑声）

股东提问：我的朋友沃尔特想知道，伯克希尔是否考虑过像拆分B股那样拆分其A股？如果考虑过，您认为利弊何在？短期和长期影响又会怎样？

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。实际上，通过发行B股，我们已经实现了变相的拆分，比例是1500比1。你知道，公司永远不会被出售，但如果任何交易涉及A股，B股将获得完全相同的待遇。所以持有B股实际上没有坏处，只是投票权比A股稍弱一些。但在其他所有方面，它都是同样的工具，所以我们已经有了一种可交易的拆分股票。因此，我会告诉沃尔特，他真的不应该对A股拆分抱太大希望。查理？

查理·芒格：是的，沃伦过去常常这样鼓励他的老朋友，对他们说：“愿你活到A股拆股的那一天。”（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：我自己也很乐意做这样的交易。（笑声）

13. 巴菲特的最佳交易：聘用阿吉特·贾因

沃伦·巴菲特：安德鲁？

安德鲁·罗斯·索尔金：这个问题来自马萨诸塞州北安多弗的马修·帕尔默。他写道：“巴菲特先生，您曾称赞[伯克希尔·哈撒韦再保险业务负责人]阿吉特·贾因是可能的继任者。既然他可能是我们的下一任CEO，您能否给我们举一个他承保的、让您印象深刻的保单的具体例子？并请您谈谈他的思维方式，因为我们很少有机会听到他的见解。”

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，阿吉特可不是个爱出风头的人。阿吉特——（笑声）——他——我想不出他做过的任何决定，是我认为自己能做得更好的。而且，我已经不再了解他所有的交易了。有很多交易规模不大或不太引人关注，但他会把所有有趣的大事和非常重要的事情都告诉我。我想说的是：在听完他提出的任何方案后，你跟着他投票比跟着我投票更好。他是我见过的最理性的人之一，和查理一样理性。他热爱他所做的事情。他富有创造力，非常有创造力。当人们进入我们经营的某个领域模仿我们时，我们就会不断进入再保险的新领域。阿吉特总能想出新的点子。最近我们在人寿再保险方面更加活跃，但谁知道明天会带来什么？

我的意思是，如果今年第三季度恰好发生一场巨大的灾难或其他类似事件，当市场承保能力紧张时，这可能会为承保业务开辟各种各样的机会。但谁知道会发生什么呢。我所知道的是，阿吉特的头脑就像一台机器，日复一日地运转。他确实热爱他所做的事情，这是在任何活动中表现出色的重要组成部分。我真的——我不知道他最好的交易是什么。但我知道我最好的交易是什么，那就是聘用了他。查理？

查理·芒格：是的。威廉·奥斯勒爵士曾为世界创建了一所模范医学院，他常说，在一个领域成功的秘诀是对其产生浓厚的兴趣。嗯，阿吉特对他所做的事情就非常感兴趣。在座的很多人可能不知道，每年感恩节，阿吉特都会飞往伦敦，因为那里没有感恩节假期。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：不过，我们圣诞节会给他放假。（笑声）阿吉特，我们只是——他——我说他多么不可或缺，我谈论他时并没有夸张。他——他出奇地首先为伯克希尔着想。在保险公司的不同繁荣时期，比如几年前百慕大公司热潮兴起时，阿吉特本可以让自己变得难以置信地富有。他现在仍然可以。我是说，人们会给他任何新成立公司很大比例的股份，加上大量资金，这样他可以不费吹灰之力就创造出数亿美元的财富，只要有人拿出几十亿美元并说“你拥有其中20%”或类似的。听着，他很聪明，他知道这一点，但他从未想过要去做任何类似的事情。

我是说，他——在薪酬方面——他总是在年底感谢我所做的一切，而我觉得我付给他的钱还是少了一个零。（笑声）他真是一个了不起的人。我们非常非常幸运，我认为他在伯克希尔的工作中获得了许多乐趣。他身边有一个大约30人的团队。还有更多的人在处理遗留业务的理赔等事宜，但在我看来，你不只在保险界，而且在整个商界的任何领域都找不到像他这样的人。（掌声）

沃伦·巴菲特：我们继续——

查理·芒格：你没有回答问题。也许你是有意避开了。

沃伦·巴菲特：哦。

查理·芒格：他说，我们最差的业务是什么？

沃伦·巴菲特：我们最差的业务是什么？嗯，一般来说——这只是泛泛而谈——我——嗯，在进入一些真正没有潜力做大的小企业方面犯了一些错误。但总体而言，我认为，可能零售业——你知道，Dexter是我们最差的业务，但家具城显然是一家出色的企业。然而，尽管我们涉足众多零售业务——有相当一部分——并且持续了一段时间，但我们并没有在那里创造出巨大的盈利能力。查理，你不同意吗？

查理·芒格：是的，但幸运的是，这只是我们业务的一小部分。

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。

查理·芒格：但你说得对。对我们来说，那一直是最难的竞争领域。你知道，如果我们再聪明一点，我们本可以更好地认识到这一点。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，如果我们再聪明一点，我们可以做成很多事。（笑声）当然，喜诗糖果在某种程度上也是一家零售企业。

查理·芒格：是的。

沃伦·巴菲特：我们在那里取得了巨大的成功，也许因此我们开始以为自己都是天才。我们就像池塘里的鸭子，遇到下雨天，还以为是自己凭本事升起来的，其实只是因为下雨了。（笑声）

14. 评估企业时“忘掉商誉”

沃伦·巴菲特：好。我们进入第二个问题。

股东提问：乔·泰林哈斯，来自马萨诸塞州波士顿。什么是思考商誉和资本回报率的最佳方式？伯克希尔的制造、服务和零售业务在有形资本上的税前回报率超过20%，这表明要么是能干的管理层，要么是出色的业务。但按分配的权益资本计算的回报率却只有个位数，看起来平淡无奇。会计师对无形资产的处理方式类似，因为它们的经济含义不同。（听不清）对于像喜诗或可口可乐这样坚不可摧的品牌，我可以理解为什么无形资产不应摊销，因为它每年都在增值，您关于GEICO保单持有人的评论是思考这个问题的一种方式。但所有烟草公司在发达国家每年都有数十亿美元的香烟单位销售商誉需要摊销，所以它们也许应该摊销。而对于时代华纳-美国在线，商誉肯定需要摊销。

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，商誉——你提到美国在线-时代华纳之类的，实际上应该冲销掉。那只是收购价格的错误。在评估一项业务的基本吸引力时，不应使用商誉。你应该看有形资产的回报率，即使那样，你可能还需要做一些小的调整。但基本上，在评估我们拥有的业务时，在评估管理层的所作所为以及业务的基本经济状况时，忘掉商誉。在评估我们配置资本的工作时，你必须把商誉考虑进去，因为我们为它支付了代价。所以，如果我们购买——你知道，可口可乐可以追溯到1886年，约翰·彭伯顿在亚特兰大的雅各布斯药房，当时他卖出第一瓶可口可乐时，账面上并没有多少商誉。如果你现在要收购整个公司，你会给它标上一个数字，可能是1000亿美元左右。

你不应该摊销它，在判断业务的经济状况时，你也不应该看它。但在判断购买它的企业（我们称之为伯克希尔）的经济状况时，你必须考虑商誉，因为我们是在配置资本，并且付出了高昂的代价。我认为摊销商誉毫无意义。我认为，当你发现收购决策错误，业务产生的收益与其投入的有形资产加商誉不相称时，冲销商誉是有意义的。但在判断一家企业是好、中等还是差时，要看其净有形资产的回报率。查理？

查理·芒格：嗯，我认为这是对的。但正如这位先生所说，当我们收购一家企业，一整家企业时，我们从来不会捡到巨大的便宜，当然，我们支付的价格可能只能获得接近10%的税前收益。这并不像你想象的那么糟糕，因为——很多资金来自保险浮存金，而它的成本为零。换句话说，如果你有600亿的浮存金，上帝每年赐予你60亿的收益，那并不完全是坏事。

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，对于路博润，我们为其股权支付了近90亿美元，它盈利——你应该对债务进行调整，但这不是一个重要因素——你知道，目前的盈利水平大概在税前10亿美元。而路博润本身动用的权益资本要少得多——你知道，大概25亿美元来赚取这10亿美元的税前利润，所以就其动用的资产而言，这是一家非常好的企业。但当我们最终支付溢价来收购它时，就变成了用近90亿美元的投资来换取10亿美元的税前利润。你必须根据近90亿美元的投资来评判我们。你必须根据詹姆斯·汉布里克动用的低得多的资本来评判他管理企业的表现。如果它最终成为一家非常好的企业，而我们只是犯了小错误（如果它不如我们现在认为的那么好），但基于其动用的有形资本，它仍然是一家令人满意的企业。查理，你能说得更清楚些吗？（笑声）

查理·芒格：嗯，只是——在目前的环境下，我们不可能以低价购买到任何像样的运营企业。这种情况根本不会发生。

15. 芒格真心热爱好市多

沃伦·巴菲特：卡罗尔？

卡罗尔·卢米斯：在一本关于查理的书《绝对正确！》（作者珍妮特·洛）中，查理谈到了他对教授金融学的看法。他说他会以大约一百家做了正确或错误事情的公司历史作为教授这门课程的基础。你们两位——既然这说的是查理，我们请你们两位——我们先从查理开始——给我们举一两个例子，无论是正确还是错误的例子？

沃伦·巴菲特：我预测查理会谈到好市多。请讲，查理。（笑声）

查理·芒格：嗯，好市多当然是一家——（笑声）——成为了其所在类别中世界上最好的企业。它通过极端的精英制度、自我强加的极度道德义务（即尽快积累所有成本优势并传递给客户）做到了这一点。当然，这创造了强大的客户忠诚度。看着这样的企业成长是非常美妙的，当然，当你这样做并坚持足够长的时间，奇怪的事情就会发生。好市多在韩国的一家门店今年销售额将超过4亿美元。这些是零售业不可能存在的数据，但当然，它们确实存在。所以，这是一个例子，说明了拥有正确的管理体系、正确的人员选拔、正确的道德观、正确的勤奋等等等等。这是非常罕见的。如果你一生中能有一两次与这样的企业相关联，那你就是一个非常幸运的人。

而更正常的企业是像通用汽车这样的，它成为了同类企业中最成功的，却在去年将其普通股股东清零，不是吗？这是一个非常有趣的故事。如果我在商学院教书，我会使用价值线那样的图表，带学生回顾通用汽车的整个历史。我会尝试将图表和数据的变化与业务中发生的事情联系起来。在某种程度上，他们面临着一个非常棘手的问题：高度工会化的企业，伴随着巨大的成功，以及来自亚洲和其他地方（某种程度上也包括欧洲）的非常强大的竞争对手。这是一个真正的问题，当然——要防止财富摧毁你，让你的成功变成劣势，是商业中的一个重大问题。所以，所有这些图表中都蕴含着绝妙的教训。我不知道为什么人们不这样做。我教学中想用的图表甚至都不存在。我无法想象会有人愚蠢到不拥有我渴望的那种图表。

