• 2018年年度股东大会
  • 上午场
    • 1. 巴菲特为芒格打开一盒花生脆糖
• 2018 Annual Meeting
  • Morning Session
    • 1. Buffett opens a box of peanut brittle for Munger
    • 2. 会计准则净亏损“不代表”业务实际
    • 2. Accounting-rule net loss “not representative” of the business
    • 3. 大师课：如何思考投资
    • 3. Master class: How to think about investments
    • 4. 一切都没变——巴菲特依然“半退休”
    • 4. Nothing’s changed - Buffett’s still “semi-retired”
    • 5. 精密铸件是“非常好的生意”
    • 5. Precision Castparts is “a very good business”
    • 6. 贸易收益巨大，因此美国和中国不会做“蠢事”
    • 6. Trade benefits are huge, so U.S. and China won’t do something “foolish”
    • 7. 交易不依赖巴菲特：“声誉现在属于伯克希尔”
    • 7. Deals don’t depend on Buffett: “The reputation belongs to Berkshire now”
    • 8. “我们在网络保险方面不知道自己在做什么”
    • 8. “We don’t know what we’re doing” in cyber insurance
    • 9. 公共部门的资本配置
    • 9. Capital allocation in the public sector
    • 10. 富国银行在“大错”之后会变得更强
• 2018年股东大会
  • 第二部分/共六部分
    • 13. 将企业价值计入损益表是“极具欺骗性的”
    • 13. Putting business values in income account is “enormously deceptive”
    • 14. 麦克莱恩利润因激烈竞争压力而受损
    • 14. McLane profits hurt by severe competitive pressure
    • 15. 与亚马逊和摩根大通合作的医疗成本项目
    • 15. Health care costs partnership with Amazon and JPMorgan
    • 16. 韦施勒和库姆斯“略微领先”标普指数
    • 16. Weschler and Combs “slightly ahead” of S&P
    • 17. GEICO正处于良好的增长和盈利轨道
    • 17. GEICO is on a good growth and profit track
    • 18. 芒格谈钢铁关税：“即使是唐纳德·特朗普也可能正确”
    • 18. Munger on steel tariffs: “Even Donald Trump can be right”
    • 19. 巴菲特不会将自己的政治观点强加于伯克希尔
    • 19. Buffett won’t impose his political opinions on Berkshire
    • 20. 伯克希尔“极不可能”支付特别股息
    • 20. “Very unlikely” Berkshire would pay a special dividend
    • 21. 芒格比巴菲特对中国股票更感兴趣
    • 21. Munger is more interested than Buffett in Chinese stocks
• 2018年年度会议
  • 第3部分，共6部分
    • 26. 我们正在试验低成本商业保险
    • 26. We’re experimenting with lower-cost commercial insurance
    • 27. 医疗保健合作正在攻击一个巨大的”行业护城河”
    • 27. Health care partnership is attacking a huge “industry moat”
    • 28. 巴菲特与埃隆·马斯克就竞争护城河是否”过时”展开辩论
    • 28. Buffett vs Elon Musk on whether competitive moats are “lame”
• 2018年年度股东大会
  • 第4部分，共6部分
    • 9. 巴菲特对报纸衰落速度未放缓感到”惊讶”
    • 10. TTI在过去一年”大幅改善”
    • 11. Phillips 66 与保持低于10%的所有权
    • 12. 加密货币热潮将”以糟糕的结局收场”
    • 13. 股东将从企业减税中获得大量好处
    • 14. 利用多元文化背景改善国际经济，以及多元文化的好处
    • 15. 鼓励子公司提供低成本的401(k)选项
    • 16. 伯克希尔的文化将持续，因为”它行之有效”
    • 17. 支持伯克希尔保险业务所需的现金
• 2018年股东大会
  • 第5/6部分
  • 21. 恶意收购并非“邪恶”，但伯克希尔不做
    • 21. Hostile bids aren’t “evil” but Berkshire doesn’t do them
  • 22. 伯克希尔仍未进入国际企业卖家的雷达
    • 22. Berkshire still not on radar screen of international business sellers
  • 23. 投资“不需要高等学习”
    • 23. Investing “doesn’t require advanced learning”
  • 24. 随着女性进入劳动力市场，巴菲特“看好人类”
    • 24. Buffett “bullish on human race” as women enter the workforce”
  • 25. 伯克希尔回购不受各州保险法规限制
    • 25. Berkshire buybacks not limited by state insurance rules
  • 26. 芒格：“我不认为机器智能会改变世界那么多”
    • 26. Munger: “I don’t think the world is going to be changed that much by machine intelligence”
  • 27. 芒格：“美国投资者错过了中国”
    • 27. Munger: “American investors are missing China”
  • 28. “杰夫·贝索斯所做的近乎一个奇迹”
    • 28. “What Jeff Bezos has done is something close to a miracle”
    • 33. 关于可持续发展报告的股东提案
    • 33. Shareholder proposal on sustainability reports

Title: 2018 Annual Meeting

Part 1/6

2018 Annual Meeting

Morning Session

1. Buffett opens a box of peanut brittle for Munger

WARREN BUFFETT: Good morning.

VOICE: Warren and Charlie, we love you! (Applause)

WARREN BUFFETT: I’m Warren. He’s Charlie. Charlie does most things better than I do, but (laughter) - you know, this one’s a little tough. Charlie, maybe you can chew on that a while. OK. (Laughter) At the formal meeting that will begin at 3:45, we will elect 14 directors. Charlie and I are two of them, and I would like to introduce the other 12. I’ll do it in alphabetical order. If they will stand as I announce their name. Withhold your applause. May be hard to do, but give it your best. And when we get all through, then you can let loose, but We’ll do this alphabetically beginning with Greg Abel, if you’ll stand and stay standing. Howard Buffett, Steve Burke, Sue Decker, Bill Gates, Sandy Gottesman, Charlotte Guyman, Ajit Jain, Tom Murphy, Ron Olson, Walter Scott, and Meryl Witmer. (Applause)

2. Accounting-rule net loss “not representative” of the business

WARREN BUFFETT: Let’s see. This morning, we posted both our earnings and our 10-Q. And if we can put up slide one, you can take a look at what was reported. And as I warned you in the annual report, a new accounting rule was introduced at the beginning of this year. And it provides that our equity securities, whether we sell them or not, are marked to market every day. So we can have a gain or loss of a couple billion dollars in our equity securities portfolio, and that day, according to the accounting principles now in effect, which are a change, will be recorded as making a couple billion dollars that day or losing a couple billion. And I told you that would produce some very unusual effects from quarter to quarter. And it further explains why I like to release our earnings early Saturday morning and - as well as the 10-Q - to give people a chance to read through the explanation. Because if you just were handed this with a TV monitor, you know, at 3:30 in the afternoon or whatever it might be, you would report the net earnings figure, understandably, very quickly.

And it really is not representative of what’s going on in the business at all. So, if you look at the figure of operating earnings, which is what we look at, we actually earned a record amount for any quarter we’ve ever had. And that includes no realized gains or losses on securities, or on the few remaining derivatives we have. You might leave that slide up there just a little longer. Maybe it is up The insurance underwriting - GEICO had a quite a good-sized turnaround in profitability and a good gain, although not as big a gain as last year, which was a record in terms of policies in force and, really, throughout most of our businesses. And the details are in the 10-Q, which is up on our website now. And as you can see, the railroad was up significantly, and we had - most of our businesses tended to be up. Now we were aided in that, in a material way, by the reduction in the federal income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Our businesses were up significantly on a pretax basis, but the gain was further enhanced by the change in the income tax rate. So that pretty well sums up the first quarter.

We’ll probably get some - may well get some questions on it when we get into the question and answer section.

3. Master class: How to think about investments

WARREN BUFFETT: The questions we’ll be getting, we’ve got the press over here, and then we have the analysts on my left. And of course, we have our partners out in front of me. And we will rotate among you. And the questions we get, as we go through the next six hours or so, will understandably relate to a lot of current events. You know, you will We may get asked, and we don’t know the questions, but we may get asked, you know, about Fed policy, or whether we’re seeing any inflation, or whether business is speeding up or down, or the threats we may face competitively in our businesses as we go along. And you - anything goes on the questions, except we won’t tell you what we’re buying or selling. But it really can be a question sometimes of confusing the forest with the trees. And I would like to just spend just a couple of minutes giving you a little perspective on how you might think about investments, as opposed to the tendency to focus on what’s happening today, or even this minute, as you go through.

And to help me in doing that, I’d like to go back through a little personal history. And we will start - I have here a New York Times of March 12th, 1942. I’m a little behind on my reading. (Laughter) And if you go back to that time, that - it was about, what? Just about three months since we got involved in a war which we were losing at that point. The newspaper headlines were filled with bad news from the Pacific. And I’ve taken just a couple of the headlines from the days preceding March 11th, which I’ll explain was kind of a momentous day for me. And so you can see these headlines. We’ve got slide two up there, I believe. And we were in trouble, big trouble, in the Pacific. It was only going to be a couple months later that the Philippines fell, but we were getting bad news. We might go to slide three for March 9th. Hope you can read the headlines, anyway. The price of the paper’s three cents, incidentally.