（笑声）但据我所知，全国没有一所商学院渴望得到这些图表。部分原因在于，如果你以这种方式教授商业史，你会侵犯所有其他分支学科的小教授们的领地。你会窃取他们最精华的案例。在官僚机构中，即使是学术官僚机构，人们也会保护自己的地盘。当然，通用汽车就发生了很多这样的情况。（掌声）是的。我真的认为世界——就应该这样教。哈佛商学院曾经在很大程度上这样教过，但他们停止了。我想做一个案例研究，看看他们为什么停止。（笑声）我想我可以——我想我可以成功猜出原因。那就是，当然，商业史会侵犯其他学科大牛们的领地，比如市场营销大牛、金融大牛、其他什么的大牛。IBM是一个有趣的案例。

我的意思是，一个接一个的案例都极其引人入胜，我认为它们根本没有被恰当地教授，因为没有人愿意做全面的梳理。

沃伦·巴菲特：查理和我最近乘坐的飞机被劫持了。

查理·芒格：什么？

沃伦·巴菲特：被劫持了。我在讲述我们在那架被劫持飞机上的经历，劫机者把我们挑出来，说我们这两个肮脏的资本家是他们真正要处决的对象。但他们对此有点不好意思。他们其实对我们没什么敌意，所以他们说在我们被枪决之前，每人可以提一个请求。他们转向查理说：“你想要什么请求？”查理说：“我想再做一次关于好市多美德的演讲，并配上插图。”（笑声）劫机者说：“嗯，这听起来挺合理的。”然后他转向我说：“巴菲特先生，您想要什么？”我说：“先枪毙我。”（笑声）

查理·芒格：总之。

16. 激励孩子

沃伦·巴菲特：好。第三个问题。

股东提问：苏马特·梅赫拉，来自印度克什米尔。巴菲特先生，希望您享受了您的首次印度之旅。

沃伦·巴菲特：确实如此。

股东提问：我的问题是这样的。激励人们最重要的因素之一是激励机制，但如果你生活在一个富裕的社会，让你的孩子努力工作并充分发挥他们的潜力是非常困难的，因为他们根本没有这个必要。所以，如果您或查理决定在接下来的五年内生个孩子——（笑声）

查理·芒格：那将是东方升起的一颗新星。

沃伦·巴菲特：仅仅决定还不够。（笑声）

股东提问：您会如何激励他或她——

沃伦·巴菲特：我以为你要说“你会怎么做？”（笑声）不，这是个好问题。我为打断你道歉。

股东提问：您会如何激励他或她与中国、巴西、俄罗斯或印度等新兴市场中那些渴望成功、积极性极高的孩子们竞争？

沃伦·巴菲特：我确信，如果你非常富有，并且教育你的孩子，让他们认为自己在社会上更重要，或者拥有某些特权，仅仅因为他们出自正确的子宫，那将是一个巨大的错误。但查理抚养了八个孩子，我都很熟悉，其中大部分，我不认为他们有那种想法。但是——如果你真的要教育你的孩子，让他们认为所有的工作都应该由别人为他们做，他们余生都有资格坐着扇扇子，那么，你很可能不会得到好结果。你知道，在我——查理在他的孩子们——他的许多孩子——成长的大部分时间里都很富有——他的一些孩子正在成长。在我的孩子们成长过程中——至少在他们上高中和大学时——我也很富有。但我当然不想让他们产生仅仅因为父母有钱就很特别的观念。

我不认为仅仅因为父母富有，就必然会导致坏结果或孩子没有动力。我认为你绝对不想给他们的一个激励是，让他们试图在父母恰好擅长的事情上超越父母。我认为那没有意义，无论你是职业运动员、富人、伟大的小说家，还是其他什么。但我真的认为，如果你很富有，而你的孩子最终缺乏动力，你不应该指责他们。你应该指责你自己。查理？

查理·芒格：嗯，我认为你不可能在富裕家庭中培养出孩子，让他们热爱在烈日下每周工作60小时去挖篱笆桩洞。那行不通。所以，在某种程度上，你是在摧毁某些类型的激励。我对你的建议是，尽可能优雅地认输。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：我不确定如果你贫穷，是否就能让你的孩子热爱每周工作60小时。他们可能不得不这样做，但是——

查理·芒格：真正对某件事感兴趣的孩子，无论多富有都会工作。但像阿吉特那样强烈的兴趣是很罕见的。你知道，如果你是一名直肠科医生，你可能不会喜欢日复一日的工作。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：我想我们最好继续了。贝基？（笑声）

17. 伯克希尔下任CEO的薪酬激励

贝基·奎克：这个问题来自爱荷华州中部的一位股东，他问道：“伯克希尔·哈撒韦的成功，部分原因在于其经理人出于非金钱原因而愿意留在公司。但未来的运营CEO很可能会由一个坚持要求超过10万美元薪水的人来担任。您认为下一代伯克希尔领导层的薪酬结构应该是怎样的？”

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，我认为下一任CEO会赚很多钱，也应该赚很多钱。我的意思是，管理一家市值几千亿美元公司的责任，理应得到丰厚的报酬。我认为，无论董事会当时决定的基本工资水平如何，都应该辅以一个期权系统，这个系统可能包含一些不同寻常的特点。我认为期权的初始行权价格不应低于公司待售时的资产价值。所以，在股市低迷时期按市场价格给某人期权的想法，我认为是疯狂的，因为你不会按那个价格出售你的企业，为什么要按那个基础出售它的一部分呢。所以，我认为底价应该是你开始时的企业价值，然后我认为，由于资金留存在公司产生的复利效应——即使没有管理层，随着时间的推移，价值也会有一定的增长——所以我认为底价应该每年按某个比率提高，然后减去已支付的股息。

所以，如果假设支付了3%的股息，并且你希望有一个每年增长7%或8%的 hurdle rate，那么你可以让期权价格每年加速提高，也许是4%或5%。但有了这种结构，我认为你可以给予非常大的期权，因为——如果某人在一个非常大的金额上创造了超过给定回报率的超额价值，我认为他们应该获得相当可观的超额回报。现在，他们——目前的薪酬体系与我继任者应得的薪酬毫无关系。最主要的是找到合适的人，有正确的价值观，能与经理们良好互动，并且知道如何配置资本。正如你们刚才听到的，我们的经理人取得了很大成就，如果——如果他们管理着大型业务，从而转化为大量金钱——他们可以在伯克希尔赚很多钱。他们——在最高层，没有什么是基于我和查理的特立独行。所以，你知道，在伯克希尔，有些人收入高达八位数。但他们赚到了，他们不是因为任何虚假的目标或类似的东西而得到这些。

他们得到高薪，是因为他们确实为伯克希尔带来了巨大的、在某些情况下是超额的价值的。查理？

查理·芒格：嗯，我希望这会在很久以后才发生。我不认为沃伦的位置未来某天由一位非常富有、并采纳了沃伦薪酬制度的人来占据是绝对不可能的。我认为在美国，必须有人成为不贪得无厌的榜样。我认为这是整个体系非常重要的一部分。（掌声）

沃伦·巴菲特：不过，在我走后，我认为你最好别登广告说：“招聘CEO，年薪10万美元，环境舒适。”（笑声）

18. 社会问题很重要但不影响投资决策

沃伦·巴菲特：好。我们进行第四个问题。

股东提问：您好，巴菲特先生，芒格先生。我叫弗恩·库申伯里。这个问题代表今天从堪萨斯州欧弗兰帕克赶来的一群投资者提出。鉴于您对可再生能源和自然资源的兴趣，我想知道您是否愿意分享，在一个清洁水资源有限且正在枯竭、粮食储备下降的世界里，这是如何影响您的投资策略和对未来的看法的？

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，我想说这是一个重要的话题，但它并没有真正影响我们的投资策略。换句话说，我们很乐意再买一家GEICO。我们很乐意再买一家BNSF。我们很乐意再买一家MidAmerican。我们以长远的时间框架来看待这些业务，但我们关注的是，我们预期的三、五、十、十五年后它们的盈利能力，与我们支付的价格相比如何。所以我要说，有许多社会问题实际上并没有影响我们的投资或企业收购决策。查理？

查理·芒格：嗯，我建议不要太关注清洁水问题。如果有足够的能源，你总能获得足够的清洁水。以色列有时会连续数月用海水淡化来满足一半的用水需求。只要有足够的能源，水问题就解决了。这在考虑未来时非常有帮助。关于农业生产力，我认为限制使用碳氢化合物的主要原因之一是，现代农业离开它们就无法运作。所以，我坚信在消耗所有碳氢化合物来取暖房屋和驱动汽车方面要持保守态度。我认为——想想看，如果我们当初把中东那些一美元一桶的石油大量运到这里，储存在盐洞里，我们现在会有多高兴。我的意思是，你可以说我们过去搞砸了，你还可以说所有那些认为我们的主要解决方案就是钻探、钻探、再钻探的人，他们都疯了。

（笑声和掌声）在保护我们自己资源的同时，消耗别人的碳氢化合物，很可能是相当明智的。它不会消失，因为我们现在没有钻探它。但你可以看到，这会引向毫无成效的讨论。（笑声）

19. 我们不会参与任何公司的拍卖

沃伦·巴菲特：好。我们继续进行，安德鲁。

安德鲁·罗斯·索尔金：下一个问题，实际上是刚刚通过电子邮件从现场某位观众的黑莓手机发来的，是一位要求匿名的著名投资者。他的问题如下：他写道：“您对路博润的收购是通过协商交易完成的。路博润董事会并未将公司挂牌出售或进行拍卖。根据代理声明，尽管您允许他们进行‘询价’程序，但您并未允许公司进行这一程序。路博润董事会是否因未采用更具竞争性的流程出售公司而违反了其受托责任？如果没有，为什么没有？”

查理·芒格：让我来回答。

沃伦·巴菲特：好。查理来回答。（笑声）他自愿——

查理·芒格：答案是否定的。路博润董事会没有违反其职责，因为如果他们不按照我们的方式来做，我们就不会参与这笔交易。（笑声和掌声）

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，我们基本上不参与拍卖。实际上，就在最近，有人邀请我们参与一次拍卖，我们根本不感兴趣。他们最终得到的钱可能比我们能给的要少。但如果他们想拍卖，我能向他们保证的一件事是，当他们全部折腾完之后，我们不会支付我们最初愿意支付的价格，如果他们当时直接来找我们的话。所以，他们得到了一个非常确定的交易，在我看来，也得到了一笔非常可观的价格，两位顾问也是这么认为的。如果他们当时说要进行拍卖，我们会说祝你好运，然后我们就会去看别的机会了。

查理·芒格：还有人问点简单的问题吗？（笑声）

20. 如何判断巴菲特是否在资本配置方面做得很好

沃伦·巴菲特：好。第五个问题。

股东提问：您好，查理。我想我有一个简单的问题。我叫——

沃伦·巴菲特：那跟我说吧。（笑声）

股东提问：我叫斯图尔特·凯，来自康涅狄格州斯坦福德的马塔林资本管理公司。沃伦，您常说您工作的一大部分是配置资本。展望未来，仅仅通过查看伯克希尔的财务报表，我们如何判断您在配置资本方面做得有多好？

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，真正的考验将是，盈利的增长速度是否与留存资本的数量相称。随着时间的推移，还有市场价值的考验——但市场可能非常波动和反复无常——但随着时间的推移，显然，我们——除非伯克希尔的市场价值显著大于我们从你们那里留存下来、并用于收购企业的资本总额，否则——如果我们开始以低于该因素的折价出售，那结论就是对我不利。但你必须——而且，你知道，这不是一个完美的衡量标准，当然不能基于三个月、六个月甚至一年的时间，但随着时间的推移，如果我们保留了你们的钱，我们必须在我们留存的这笔钱上赚取高于平均水平的回报，这必须转化为股票以高于我们从你们那里留存的资本的价格出售。到目前为止，我们还做得不错，但每年这项工作都变得更难。查理？

查理·芒格：是的。我们持续跑赢市场平均水平。我们只是没有超越自己过去的记录。我保证这种情况会持续下去，至少后半部分会是如此。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。只是后半部分，对吧？

查理·芒格：是的。

21. 不要把现在的机会和你最好的交易相比

沃伦·巴菲特：好。卡罗尔？

卡罗尔·卢米斯：这个问题来自迈克·里夫金。他想问您近年来所做的五笔条款非常不同的交易：高盛，50亿美元，10%利率加认股权证；GE，50亿美元，10%利率加认股权证；陶氏化学，30亿美元，8.5%可转换普通股；箭牌-玛氏，44亿美元，11.45%利率；瑞士再保险，27亿美元，12%利率。为什么您设定的利率不同？为什么有些交易包含认股权证？为什么富有的玛氏家族需要44亿美元来完成交易，而且利率是11.45%？

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，就玛氏家族而言，让他们自己解释吧。但比较这五笔交易，GE的是30亿美元，而玛氏的交易实际上涉及21亿美元优先股，具有一些不寻常的特征，所以你必须将其视为一个整体。但重要的是，每笔交易都是在不同时间完成的，尽管高盛和GE的交易时间非常接近。市场条件——你知道，你在电影里听到查理谈论机会成本。在这五笔交易中的每一笔，我们的机会成本都不同。顺便说一句，我们本可以做得更好——我本可以做得更好——在恐慌后的时期进行资金配置。比起五个月后的情况，我在高盛和GE的投资都太早了。但是，你知道，我们不仅没有完美的先见之明，有时还相当糟糕。

但是，每一笔交易——我做瑞士再保险交易时，并没有考虑陶氏化学的交易（那笔交易可能是一年多以前承诺的）。我考虑的是，用这27亿美元我还能做其他什么事。所有的决策都是这样做出的。所以，它们彼此之间没有关联。它们通过一个大脑进行决策，这个大脑会审视当天所有可用的机会，包括我们手头的现金数量、下周或下个月还能做其他事情的可能性、以及当天我们还能做些什么。我们过去做成的交易实际上无关紧要。事实上，人们——在商业中经常犯的一个错误——有时可能是一个巨大的错误——就是试图将每一笔交易与自己有史以来做过的最好的交易进行比较。所以他们会说，你知道，我做了这样一笔好交易，也许是保险单的承保，或者是收购了一家公司，或者是买入了一只股票，他们决心未来再也不做一笔不如那笔交易吸引人的买卖。

所以，他们实际上——有时会把自己排除在游戏之外。目标不是要做一笔比你以前做过的更好的交易。目标是要做一笔满意的交易，并且是当时你能做的最好的交易。查理把这事比作婚姻，我让他详细说说。（笑声）

查理·芒格：不，那些——当然，我们会在不同的时间，基于不同的机会成本，做不同的交易。没有其他理性的做交易方式。

22. 你不需要读得快，但你应该阅读

沃伦·巴菲特：好。我们来进行第六个问题。

股东提问：基思·麦高恩，来自马萨诸塞州诺福克。谢谢您，巴菲特先生和芒格先生。感谢你们成为行为榜样。你们的道德、节俭、幽默感、诚实，分享投资和商业理念，让这个世界对每个人都更美好。（掌声）查理在之前的回答中提到了持续学习。巴菲特先生，您每天阅读大约五份报纸。您还阅读许多年度报告和其他商业相关报告。您阅读速度远超绝大多数人。阅读是一件美妙的事情。对于那些希望提高阅读速度的高中生、大学生或成年人，您有什么建议？

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，你知道这是个有趣的问题，因为正如你所说，我确实阅读五份报纸和大量的10-K和10-Q报告。不幸的是，我阅读速度不快，而且也不如以前快了。但我不知道各种快速阅读课程的效果如何，但如果它们有效，你知道，我会——我真的建议任何能提高阅读速度的人——我希望自己能读得快得多。查理读得比我快。能够快速阅读是一个巨大的优势。而且，你知道，有一个关于伍迪·艾伦的老故事，说他参加了快速阅读课程，然后遇到一个人，他告诉那人这课程有多棒。那人说：“嗯，举个例子。”伍迪·艾伦说：“嗯，我昨晚在20分钟内读完了《战争与和平》。它是关于俄罗斯的。”

（笑声）这就是我尝试快速阅读时遇到的问题。我读完一本书，然后说，它是关于商业的，你知道，所以——我真的不知道快速阅读课程的效果如何，但如果你知道有朋友或——你可以了解更多，有一些有效的技巧。显然，最好的办法是年纪轻轻就学习这些技巧，因为真的——几乎没有什么比阅读、阅读、再阅读更令人愉悦的了。查理和我在这方面做得很多。我们一直在大量阅读。但我阅读的速度没有我期望的那么快。查理？

查理·芒格：嗯，我认为速度被高估了。我在加州理工学院时有一个室友，思维非常敏锐，我解题比他快，但他从不犯错，而我犯错。（笑声）所以，如果你必须读得慢一点，不要太沮丧。那又能怎么样呢？（笑声和掌声）把那花生脆递过来，沃伦。

沃伦·巴菲特：好的。

查理·芒格：谢谢。谢谢。

沃伦·巴菲特：你可能注意到我们在另一个房间有15磅装的花生脆出售，但查理在找25磅装的。

23. 巴菲特：甚至不应该有债务上限

沃伦·巴菲特：贝基？

贝基·奎克：这个问题来自埃里克·怀斯曼，他问：“您是否担心国会就提高债务上限玩弄政治？这会对伯克希尔·哈撒韦的股票和整体经济产生什么影响？”

沃伦·巴菲特：你是说如果他们不提高的话？

贝基·奎克：如果他们不提高的话，是的。

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，那很可能是国会有史以来做出的最愚蠢的举动。曾经在19世纪90年代的印第安纳州，我想他们通过了一项法案——我知道有人提出过——你可以用搜索引擎查一下。他们通过了一项法案，要把数学常数π的值改为整数3——（笑声）——因为他们说这样方便学生计算。嗯，这是我能想到的，唯一能与拒绝提高债务上限相媲美的法案了。我是说，这太离谱了。我的意思是，我们的赤字每月远远超过1000亿美元，而且有各种各样的项目无法改变——我是说，——首先设定一个债务上限就是错误的。我的意思是，2011年的美国与1911年的美国拥有不同的债务承受能力，而且我们始终——这将是一个不断增长的国家，我们的债务承受能力也会不断增长。

这并不意味着我认为债务占GDP的比例增长是个好主意。但是，这个债务上限的存在——以至于这些游戏被玩，所有那些被浪费的时间，你知道，你听到的那些愚蠢言论的数量。对于一个有很多事情要做的国家来说，这似乎太浪费时间了。但最终，在我看来，他们不会——他们不可能不提高债务上限。我很乐意看到他们——嗯，我很乐意看到他们取消这个想法，因为它导致了这类周期性的僵局操作，每个人都用它来摆姿态等等。只要美国继续以本国货币发行债券，就不会发生任何形式的债务危机。你知道，能够以本国货币借款与必须以外币借款之间的区别是天壤之别。我们唯一需要担心的是印钞机和通货膨胀。

如果你是欧元区或欧洲货币联盟的成员，你不得不担心——你不能印钞票。你可以让其他成员试图帮助你。但是，放弃以本国货币发行债务的权利是一个巨大的步骤。美国没有这样做。我不知道我们是否发行过美元以外货币的美国债券，但我们肯定没有形成习惯。另外，有趣的是，日本债务占GDP的比例非常高，但它也一直以本国货币借款。相信我，当需要偿还某人时，而你被迫用别人的货币而不是用你自己的货币来偿还，这完全是两码事。事实上，查理和我，我们曾试图买回那家银行——

查理·芒格：芝加哥。

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，在20世纪60年代末的芝加哥，那是一个货币非常紧缩的时期。那时的紧缩与今天的紧缩不同。我是说，紧缩意味着没有钱。有人——我们想买这家银行，他们想要——我们能找到钱的唯一地方，我想是在科威特，用第纳尔，不是吗？

查理·芒格：科威特第纳尔。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：我心想，查理也同意，当我们去偿还时，谁知道他们会说第纳尔的价值是多少。这不是我们能够控制的事情。所以我们决定不借第纳尔，尽管我有点希望我们当时买下了那家银行。查理，你有什么要说的吗？

查理·芒格：没有。（笑声）我确实认为——我确实认为——你知道，我记得一个时代，我们有跨党派的对外政策等等，我喜欢那个时代。那是马歇尔计划的时代，做了很多美妙而有建设性的事情，而且都是慷慨的举措。现在，在我看来，两党似乎都在竞争，看谁最愚蠢——（笑声）——而且他们不断超越对方。（笑声和掌声）

沃伦·巴菲特：你可以看出查理是一个总是准确填报所得税申报表的人。（笑声）他不担心。

24. 核电“重要”且“安全”

沃伦·巴菲特：第七个问题。

股东提问：下午好，巴菲特先生和芒格先生。我是约翰·戈里，来自爱荷华州爱荷华市，我是MidAmerican Energy的快乐客户。大约在2004年，巴菲特先生，您告诉我们，您非常关注限制伯克希尔对巨灾的风险敞口，以确保没有任何灾难能够击垮伯克希尔。如今，MidAmerican Energy正在寻求批准在爱荷华州东部建造一座核电站。与此同时，另一家公用事业公司东京电力公司正面临索赔，美林估计索赔金额超过12万亿日元（约合1400亿美元），用于赔偿流离失所的居民、企业以及无法生产的农民。您认为MidAmerican Energy可能从核电站获得的类似债券的回报，能否证明其对伯克希尔构成的巨灾风险是合理的？