The - and let’s see, we’ve got March 10th up there, as slide - I - when I get to where there’s advanced technology of slides, I want to make sure I’m showing you the same thing that I’m seeing in front of me. So anyway, on March 10th, when again, the news was bad: “Foe Clearing Path to Australia.” And it was like it - the stock market had been reflecting this. And I’d been watching a stock called Cities Service preferred stock, which had sold at $84 the previous year. It had sold at $55 the year - early in January, two months earlier - and now it was down to $40 on March 10th. So that night, despite these headlines, I said to my dad - I said, “I think I’d like to pull the trigger, and I’d like you to buy me three shares of Cities Service preferred” the next day. And that was all I had. I mean, that was my capital accumulated over the previous five years or thereabouts. And so my dad, the next morning, bought three shares.

Well, let’s take a look at what happened the next day. Let’s go to the next slide, please. And it was not a good day. The stock market, the Dow Jones Industrials, broke 100 on the downside. Now they were down 2.28 percent as you see, but that was the equivalent of about a 500-point drop now. So I’m in school wondering what is going on, of course. Incidentally, you’ll see on the left side of the chart, the New York Times put the Dow Jones Industrial Average below all the averages they calculated. They - they had their own averages, which have since disappeared, but the Dow Jones has continued. So the next day - we can go to the next slide - and you will see what happened. The stock that was at 39 - my dad bought my stock right away in the morning because I’d asked him to, my three shares. And so I paid the high for the day. That 38 1/4 was my tick, which was the high for the day.

And by the end of the day, it was down to 37, which was really kind of characteristic of my timing in stocks that was going to appear in future years. (Laughs) But it was on the - what was then called the New York Curb Exchange, then became the American Stock Exchange. But things, even though the war, until the Battle of Midway, looked very bad and - and if you’ll turn to the next slide, please - you’ll see that the stock did rather well. I mean, you can see where I bought at 38 1/4. And then the stock went on, actually, to eventually be called by the Cities Service Company for over $200 a share. But this is not a happy story because, if you go to the next page, you will see that I - (Laughter) Well, as they always say, “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” you know. (Laughter) So I sold - I made $5 on it. It was, again, typical - (laughs) - of my behavior. But when you watch it go down to 27, you know, it looked pretty good to get that profit.

Well, what’s the point of all this? Well, we can leave behind the Cities Service story, and I would like you to, again, imagine yourself back on March 11th of 1942. And as I say, things were looking bad in the European theater as well as what was going on in the Pacific. But everybody in this country knew America was going to win the war. I mean, it was, you know, we’d gotten blindsided, but we were going to win the war. And we knew that the American system had been working well since 1776. So, if you’ll turn to the next slide, I’d like you to imagine that at that time you had invested $10,000. And you put that money in an index fund - we didn’t have index funds then - but you, in effect, bought the S&P 500. Now I would like you to think a while, and don’t - do not change the slide here for a minute.

I’d like you to think about how much that $10,000 would now be worth, if you just had one basic premise, just like in buying a farm you buy it to hold throughout your lifetime and depend - and you look to the output of the farm to determine whether you made a wise investment. You look to the output of the apartment house to decide whether you made a wise investment if you buy an apartment - small apartment house - to hold for your life. And let’s say, instead, you decided to put the $10,000 in and hold a piece of American business, and never look another stock quote, never listen to another person give you advice or anything of this sort. I want you to think how much money you might have now. And now that you’ve got a number in your head, let’s go to the next slide, and we’ll get the answer. You’d have $51 million. And you wouldn’t have had to do anything. You wouldn’t have to understand accounting.

You wouldn’t have to look at your quotations every day like I did that first day - (laughs) - when I’d already lost $3.75 by the time I came home from school. All you had to do was figure that America was going to do well over time, that we would overcome the current difficulties, and that if America did well, American business would do well. You didn’t have to pick out winning stocks. You didn’t have to pick out a winning time or anything of the sort. You basically just had to make one investment decision in your life. And that wasn’t the only time to do it. I mean, I can go back and pick other times that would work out to even greater gains. But as you listen to the questions and answers we give today, just remember that the overriding question is, “How is American business going to do over your investing lifetime?” I would like to make one other comment because it’s a little bit interesting.