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，我不认为它构成——我不了解细节，格雷格·阿贝尔能比我更好地说明，但我不认为存在你提到的类似风险敞口。我认为核电是世界解决其问题的重要部分，真的——这是非常长期的，因为你无法在短期内改变已安装的基础设施。如你所知，法国核电比例非常高。实际上，美国20%的电力来自核电。我可能也在用一些核电——我们在卡尔霍恩堡有一个核设施——不是我们，是奥马哈公共电力区有一个核设施，我实际上进去过。但我认为核电很重要，而且我认为它是安全的。我认为——我知道——我认为核电在美国暂时——可能是相当长一段时间内——不会有什么发展，因为对东京——对东京电力公司事件的反应。

但这不会改变我关于继续发展核能的建议的看法，不仅在美国，而且在全世界。我认为有些人误解了我在接受采访时的说法，我说我认为核能发展会遭遇重大挫折，仅仅因为公众对日本事件的反应。但这并没有改变我的观点，即核电对这个国家和世界的未来都很重要。查理？（掌声）

查理·芒格：是的，我们不能因为害怕风险就回避那些只有极小概率会对某个子公司造成重大影响的事情。我们在经营这家公司时必须具备一定合理的勇气。

沃伦·巴菲特：我们有管道——我们有天然气管道——你可以设想各种最坏的情况。我们必须运输有毒物质。法律要求我们用铁路运输它们，你知道，你可以想象错误的地点、错误的时间、错误的一切。但在我看来，我们从不承担任何威胁到企业的风险。我的意思是，这是我一直在考虑的事情。我认为自己是伯克希尔的首席风险官，在我看来，这完全不应该授权给一个委员会。所以我会考虑——无论我考虑衍生品头寸、杠杆、核电站或其他任何东西，我的意思是，我们不会做任何我所知道的——尽我所能地发挥想象力——会让我因为担心伯克希尔的福祉而失眠的事情。

查理·芒格：而且我认为，在爱荷华州建造的任何新核电站，都会比我们已有的核电站安全得多。我们在这个过程中不断学习。（掌声）

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。显然，死于煤矿事故的人数远远超过美国核电站造成的死亡人数——核电为3.09亿人口提供了20%的电力，却从未造成任何伤亡。

查理·芒格：而且如果海啸到达爱荷华州，那将是一场可怕的海啸。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。我们的铁路也不会那么好过。（笑声）

25. 慈善项目因压力团体而终止

沃伦·巴菲特：安德鲁？

安德鲁·罗斯·索尔金：这个问题来自伊利诺伊州斯普林菲尔德的玛丽和吉姆·博蒙特。他们自1971年以来就是伯克希尔的股东。我应该指出，我们收到了几位长期股东类似的问题。这个写道：“伯克希尔是否考虑过恢复股东主导的慈善捐赠计划？既然您现在拥有大量现金头寸，并且正在敦促人们将财富捐给有价值的事业。当你们有这个计划时，我们多年来能够支持许多当地学校和慈善机构。”

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，我喜欢那个计划，我们大概持续了20年左右。查理喜欢它。很多股东喜欢它。它很有趣，因为它是一种节税的方式，让股东们把他们的一些钱捐赠给他们选择的任何机构，只要是501(c)(3)组织，他们可以选择最多三个慈善机构。一些家庭，例如，把它当作一种学习工具。当他们从我们这里收到表格时，他们会让孩子围坐在桌子旁，讨论慈善以及为什么选择这些机构。有两件事——嗯，有一件事非常有趣，那就是没有其他人模仿它。我的意思是，美国企业界的其他公司对让他们的股东指导捐赠不感兴趣。他们更感兴趣的是让CEO来指导捐赠。所以，尽管有相当多的宣传，它并没有流行起来。我们总是会遇到一些人的轻微反弹，他们不喜欢我们的股东选择的慈善机构。毕竟，伯克希尔的名字出现在支票上。

股东会告诉我们，我们希望每股捐20美元，比如说——他们持有10股，所以可以指导捐赠200美元——他们会说，我们希望这200美元捐给更多的——教堂和犹太教堂，实际上是排名第一的——但还有学校和各种各样的机构。我们总会收到一些信，说伯克希尔正在向比如加州计划生育协会捐款，人们会说：“嗯，我们将不再购买喜诗糖果，因为伯克希尔在加州支持计划生育协会。”有时我会给这些人回信，告诉他们，当喜诗购买杏仁、牛奶或任何类似东西时，我们不会去调查供应商的慈善偏好，但这从未真正造成什么影响。后来我们收购了The Pampered Chef，情况就不同了，因为我们通过5万多名独立承包商来运营The Pampered Chef。

这些人大多是女性，她们有时为了补贴收入——我们办公室里至少有一位女士销售The Pampered Chef的产品——有时这是她们的主要收入来源——这5万名独立承包商，出现了一场运动，人们说因为伯克希尔·哈撒韦捐钱，可能主要是捐给支持选择权的组织，而且这是按照股东的指示——我们也有其他人捐给支持生命权的组织。我的意思是，这些反映了我们股东的观点，而不是伯克希尔管理层的观点——但他们声称要抵制这些独立承包商。这些人是依靠这些收入生活的人，他们与伯克希尔的政策毫无关系，他们的生计受到了损害。在一些城市，这变成了电台运动；在一些城市，人们开始定期干扰我们为The Pampered Chef顾问举办的聚会。这伤害了许多无辜的人，他们与伯克希尔的政策无关，与伯克希尔也无关。那时，我们不情愿地决定终止这个项目。我一点也不介意因此失去一些喜诗糖果或其他业务的客户。

但当我们开始影响到个人时——这些人大多不是高收入者——并且因为伯克希尔的所作所为而断了他们的生计，这变得——对我来说很明显，继续下去是不公平的，我们不情愿地停止了它，我认为这很遗憾。查理？

查理·芒格：我们不想让母公司卷入关于当时社会问题的分散注意力的争论。

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，我们当然不希望它影响到——

查理·芒格：是的。

沃伦·巴菲特：——那些基本上只是旁观者的人，他们多年来一直指望与我们合作。这确实影响了成千上万人的收入，主要是女性，集中在全美的某些社区。好了。

查理·芒格：每年都有大量的伯克希尔股票被捐赠出去。我们并没有完全失去慈善的流动。

沃伦·巴菲特：不，大量的资金被捐出。部分原因是查理和我在50年代和60年代开始了我们的合伙关系，我们有许多合伙人现在已经80多岁了，其中一些捐出了异常巨额的金钱。你之前从迪克·霍兰德那里问了一个问题，例如，迪克·霍兰德——我认为具体数字是有记录的——但他多年来捐出了巨额金钱，并且还在继续。我们还有几十个这样的人，我认为他们最终会将他们在伯克希尔赚到的钱的90%或更多捐出去。

26. 为什么我们讨厌预测

沃伦·巴菲特：好。（掌声）第八个问题。

27. 巴菲特持有少量股票和大量债券

沃伦·巴菲特：好。卡罗尔？

卡罗尔·卢米斯：在伯克希尔提交给美国证券交易委员会的季度13F文件中，有三只股票仅由表格上登记的实体“沃伦·E·巴菲特”持有，而非伯克希尔子公司。请澄清这一令人困惑的情况。这些持股是您在伯克希尔之外的个人投资，还是它们归属于伯克希尔·哈撒韦？

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，你得告诉我具体是哪些股票。

卡罗尔·卢米斯：遗憾的是，提问者没有列出。但我认为就是这三只，上面写着沃伦·E·巴菲特是所有者。

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。好吧，马克·汉堡负责准备这些表格。马克，你有麦克风吗？你可以——

马克·汉堡：我想——

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，请说。

马克·汉堡：嗯，这些证券由某些员工福利计划持有，所以沃伦对这些计划有指示权，但这并不意味着它们归沃伦所有，也没有任何迹象表明它们归沃伦所有。沃伦被列为申报人，是因为他被视为伯克希尔的控股股东。因此，表格中列出的每只证券都将沃伦列为所有者之一。

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。我们是否要申报养老金计划持有的股票？

马克·汉堡：在你有指示权的范围内——

沃伦·巴菲特：我明白了，是的。

马克·汉堡：对。

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。不，我不认为我——嗯，马克比我更了解相关规则。我个人持有的证券非常非常少。我确实把时间花在思考伯克希尔上，所以我持有大量我一直在告诉你们不要买的证券，也就是政府债券，但这并非因为它是一项好的投资。这只是放点钱在那儿而不用操心的地方，我会专注于伯克希尔的工作。

28. 评估一家美国以外的公司

沃伦·巴菲特：第九区。

参会者：巴菲特先生、芒格先生，非常荣幸和高兴见到你们。我叫本·安德森，来自洛杉矶。当您考虑在中国投资时，那里的商业文化与这里大不相同，成功的商业实践也与此处截然不同，您在选择投资该公司时会寻找哪些特征？这与伯克希尔的一般原则有所不同吗？

沃伦·巴菲特：我们遵循同样的原则，但我们认识到，在离开美国后，我们对税法、商业惯例、对股东的态度等方面的了解，都不如在美国本土了解的多。现在，我们会在不同程度上权衡这种不确定性。在我买入中石油股票时（大概是2003年左右），它相对于任何储备量、炼油能力、现金流或任何你能想到的指标都极其便宜。与此同时，俄罗斯的尤科斯公司也非常非常便宜，它们都是巨型公司。我并不是什么地缘政治专家，但我当时决定买入中石油比买入尤科斯让我更安心。那么，我买入中石油是否像买入一家类似规模的美国国内公司那样安心呢？不是的，因为我对中国税法所有细节及其可能采取的政策，当时知道得不多，现在也一样。但当我阅读中石油的年报时，我印象相当深刻——非常深刻。

首先，他们表示将拿出（我记得是）盈利的45%用于派发股息。这比美国任何一家石油公司告诉我的都要多。因此，我认为这是一个积极因素，并且表明了一种我认为会实现的意图，而事实也确实如此。因此，我们会像在美国考虑各种关键因素一样，为我们的理解不足留出余地。但评估企业价值、寻找我们对其能力和诚信都有信心的管理层、然后找到有吸引力的买入价格，这些基本原则适用于我们在世界任何地方的投资。查理？

查理·芒格：嗯，我们在中国的投资非常少，想从中总结出普遍规律很难。这让我想起一个故事：一位教授暑假去西部，回来后对同事们说：“我发现印第安人总是排成一列走路。”他们问：“你怎么知道的？”他说：“因为我看到一个印第安人就是这么走的。”（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：我们怎么从那儿聊到中国了？（笑声）

查理·芒格：嗯，我们在中国只做过几件事。它们就像那一个印第安人一样。你无法从它们身上总结出普遍规律。

沃伦·巴菲特：但我们愿意明天就去看。我的意思是，显然，如果我们接到一个电话，那可能是一笔相当大规模的投资，因为去看那些我们只能投入几亿美元的项目对我们来说毫无意义。但是，我喜欢研究各种想法的过程。我觉得听取那些我还不熟悉的公司或企业的消息，是一个引人入胜的游戏。现在的问题是，由于我们的规模，这个“宇宙”已经变得小多了。但我们欢迎来自许多国家的电话。有些国家太小了，它们不会有能够影响伯克希尔这种体量公司的业务，所以这些国家就被排除在名单之外了。但是——

查理·芒格：中国至少有一家民营公司，税后年利润超过30亿美元。那里还是有些大公司的。

沃伦·巴菲特：我稍后会从他那里问到名字，但我不想让你听到。（笑声）

29. 伯克希尔的短期现金去向

沃伦·巴菲特：贝基？

贝基·奎克：这个问题来自阿拉斯加的爱德·施密特。他询问伯克希尔的现金情况。他写道：“这些钱存放在哪里？全是国库券还是票据？如果是这样，当最大的买家美联储在6月份停止购买时会发生什么？所有这些场外资金在哪里？它是在两年前我们看到的那张床垫下面吗？我看不出来任何大笔资金可以存放在不付利息的银行、有风险且利息不高的公司债券、或者看起来一天比一天不靠谱的政府债券里。”

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，他说得对，目前所有短期资金的选择都很糟糕，但我们不会乱动短期资金。因此，在2008年问题出现之前，我们就没有持有商业票据。我们也没有持有货币市场基金。我说我们没有持有它们，可能各子公司在一些小金额上持有，但就我们伯克希尔总部管理的大额资金而言，我们基本上将其存放在国库券里。现在我们几乎从中得不到任何收益，这很烦人，但在伯克希尔，我们最不可能做的事情就是为了多赚5个、10个、20个或30个基点，而将我们的短期资金投入到其他东西里。这只是一个停车位。这是一个没有吸引力的停车位，但这是一个我们知道当我们想取回我们的车时，一定能取到的停车位。

你知道，当我们需要现金时——2008年9月就是如此——我们此前已承诺在玛氏/箭牌交易发生时投入65亿美元购买箭牌股票。我们在做出这个承诺时（可能是在夏天），当然没有预料到9月份会发生那样的事件。但是，我们有钱。我知道我必须在（我猜是）10月6日拿出65亿美元。我必须出现。（笑声）我不能拿着货币市场基金、商业票据或诸如此类的东西出现。我必须带着现金出现。在持有大量随时可用的现金方面，我几乎唯一感到放心的就是国库券，这也就是我们的存放之处。如果你看看我们3月31日的报表，我想你会看到380亿美元，其中绝大部分是国库券。查理？

查理·芒格：嗯，当然，我见过很多人挣扎，他们认为自己有责任在短期资金上多赚10个基点。我认为，如果你像我们一样玩的是机会主义游戏，想随时准备部署资金，那么试图最大化短期资金回报是极其愚蠢的。我们买的一些管道，它们是在周六挂牌出售的，我们必须在周一或类似的时间完成交割？

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。

查理·芒格：当我们有如此突然的资金需求时，为什么要去摆弄一些可疑的工具呢？

沃伦·巴菲特：我们买了一条管道，卖家还担心下周就要破产了。这需要通过联邦贸易委员会的哈特-斯科特-罗迪诺反垄断审查，但他们急需用钱。我们——我记得我给联邦贸易委员会写了一封信，说我们会完全按照你们后续的指示来做。你们想怎么审查都行。我们会提供你们想要的所有数据。如果你们告诉我们要解除交易，无论你们说什么，我们都会照做。但是这些家伙需要钱，所以我们提前完成了交易。我们能够在人们需要钱、而在世界其他地方出于某种原因都惊恐万分的时候拿出现金，这让我们完成了几笔交易。我们不知道——这种情况明天就可能发生。我是说，如果——你知道，本·伯南克和帕丽斯·希尔顿私奔去南美了或者别的什么——（笑声）——我是说，谁知道会发生什么。我们希望到那时候，我们的支票能够兑现。

因此，我们认定，我们永远不知道明天会发生什么，虽然不会发生那种事，我想让你把它从这份报告的笔录部分删掉。（笑声）但是，当有人来找我们说，我们需要立刻完成一笔交易，我们能做到，他们也知道我们能做到，而且交易规模可能很大。前提是这笔交易要有吸引力。

30. 风电需要政府补贴

沃伦·巴菲特：好的，第十区。

参会者：嗨，沃伦。嗨，查理。非常感谢你们抽出时间举办了一场精彩的股东大会。四年前我们宣布要以你的名字命名我们的儿子，所以我们很高兴向你们俩问好。查理，自从伯克希尔收购了韦斯科之后，我们想知道你是否可以抽出时间自己主持一次会议？地点和时间都可以。

查理·芒格：我们会做的。

参会者：太好了。

查理·芒格：我们不会叫它韦斯科会议。我们会叫它“与查理共度一个下午”。

参会者：太好了。

查理·芒格：只面向铁杆爱好者。（笑声）

参会者：沃伦，中美能源公司正在投资超过10亿美元用于风电。你如何看待风电作为可再生能源及其经济性？这种投资规模会持续下去吗？你期望从风电中获得什么样的回报？

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，风电很棒，但只有在有风的时候才棒。根据我的记忆，在爱荷华州，风大约35%的时间在吹。所以你永远不能指望用风电来满足你的基础负荷。你知道，这是一个真正的局限。另一方面，我认为风电基本上是你所能想到的最清洁的能源，除了它不能持续供应这一点。它的经济性只有通过联邦政府提供的激励性税收抵免才能说得通，而联邦政府已经这样做了相当长一段时间了。如果完全靠自己，这项投资根本不会产生足够的资本回报。因此，你们的政府实际上决定通过税收抵免来补贴风电。爱荷华州是一个适合发展风电的州。

整个中部地带都适合——国家的中部地区很适合——所以在爱荷华州部署大量兆瓦的发电能力是合理的，我们现在有更多正在建设中的项目，我想我们目前是全国风电领域的领先者。所以我们会做得更多。就你能获得的价格、你发电能力的实际使用时间百分比等等而言，它只有在有税收抵免的情况下才有意义。有一件挺有意思的事——伯克希尔的资产之一就是它缴纳很多税。这听起来不像是什么资产，但在当下，很多公用事业公司，当它们同时享受100%的折旧扣除（这是联邦政府近期短期实施的）和这些风电税收抵免时，它们实际上没有足够的纳税能力来使用这些税收抵免。所以，它们与缴纳大量税收的伯克希尔处境不同。

在过去五年里，我们可能缴纳了美国所有公司税的2%左右。我想核实一下，但我觉得这数字不算太离谱。所以我们有很强的纳税能力。我们可以利用这一点来建设更多风电项目。我认为我们很可能会继续这样做。这有利于我们在爱荷华州的客户。因为这些项目很成功，这使我们能够保持电价——除了其他原因——保持电价十多年来完全不变，这在美国电力公司中是非常罕见的。查理？

查理·芒格：不，我没什么要补充的。

31. 我们绝不会让NetJets破产

沃伦·巴菲特：安德鲁？

安德鲁·罗斯·索尔金：嗯，这不是一个关于大卫·索科尔的问题，但与他有关。实际上是一个关于NetJets的问题。这位股东问道：“当您称赞索科尔‘复活了一个注定要破产的企业’时，您的说法让我很震惊。这确实引起了我的注意，因为我不记得您或伯克希尔·哈撒韦之前说过，在他的前任理查德·桑图利离职时，NetJets正处于破产边缘。事实上，当时这家公司给人的印象是它在处理一些短期问题，但基本面是稳健的。那么，它究竟离破产有多近？如果是这样，您为什么不告诉我们？最后，在NetJets的主要股东眼中它‘注定要破产’的时候，它还在要求潜在客户掏钱，这在道德上站得住脚吗？”

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，我想我说过它是——也许我们能找到确切的措辞——但我想我说过，如果不是因为伯克希尔·哈撒韦拥有它，如果它是一个独立的实体，它注定要破产。而伯克希尔从来没有任何意图，也永远不会有意让NetJets破产。但如果它被其他人作为独立公司拥有，公众投资者，那就会是它的下场。在伯克希尔的拥有下，伯克希尔旗下有两家保险公司，如果它们是独立的保险公司，也会破产。而我们——我们从未想过要让它们破产。所以，我们向伯克希尔拥有的、实际上已经破产的公司投入资金，使它们恢复元气。基本上，我们对NetJets也做了同样的事情，我们投入的资金达到了19亿美元。但我认为，如果没有像伯克希尔这样的公司拥有它，NetJets就会破产。我几乎可以肯定我说过这样的话，即‘没有伯克希尔的拥有’或类似的话——让我找找看。

在我找的时候，也许查理可以评论一下。无论如何——（笑声）嗯，我一下子没找到我当时讨论这个问题的原文，但我知道我谈到了破产这件事，而且我知道我把它限定为‘不被伯克希尔拥有’的条件。查理？

查理·芒格：不予置评。

沃伦·巴菲特：不予置评。（笑声）我们向标准普尔和穆迪指出过这一点。我们看待——伯克希尔有很多不同的公司，但我们认为它是一个整体，你知道，穆迪或标准普尔需要分别看待每一家公司等等，但查理和我在经营这个业务时，并没有想过要抛弃任何一家公司。我们在路易斯安那州有一家南方意外险公司，在芝加哥还有另一家，如果任其自生自灭，这两家都会破产，而我们甚至没有考虑过不让它们恢复元气。

32. 巴菲特的建议：投资于你自己的技能

沃伦·巴菲特：第十一区？

参会者：下午好。我叫克里斯托弗·大卫。我是来自弗吉尼亚州阿灵顿的一名企业家。我的问题是关于年轻人的。我和很多高中生、大学生以及近期毕业生打交道，他们面临着20%的青年失业率，但同时却拥有最有利的创业环境之一。现在创办一家企业或加入一家初创公司比以往任何时候都容易。那么，考虑到这些孩子政治头脑敏锐、喜欢学习经济学、才华横溢且愿意学习，从投资的角度来看，您能给他们什么建议，帮助他们规划自己的道路，而不是去朝九晚五地工作？