Let’s say you’d taken that $10,000 and you’d listened to the prophets of doom and gloom around you, and you’ll get that constantly throughout your life. And instead, you’d used the $10,000 to buy gold. Now for your $10,000 you would have been able to buy about 300 ounces of gold. And while the businesses were reinvesting in more plants, and new inventions came along, you would go down every year in your - look in your safe deposit box - and you’d have your 300 ounces of gold. And you could look at it, and you could fondle it, and you could - I mean, whatever you wanted to do with it. (Laughter) But it didn’t produce anything. It was never going to produce anything. And what would you have today? You would have 300 ounces of gold just like you had in March of 1942, and it would be worth approximately $400,000.

So if you decided to go with a nonproductive asset - gold - instead of a productive asset, which actually was earning more money and reinvesting and paying dividends and maybe purchasing stock - whatever it might be - you would now have over 100 times the value of what you would have had with a nonproductive asset. In other words, for every dollar you had made in American business, you’d have less than a penny by - of gain - by buying in this store of value, which people tell you to run to every time you get scared by the headlines or something of the sort. It’s just remarkable to me that we have operated in this country with the greatest tailwind at our back that you can imagine. It’s an investor’s haven - I mean, you can’t really fail at it unless you buy the wrong stock or just get excited at the wrong time. But if you’d - if you owned a cross-section of America and you put your money in consistently over the years, there’s just - there’s no comparison against owning something that’s going to produce nothing.

And there - frankly - there’s no comparison with trying to jump in and out of stocks and pay investment advisors. If you’d followed my advice, incidentally - or this retrospective advice - which is always so easy to give - (Laughs) If you’d follow that, of course you - there’s one problem. Your friendly stock broker would have starved to death. I mean, you know, and you could have gone to the funeral to atone for their fate. But the truth is, you would have been better off doing this than a very, very, very high percentage of investment professionals have done, or people have done that are active that - it’s very hard to move around successfully and beat, really, what can be done with a very relaxed philosophy. And you do not have to be - you do not have to know as much about accounting or stock market terminology or whatever else it may be, or what the Fed is going to do next time and whether it’s going to raise three times or four times or two times. None of that counts at all, really, in a lifetime of investing.

What counts is having a philosophy that you’ve - that you stick with, that you understand why you’re in it, and then you forget about doing things that you don’t know how to do.

4. Nothing’s changed - Buffett’s still “semi-retired”

WARREN BUFFETT: So with all those happy words, we will move on and start the questioning, and we’ll start with Carol.

CAROL LOOMIS: Good morning. In choosing a first question to ask each year, I look for a question that is definitely Berkshire-related and is timely. And this question seemed to fill the bill. The question came from William Anderson (PH) of Salem, Oregon. And he said, “Mr. Buffett, you have previously said that there are two parts to your job, overseeing the managers and capital allocation. Mr. [Greg] Abel and Mr. [Ajit] Jain now oversee the managers, which leaves you with capital allocation. “However, you share capital allocation with Ted Weschler and Todd Combs. Question. Does all that mean you are semi-retired? Or if not, please explain.” (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: I’ve been semi-retired for decades. (Laughter) The answer is that I was probably - well, it’s hard to break down the percentage of the time that I was involved in but now - the jobs that are now done by Ajit and Greg, and in the case of investing, the sub part of the job that is done by Ted and Todd. Ted and Todd each manage 12- or $13 billion, so in total, that’s 25 billion. And we have in equities 170-some billion, probably now, and 20 billion in longer-term bonds, and another hundred billion in cash and short-term. So they’re managing 20 - 25 and doing a very good job. And I still have the responsibility, basically, for the other 300 billion. So - (Laughter and applause) I think Charlie will tell you - in fact, I’d like him to comment - nothing’s really changed that much. We’ve got - clearly we’ve got two people in Ajit and Greg that are smarter, more energetic, just bring more to the job every day.

But they don’t bring too much, because the culture is that our managers are running their business. But there’s a lot - there’s a good bit to oversee. So they do a superb job. And Ted and Todd not only do a great job with the 12 or 13 billion each - they started with a couple billion each - not that it’s all been the growth of the 2 billion - but they also do - have done a number of things for Berkshire that they do it cheerfully, but more important, very skillfully. So there’s just - there’s one thing after another that I will have them looking into or working on. And sometimes I steal their ideas and But I think, actually, semi-retired is probably - catches me at my most active point. I think if (laughter) - your questioner’s got a good point. OK, Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, I’ve watched Warren for a long time, and he sits around reading most of the time and thinking. And every once in a while he talks on the phone or talks to somebody. I can’t see any great difference. A lot of people - (Laughter) Part of the Berkshire secret is that when there’s nothing to do, Warren is very good at doing nothing. (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: I’m still looking forward to being a mattress tester. (Laughter)

5. Precision Castparts is “a very good business”

WARREN BUFFETT: OK, Jonathan Brandt.