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，你能做的最主要的事情——人们有不同的做法。我过去是通过大量阅读来做的。我八九岁、十岁、十一岁的时候，几乎住在奥马哈公共图书馆里，住了三四年。我的意思是，你做的任何提高自己技能的事情，你永远不知道它日后会在哪里得到回报。我的办公室里只挂着一张文凭，我还有其他几张，但我挂起来的那张是我在戴尔·卡内基课程获得的，那是1951年我花了100美元学的。这100美元给我带来的价值是无法估量的。没有什么比努力提高自己的技能更好的了，我想说，无论你做什么，沟通技巧是我会首先努力提升的领域，这能提升你一生的价值。我的意思是，如果我在1950年或1951年时，在沟通方面还停留在原来的水平，我的人生轨迹就会完全不同。我是说，我那时开始销售证券。

如果你不能与人交谈，销售证券就会遇到大问题。所以——我认为——如果你有幸早早找到了自己的热情所在，你会希望从事你充满热情的工作，然后你会努力提高这方面的技能。我认为如果你做到了这两点，你很可能会做得非常好。查理？

查理·芒格：是的，我认为经济学是一门非常难的学科。我认为教授基础的微观经济学和某些基本概念很容易，但一旦涉及到全方位的复杂性，你就面临专家意见不一致的困难。所以，如果我想学习某个领域，我不会急于投身于那些连专家自己都无法达成一致的领域。我会先掌握简单的部分。

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，我不认为——是的，我不会建议去学校的人上大量的经济学课程。我试着回想一下。我在沃顿商学院上经济学课程是很久以前的事了，但我不认为它们是那些能推动我取得显著进步的课程。

33. 再保险远比看起来难得多

沃伦·巴菲特：卡罗尔？

卡罗尔·卢米斯：乔恩·勃兰特提出的问题。伯克希尔对慕尼黑再保险和瑞士再保险的股权投资，是否会减少你们愿意直接承保的巨灾险业务量？如果是这样，假设价格回到有吸引力的水平，你们是否会限制购买其他再保险股票的数量，以便能够做更多的直接业务？

沃伦·巴菲特：我们对慕尼黑再保险和瑞士再保险的投资少于——嗯，让我算一下——少于40亿美元，所以我们谈论的只是我们净值的2.5%。因此，这些投资的总规模，还不足以让我改变我们愿意在再保险领域承担的——我们愿意承担的风险。就我们愿意在保险中容忍的风险而言，我们远远低于我们的能力。我的意思是，我在年报中写到，我认为我们的正常盈利能力在税前170亿美元左右。这与世界上其他任何再保险公司都截然不同。我们经历了再保险历史上最糟糕的季度（除了卡特里娜飓风那个季度），最终我们仍然获得了相当可观的利润。因此，这些投资对我们承保保险的意愿没有任何制约。

我们非常希望账面上有更多有吸引力的再保险业务，我们只是——只是找不到我们认为与风险相称的价格。但这并不是因为总体上的风险厌恶。查理？

查理·芒格：是的，保险，特别是再保险，并不是一个容易的行业。你能做到现在这么好，花了很长时间。如果不是因为阿吉特，我们——我们现在的业务规模会小得多。

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，需要指出的是，在最初的15年里，我们在再保险业务上其实并不成功。我们在1970年左右开始做再保险，我们有一个我非常欣赏的人乔治·扬在管理，但扣除浮存金的价值后，在阿吉特出现前的15年里，这对我们来说并不是一个好生意。这不是一个容易的生意。大多数时候它看起来很容易。我的意思是——

查理·芒格：这就是问题所在。它看起来比实际容易。

沃伦·巴菲特：它看起来比实际容易得多。你知道，这就像拿着一对骰子，接受对双六之类的下注，你知道，它的出现概率是三十六分之一，所以你可以通过给出错误的赔率赢很多赌注，但如果你一直这样做足够久，你会输很多钱。所以对于这些罕见事件，你最好在定价时就考虑到它们，不要因为在某一年、两年、甚至三四年里赚钱而欺骗自己。大多数人在这一点上有些困难，我们在大约15年的时间里也有些困难。

查理·芒格：顺便说一句，如今世界上的投资银行家们，因为他们自营交易和衍生品交易如此之多，他们出售了一些产品，这些产品在大多数时候客户赢了，但客户输的时候，他们会输得非常惨。换句话说，他们比客户更精明，他们给普通商人造成了一些最可怕的损失。这在韩国发生过，在墨西哥发生过，还发生过——小心那些推销新型衍生品产品的销售员。

沃伦·巴菲特：或者老产品也一样。

查理·芒格：是的，但新的更糟糕。

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。

34. 巴菲特第一次见到托德·库姆斯

沃伦·巴菲特：好的，第十二区。

参会者：嗨，我叫波特尔·庞迪。我来自宾夕法尼亚州费城。问题是关于托德·库姆斯的，就是您去年年底雇佣的那位年轻的资金管理人。芒格先生，据我了解是您把他介绍给伯克希尔的。您能谈谈这是怎么开始的吗？我们作为股东，将如何评估他的进展？

查理·芒格：嗯，我讨厌谈这个，因为我可能会收到比我想象中更多的信，但他给我写了一封信。事情就是这样开始的。就像沃伦给那个人——拉尔夫·谢伊——写信一样。总之，我和他吃了一顿饭，然后我打电话给沃伦说：“我觉得你应该和这个人谈谈。”我们有一个非常复杂的业务和非常细致的流程，你们可以想象。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：他的业绩可以在大约五年的周期内被知晓。我的意思是，你不能根据一个人在六个月或一年里的表现来判断他是不是一个好的投资者。

查理·芒格：托德的优势在于，他多年来一直在思考像伯克希尔这样的金融公司。有他这样的人在我们身边是很有用的。

沃伦·巴菲特：正如我们在年报中所说，随着时间的推移，我们拥有不止一位投资经理的可能性较大，但并非确定无疑。你知道，伯克希尔有大量资金需要管理。拥有多位经理不是个坏主意，但我们必须找到合适的人选。合适的人选不仅仅意味着一定的智商或过去的业绩记录，它意味着很多方面。如果我们最终有两三位，那是一个加分项。但我们并不强制要求达到这样一个结果。

35. 收购与股票

沃伦·巴菲特：贝基？

贝基·奎克：这个问题来自斯科特·威尔金，他来自芝加哥，但目前就坐在观众席里。强生公司是伯克希尔最大的持股之一，他询问您，沃伦，对强生最近以210亿美元收购新创公司的看法。您曾直言不讳地反对卡夫收购吉百利，特别是因为他们使用了股票。强生的这笔交易也主要使用股票，您支持这笔交易吗？

沃伦·巴菲特：我没有与强生管理层的任何人谈过，我对该公司没有具体的了解，但基本上，如果这笔交易全部用现金支付，我会喜欢得多。当一个管理层放弃——我认为这笔交易大约是三分之二股票，三分之一现金。强生完全有能力用现金支付这笔220亿美元的交易。当他们拿自己现有的业务去换取其他业务时，他们要么是在说自己的业务估值已经相当充分，要么是在说出售方犯了一个大错。所以我会——就像我说的，如果全部用现金，我会喜欢得多。而且我认为，在这样一笔交易中使用大量股票，你当然可以推断出强生并不认为自己的业务——你知道——像你可能认为的那样有吸引力。

如果你用自己公司的股票以高于市场价20%或更多的价格去收购另一家公司，而这些交易中可能没有多少协同效应或管理上的好处。也许有一些，但通常也有一些抵消因素。但就像我说的，如果他们用现金完成交易，我会更喜欢得多。查理？

查理·芒格：是的，你还有一个不利因素，你对巧克力和披萨的了解，比你对医疗设备的了解要多得多。

沃伦·巴菲特：你认为我对巧克力更了解？

查理·芒格：嗯，你——（笑声）但在卡夫那个案例里，我的意思是，你说的是沃伦非常了解的生意，而我们俩对医疗设备都知之甚少。

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，披萨业务自卡夫出售以来表现得相当不错。（笑声）

36. 为什么我们不会为收购而发行股票

沃伦·巴菲特：我们转到另一个房间的第十三区。

参会者：嗨，我是来自纽约的格伦·唐。首先，感谢你们带来精彩的一天。我的问题涉及收购。在路博润交易之前，我们估计伯克希尔2011年底的现金余额可能接近600亿美元。我相信您最近评论过一头您觉得太大的大象。您的收购胃口如何？多大的规模算太大？最近电话响了吗？作为股东，我们能做些什么来帮忙吗？

沃伦·巴菲特：我上大学回答的问题都没这么多。但是——（笑声）不过，对于你能做的任何帮助，格伦，我都表示感谢。这个——你知道，很难给出一个精确的数字。这笔交易太大了，除非我们使用大量股票，而就像我说过的，我们不会这么做。我们的胃口一直都在。我们不会借很多钱。我们不会发行股票，除非是少量的，为了让一笔交易能够完成。而且，显然，我们绝不会为了买其他业务而出售一项业务。所以，你知道，除非我们采取行动，否则我们的现金余额会逐月增加。我们可以，也会出售一些投资组合中的证券。但是完成路博润交易需要接近90亿美元的现金，显然我们还可以再做一笔同样规模的交易。

事实上，我们正在看几个项目，但它们还只是眼中的一丝闪光，不过它们需要的资金规模与路博润大致相当，我们会很乐意做这些交易，它们会显著增加伯克希尔的盈利能力。它们值得做。但我们现在不能做一头真正的大象了，我们不会——你知道，我们不会勉强。我们从未真正冒过任何风险，因为我们不需要，我们不会用我们拥有且需要的东西，去交换我们没有且不需要的东西，即使我们有点想要它。查理？

查理·芒格：嗯，我当然同意所有这些。我们非常不愿意发行股票。在这一点上，我们与大多数公司不同。我有一个朋友卖给了一个社会主义国家，他们发行了一家控股公司的股票，那位社会主义高管说：“我们白白得到这家企业，这难道不美妙吗？”

沃伦·巴菲特：有些人确实有这种想法，当然，有些公司——我们谈到了60年代末的那一波潮流，但周期性发生的——互联网时期肯定发生了一次——公司发行股票的速度简直不够快，因为它们基本上是在用彩纸换取真实资产。在过去，某些公司在某些时期成功地运用了这种商业模式。它通常以某种形式的惨败告终，但是——嗯，我不应该说通常如此，但它在某个时候会耗尽能量。但你知道，从根本上说，我们从未玩过这种游戏。我们讨厌发行股票，而当我们发行股票时，我们就是在剥离我们所拥有的每一家出色公司的一部分股份，从GEICO到ISCAR，不胜枚举。我们不喜欢那样做。我们喜欢拥有这些公司。我们希望拥有更多它们。

我们——你知道，我们在Marmon公司有一笔交易，今年我们又买入了一些股份，再过几年我们会买下其余部分，我们对此感觉很好。我们支付了公允的价格，但我们得到了一家我们了解的企业、我们喜欢的管理层，这确实是我们在伯克希尔希望继续做的事情。事实上，我们会继续这样做。

37. 房地产市场很糟糕，但我们会从反弹中获利

沃伦·巴菲特：安德鲁？

安德鲁·罗斯·索尔金：这个问题来自拉里·皮特考斯基，他是一位长期股东，我想他就在观众席中，来自GoodHaven基金。他问道：“多年来，你们建立或收购了大量与住宅和商业房地产市场相关的业务，包括经纪服务、绝缘材料、地毯、建筑产品、油漆家具等细分领域。伯克希尔对这些业务的所有权似乎为您提供了一个独特的视角来观察当前状况。您能否向我们介绍一下住宅和商业房地产市场的现状，以及我们可能对这些业务在未来——这可能是长远的——十年内有何期待？”

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，眼下的情况很糟糕。它已经长期处于停滞状态，这影响了肖氏地毯、MiTek、阿克里砖业、约翰斯曼维尔，也影响了我们的HomeServices业务。根本没有反弹，你在新屋开工数据上也能看到这一点。我说的这些你们都知道，只是我看着每月的盈利数据时会感到痛苦。但这些都是好生意。正如我在年报中提到的，我们收购了阿拉巴马州最大的砖厂。我认为阿拉巴马州的人均用砖量比美国任何州都多，但这在当前意义不大，因为几乎没人用砖了。但我们还是买了它。我们开了一张现金支票，我们喜欢增强我们的地位。MiTek收购了一些业务。肖氏地毯今年要花几亿美元，部分原因是地毯业务性质的变化。

随着时间的推移，这个国家的房屋建设总量总体上将与家庭增长相匹配，我相信未来几十年我们将看到大量的家庭增长，而且我认为当住宅建设恢复到正常水平时，我们的公司完全有能力赚取可观的利润。我在年报中说，我认为我们会在年底看到回升。自从我撰写年报以来，我还没有看到任何让我确信自己正确与否的迹象；在我写完报告的这两个月里，我至今没有看到任何动静。我想届时就该开始了，但如果没有，你知道，可能会晚一年。我认为没有人知道答案。如果我必须赌一个方向，我认为它会在年底前好转。这对我们来说其实并不是那么重要。

当我决定收购阿拉巴马州的砖厂时，并不是因为我认为砖业会在两个月、六个月或一年内好转。我认为随着时间的推移，作为阿拉巴马州一家非常重要的砖制造商和经销商，毗邻我们在德克萨斯的强大业务，以我们支付的价格，这将是一项不错的投资。我对这个决定感觉良好，但未来六个月我不会对我们的砖厂业绩感到满意。这点我很确定。查理？

查理·芒格：嗯，收购这些非常周期性的业务的一个好处是，很多人不喜欢它们。如果这些业务的平均收益是每年3亿美元，但呈非常不稳定的状态，这对我们来说又有什么区别呢？从大局来看，只要是一门好生意，它是否不稳定又有什么关系呢？在这方面我们有一个优势。没有其他人在竞标一个几乎没客户的阿拉巴马州砖厂。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：如果你在阿拉巴马州需要砖，我们会在这里。（笑声）你知道，喜诗糖果是一门美妙的生意，但一年中大约有八个月是亏损的。碰巧我们知道这个季节性模式，所以我们在七月份不担心圣诞节会不来。我们有几千年的历史站在我们这边。（笑声）所以，这很容易理解。如果你只看喜诗一个月的盈利或一个季度的盈利，你会想，这些人干这行干嘛？显然，周期性业务不会和季节性业务表现得完全一样，但为什么要区别看待呢？我的意思是，如果你看未来20年，住宅建筑会有三四年糟糕的年份，会有很多相当好的年份，还会有少数几个非常好的年份。

我不知道它们出现的顺序，但我知道如果我能以足够便宜的价格买入这些资产来参与这20年，我们在这段时间内会做得不错。这就是为什么我们从事砖块生意。

38. 正式业务会议前的短暂休会

沃伦·巴菲特：现在让我们看看。是的，现在是3:30，所以我们休会大约五分钟，然后我们将举行伯克希尔·哈撒韦的业务会议。我们可以把灯打开，几分钟后我们再回来。（掌声）

39. 伯克希尔正式年度会议开始

沃伦·巴菲特：好的。请大家安静下来，我们处理一点业务。今天早上我介绍了到场的伯克希尔·哈撒韦董事。今天与我们同在的还有我们的审计师德勤会计师事务所的合伙人。他们可以回答你们可能提出的关于他们公司审计伯克希尔账目的相关问题。福雷斯特·克鲁特是伯克希尔的秘书。他将对会议过程进行书面记录。贝基·阿米克被任命为本次会议的选举监察员。她将核证董事选举和本次会议表决的各项动议的投票计数。本次会议指定的代理投票人是沃尔特·斯科特和马克·汉堡。秘书是否有关于伯克希尔已发行、有表决权以及出席会议的股份数量的报告？

福雷斯特·克鲁特：是的，我有。正如随本次会议通知一起发送给所有在2011年3月2日（本次会议登记日）登记在册的股东的委托书中所指出的，已发行的伯克希尔·哈撒韦A类普通股为942,559股，每股有权在会议审议的动议中投一票；已发行的伯克希尔·哈撒韦B类普通股为1,059,055,810股，每股有权在会议审议的动议中投1/10,000票。其中，通过截至4月28日（周四）晚上退回的代理投票，有663,042股A类股和659,697,109股B类股出席了本次会议。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢。这个数字构成了法定人数，因此我们将直接进行会议。第一项议程是宣读上一次股东大会的会议记录。我请沃尔特·斯科特先生向会议提出一项动议。

沃尔特·斯科特：我提议免于宣读上一次股东大会的会议记录，并批准该记录。

沃伦·巴菲特：有人附议吗？

声音：附议。

沃伦·巴菲特：该动议已提出并得到附议。有意见或问题吗？我们将通过口头表决对这项动议进行投票。赞成的请说“赞成”。反对的？动议通过。

40. 选举董事

沃伦·巴菲特：下一项议程是选举董事。如果有股东在场希望撤回之前提交的代理投票，并亲自就董事选举投票，可以这样做。此外，如果有股东在场未提交代理投票，并希望获得选票亲自投票，也可以这样做。如果您希望这样做，请向走道中的一位会议工作人员表明身份，他们将向您提供选票。我请沃尔特·斯科

贝克·阿米克：我的报告已准备就绪。根据截至上周四晚间收到的委托书，投票结果如下：针对高管薪酬咨询性投票的频率，每年一次获得112,395票，每两年一次获得4,615票，每三年一次获得609,699票。根据特拉华州法律要求，投票的精确计票认证将交给秘书，并纳入本次会议记录。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢你，阿米克小姐。公司股东已在咨询基础上决定，他们应每隔三年就公司指定高管的薪酬进行一次咨询性投票。

43. 关于减少温室气体排放的股东动议

沃伦·巴菲特：下一个议题是由股东科沃德小姐提出的一项动议，该股东由布鲁斯·赫伯特先生和拉里·多尔斯先生代表。该动议已在委托书中说明。动议要求伯克希尔·哈撒韦为其子公司发电厂设定减少温室气体排放的目标，并向股东准备一份关于如何实现这些目标的报告。董事们建议股东投票反对该提案。我现在请赫伯特先生来陈述该动议。为了让所有感兴趣的股东发表意见，我请赫伯特先生将发言时间限制在五分钟内。麦克风在…嗯，我们先让赫伯特先生发言，如果可以的话，把灯光调亮一些。

布鲁斯·赫伯特：谢谢。女士们，先生们，下午好。我叫布鲁斯·赫伯特，是华盛顿州西雅图Newground Social Investment公司的首席执行官。非常高兴今天能来到这里，代表一位终身持有伯克希尔A类股的股东。我在此陈述委托书第12页上的决议，该决议要求我们公司为其能源控股子公司设定减少温室气体排放的目标。这是因为严肃的投资者知道，并且研究显示，气候变化会带来财务责任。气候风险投资者网络（其成员管理着超过10万亿美元的资产）和碳披露项目（代表全球超过70万亿美元的资产）都呼吁公司披露与气候变化相关的风险，以及为减轻这些风险所采取的行动。2010年，66%的美国电力公司已经设定了温室气体减排目标。66%。遗憾的是，伯克希尔的中美能源并不在其中。现在，投资者有理由感到担忧。就在去年，美国证券交易委员会宣布气候风险是重大风险，并且必须予以披露。我们确实赞赏中美能源拥有美国所有公用事业公司中最大的风能投资组合。然而，同样真实的是，中美能源近四分之三的电力是通过燃烧煤炭产生的。全球投资者希望通过更清洁的发电方式来降低风险，并且66%的公共事业公司已经公布了这样做的计划。但中美能源没有提供这样的计划，尽管其网站在公开声明中称，“我们将设定具有挑战性的目标，并评估我们持续改善环境表现的能力”。对于一个燃煤公用事业公司来说，没有比减少污染更重要的环境目标了。但除此之外，伯克希尔面临着独特的脆弱性，因为气候变化的财务负担被转嫁给了保险公司，而作为一家主要的保险公司，这对我们公司有严重的财务影响。伯克希尔以其务实且富有远见的作风而享有卓越且当之无愧的声誉，这是几十年来赢得的。应对气候变化为我们公司提供了一个维护并提升这一声誉的机会。所以，最后我想说，世界上最大的机构投资者呼吁公司设定温室气体减排目标。这些目标是管理气候变化这一特殊商业风险的关键工具。美国三分之二的公用事业公司已经设定了这类减排目标，而这项决议重要的是，它赋予了伯克希尔管理层自由来决定这些目标应该是什幺，并塑造实现这些目标的流程。主要的代理顾问公司也反复建议投票支持类似的决议。因此，我将以一个请求和一个问题来结束我的发言。请求是请今天在座的各位加入我们，支持这项常识性的提案。而问题，先生们，是：你们是否评估了气候变化对我们公司的商业风险？你们发现了什么？谢谢。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢你，赫伯特先生。我们在1号区域有一个麦克风。任何希望发言支持或反对该动议的人都可以使用。你们已经看到1号区域在那里了。我会等一两分钟，以防有人想——还有另一位发言者吗？为了在场各位的利益，我请每位支持或反对该动议的发言者将发言时间限制在两分钟内，并将发言内容仅集中在该动议上。好了，请讲。

听众：嗨，我是保罗·赫尔曼，HIP投资者公司的创始人。HIP代表人类影响和利润。我们是加州、伊利诺伊州和华盛顿州注册的投资顾问。气候变化显然是伯克希尔·哈撒韦集团旗下公司面临的风险之一，包括中美能源和伯灵顿铁路——伯灵顿铁路运输煤炭，其中很大一部分被出口到中国。因此，我们也关注温室气体的披露、量化及其对利润的影响，以及可能为生态效率公司提供的碳信用资产的量化。所以我们强烈支持这项决议，要求增加披露、提高透明度，并评估可能实现的财务回报或财务负债，特别是在你们再保险的专业领域，因为再保险公司通常会对潜在的碳风险和负债进行量化，而传统保险公司可能不会这样做。因此，我们强烈主张对潜在的风险和负债进行透明化、披露和量化。美国证券交易委员会鼓励这种类型的披露，尽管他们并未强制要求。所以伯克希尔·哈撒韦可以在这方面成为领导者，就像通用电气公司那样，他们的“绿色创想”计划，其收入的10%来自“绿色创想”产品，以及从杰夫·伊梅尔特到杜克能源公司领导层的其他领导者，他们对应对气候变化和提高碳效率可能带来的财务回报持积极态度。谢谢。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢。还有其他人要发言吗？

听众：巴菲特先生，芒格先生。我叫杰斐逊·利利，是伯克希尔的长期股东。我个人认为，刚才那两位发言者才是全球变暖问题中的“热空气”，我们不应该（掌声）通过监管伯克希尔·哈撒韦来强迫其进行碳披露或遵守其他愚蠢的规则。如果个别业务的管理者自己选择这样做，那没问题，但试图用这种关于全球变暖的虚假信仰来监管伯克希尔·哈撒韦，是完全不合适的。你们自己做得很好。（掌声）

沃伦·巴菲特：还有其他发言者吗？

听众：芒格先生和沃伦·巴菲特。我只想说一件事，我认为这非常重要。伯克希尔·哈撒韦可以成为环境领域的领导者。我支持透明度，我知道这两位先生也是如此，还有约翰·杜尔，他对环境非常热心，我知道如果他今天在这里，他会有和这两位先生同样的感受。作为美国公民，关心环境很重要，不要继续污染环境了。我百分之百支持这两位先生。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢。（掌声）还有其他人没有发言的吗？

听众：有。我叫埃里克·施利姆。我不支持这个，所以我反对这项动议。我认为伯克希尔·哈撒韦在保持清洁、对环境负责方面有着相当好的声誉。我想没有人说巴菲特先生或芒格先生不在乎环境。我认为大多数人都关心环境。但这并不意味着我们应该让巴菲特先生和芒格先生，或任何一位CEO，来告诉他们如何经营自己的业务。你们非常关心伯克希尔的声誉。如果伯克希尔的子公司到处污染海洋和池塘，破坏不同城镇和城市的声誉，我想巴菲特和芒格也不会同意。所以，不进行监管或告诉别人如何经营业务，并不意味着你不关心环境。让我们自愿去做事，去做能赚钱的事，并且负责任。归根结底，这才是制胜之道。谢谢。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢。（掌声）还有人要发言吗？

听众：是的，我叫拉里·多尔斯，我支持这项决议。我认为没有人说你们不是正直的君子。但这是个实实在在的金钱问题。美国环保署正在发布新规定，要求加强对温室气体排放的监管。所以，我们真的是从一家拥有保险业务的集团公司的角度来看待这个问题，而实际承担巨大成本的正是保险公司。所以我非常期待听到你们的观点。谢谢。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢。还有其他人吗？

听众：是的，谢谢。我是股东大卫·休斯。我的观点是，这样做是正确的，我认为作为一个组织，在被强制要求之前主动去做是明智的。如果这赋予了你们以自己认为合适的方式制定规则的权力，那么我认为这会更强大，并开创一个先例，就像伯克希尔过去所做的那样，所以我支持这项决议。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢。（零散掌声）还有其他人吗？

听众：你好。我叫托马斯·丹肯伯瑟，我的专业背景是生物化学，我对环境问题非常热心，我认为伯克希尔努力成为领导者非常重要，所以我非常支持这项提议。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢。（零散掌声）那边还有人吗？

听众：嗨。我叫莎拉·克利夫兰，来自俄勒冈州波特兰市。我也想发言支持这项决议，我认为这无关对错。这关乎是否愿意审视风险和机遇。同时也是为了让伯克希尔·哈撒韦成为领导者，并与子公司就具体可能性进行合作。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢。（零散掌声）

听众：嗨。

沃伦·巴菲特：请讲。

听众：我叫萨姆·罗伊。这是我第一次参加年会。芒格先生和沃伦·巴菲特先生，你们经营业务的方式给我留下了深刻印象，但我也认为你们会关心环境。我不知道我们是否应该强制执行某种路线，但至少你们会通过行动，通过本地业务的运营方式以及所有运营活动展现出来，毫无疑问，我们会尽一切可能，绝不污染无法改变的大气。这不是空谈，而是我深为关切的事情。在环境问题上你们可以做任何事，但如果你们现在不掌控局面，我们不知道这对我们的子孙后代意味着什么。我请求你们进行彻底的调查，我相信你们会这样做的。感谢你们给我这个机会。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢。（零散掌声）

听众：是的。巴菲特先生和芒格先生，我叫鲍勃·斯坦。我是一名注册专业工程师，我有几点意见，我是伯克希尔的股东。第一，我认为我们都支持健全的环境保护。但环保署用于温室气体问题的科学依据并不一定可靠，也不一定符合伯克希尔·哈撒韦股东的最佳利益。此外，环保署提出的一切都不可行，并且已经造成了许多问题，削弱了美国在世界工业市场上的竞争力。谢谢。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢。（零散掌声）

听众：杰森·邦，来自加州帕洛阿尔托。对我来说，关于这个问题，有一点非常有趣，就是它值得人们投入热情。实际上，在这个问题的科学依据上，我同意很多人的观点。我担心的是，不一定是伯克希尔是否同意这项动议（我实际上是反对的），而是伯克希尔旗下的企业是否准备好帮助传播关于实际情况的真正科学，并帮助美国公众更好地理解，这样他们也能推动变革，而不是一切都由高层决定。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢。

听众：下午好。我叫比尔·冈瑟，来自佛蒙特州纽芬的股东。我在家乡担任州林业员，我想对那些不相信全球变暖是现实的人说，我希望你们能跟我到森林里看看。这绝对是现实。我支持这项决议，并希望其他股东也认为它足够重要，能将其贯彻到底。谢谢。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢。（零散掌声）

听众：下午好。我是（听不清）。我关心能源问题。我比任何人都关心能源和环境，因为我目前仍在研究能源和环境问题。但我真心相信私营部门的力量，相信自由市场的力量。而且我认为，这不是你们的责任将股东的资源投入到这个问题上。这不是你们的专业领域。我个人可以比我通过（听不清）进行环境倡导做得更好。所以，实际上是反对这项决议。谢谢。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢。（零散掌声）

听众：抱歉，我有位朋友想说点东西。我可以翻译一下。（离麦克风讲话）好的。他说太阳能电池板的发展对中国影响很大。问题——他还认为，实际上，伯克希尔应该做点什么，应该考虑这其中的影响。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢。（零散掌声）好的。哦，还有一位。

听众：嗨，我是凯文·汤普森，一名股东。我支持这项动议。我是一名职业工程师，在一家石油公司工作。我们开始审视温室气体排放时发现，我们原本以为会增加公司成本的东西，实际上却为公司创造了更多收入。这些故事通常不为人知，但它们确实存在。我建议你们也看看这个问题，因为实际上，你们可能忽略的东西，可能会为你们的股东带来收入。谢谢。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢。（零散掌声）

听众：你好，巴菲特先生。我是麦克，来自（听不清）。显然，砍伐亚马逊森林和烧一些煤之间有一条细微的界限。所以有时候你可以放弃一点，但不能放弃太多。这就是我不支持该动议的原因。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢。（零散掌声）

听众：不客气。

会议官员：似乎没有进一步的评论了。

沃伦·巴菲特：好的，谢谢。（掌声）伯克希尔的民主在行动。有几个被提出的问题。关于重大信息，或重大风险，就伯克希尔，特别是我们的保险业务而言，每年在10-K报告中，都会有风险陈述。而依我个人的看法，就我们的保险业务而言，这个问题对伯克希尔的保险业务并不构成重大风险。最后一位提到这个问题的那位先生，他认为如果我们遵循这项动议，甚至可能对伯克希尔更有利。讽刺的是，如果由我们决定，他很可能说对了。但就以我们电力公用事业业务所在的三个主要州为例，我们在那里服务近200万客户，分别是爱荷华州、犹他州和俄勒冈州，其他州也是如此。我们在这些州的公用事业委员会的指令下运营，每个委员会都制定自己的运营规则，我们都遵守这些规则。举例来说，如果我们单方面决定关闭重要的燃煤发电，我们会被告知要在更短的时间内对这些电厂进行折旧，这不会转化为伯克希尔的成本，而是会转化为当地更高的电价。我们有权获得投资回报，折旧越快，为了实现允许的回报率，电价就必须越高。例如，刚才有一位来自俄勒冈州的女士发言。任何我们单方面的尝试——而且我们未经公用事业委员会批准也无法这样做——但负担会落在客户身上。实际上，确实如此，我们会收回加速折旧的成本，并且我们很可能在其他发电设施上有更大的投资，从而获得回报。但这是一个问题——这最终不会由伯克希尔的股东承担成本，而是由这些州的电力费率或电力用户来支付。而这一判断，很恰当地，应该由这些州的公用事业委员会做出。无论他们决定什么，你知道，我们都会遵守。随着时间的推移，毫无疑问，就像我们谈过的在爱荷华州的风力发电一样，这个国家将转向不同的电力构成。正如我之前所说，我个人更倾向于随着时间的推移增加核电，但这将在州一级，以及某种程度上在国家一级决定。因此，我们建议投票否决该动议。我认为现在是时候对该动议进行表决了。如果有股东亲自投票，现在应该在该动议上标记选票，并将选票交给选举检查员。阿米克小姐，你准备好后可以宣读报告了吗？

贝克·阿米克：我的报告已准备就绪。根据截至上周四晚间收到的委托书，投票结果为：支持该动议67,733票，反对该动议608,576票。由于反对该动议的票数超过了所有已发行A类和B类股份的多数，该动议未获通过。根据特拉华州法律要求，投票的精确计票认证将交给秘书，并纳入本次会议记录。

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢你，阿米克小姐。该提案未通过。

44. 正式会议休会

沃伦·巴菲特：在我们休会之前，有没有人需要提出任何其他事项？如果没有，我请斯科特先生向会议提出一项动议。

沃尔特·斯科特：我提议本次会议休会。

沃伦·巴菲特：有人附议吗？

声音：我附议。

沃伦·巴菲特：休会动议已提出并获附议。我们将进行口头表决。有讨论吗？如果没有，赞成者请说“赞成”。反对者请说“反对”。