JONATHAN BRANDT: Hi Warren. Hi Charlie. Given the growth in airplane build rates, it seems surprising that Precision Castparts isn’t doing better on the top or bottom line. I understand the issue with a bumpy transition from old to new programs, but I’ve also heard from industry sources that Precision’s market position is not as strong as it used to be amid intensifying competition and some technological disruption. What does Precision need to do to solidify and strengthen its preeminent position with its aerospace customers so that it can deliver the growth you expected when Berkshire acquired it?

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah

JONATHAN BRANDT: More generally, two years after the acquisition, what is your outlook for that business?

WARREN BUFFETT: Give me the last part again. The outlook.

JONATHAN BRANDT: More generally, two years after the acquisition, what is your updated outlook for that business longer term?

WARREN BUFFETT: Oh, longer term, I think - and in the reasonably shorter term - it’s a very good business. I mean, you were You mentioned aircraft, but we get into other industries. But certainly aircraft’s the most important. You have manufacturers that are very dependent on both the quality of the parts and the promptness of delivery. You do not want to have an aircraft with 75- or 100- or maybe $200 million and be waiting for a part or something of the sort. So it’s - Reliability is, both in terms of quality and delivery times and all of that sort of thing, is enormously important. And we get contracts that extend out many years. And sometimes we - I mean, we will get them well before the plane even starts in production. So there’s very long lead times. And we have found in the last year - found it earlier, but I know of some specific cases in the last year - where other suppliers have failed in their deliveries and then the manufacturers come to us and say, “We would like you to help us out.”

And we say, “Well, we’d be glad to help you out, but we’d like about a five-year contract, if we’re going to do it because we’re just not going to make up for these other guys’ shortfalls periodically.” But that sort of thing has a very long lead time. The business is a very good business. One thing you will see their earnings charged with is about $400 million - little over $400 million a year - of intangible - nondeductible in that case amortization of goodwill, which is really - is not an economic cost in my view. We have a significant amount of that through Berkshire, but by far, the largest amount is related to the Precision acquisition. So whatever you see, you can add about 400 million that in my view is not an economic expense, but the accountants would argue otherwise. But it’s our money, so we’ll take my view. The - (Laughter) Mark Donegan, who runs that operation, is incredible, and he has been not only - he’s a fabulous manager. I wouldn’t have bought it without him in charge.

He also has been very helpful to us in other areas, and he loves to do it. So you can’t beat him, both as a manager in his own operation, but with his devotion to really doing everything that will help Berkshire. It was - it’s a very good acquisition with very long tails to the products that are being developed. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, yeah, I think we’d buy another one just like it tomorrow if we had the chance.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, that’s the answer. (Laughter) Man of few words, but he gets the point. (Laughter)

6. Trade benefits are huge, so U.S. and China won’t do something “foolish”

WARREN BUFFETT: OK, now we will go to the shareholder in Station 1. I believe that’s probably up here to my right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello. This is Chao (PH) from Wuxi, China, (Inaudible) Capital. I’ve been to the meeting for 12 years. Wish you and Charlie good health, so we could see you both from meeting for 12 more years.

WARREN BUFFETT: Thank you. (Applause)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Quick question. We know both you and China delegations - U.S. and China delegations - are in China for intense discussion, also called a trade war. Let’s go one step beyond the trade war. Do you think there’s a win-win situation for both countries or the world is just too small for both to win and we have to revisit your 1942 chart again? Thank you.

WARREN BUFFETT: Thank you. I’d like to just mention one thing. In August, I’m going to be 88, and that will be the eighth month of the year, and it’s a year that ends with an eight. And as you and I both know, eight is a very lucky number in China. So if you find anything over there for me, this is the time we should be acquiring something. All those eights.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Will do. (Buffett laughs)

WARREN BUFFETT: The United States and China are going to be the two superpowers of the world, economically and in other ways, for a long, long, long time. We have a lot of common interests, and like any two big economic entities, there are times when there’ll be tensions. But it is a win-win situation when the world trades, basically. And China and the U.S. are the two big factors in that, but there’s plenty of other citizens of the world that are involved in how this comes out. And there is no question The nice thing about in this country I think is that both Democrats and Republicans basically, on balance, believe in the benefits of free trade. And we will have disagreements with each other. We’ll have disagreements with other countries on trade. But it’s just too big and too obvious for - that the benefits are huge, and the world’s dependent on it in a major way for its progress, that two intelligent countries will do something extremely foolish. We both may do things that are mildly foolish from time to time, and there is some give and take, obviously, involved. But U.S.

exports in 1970 and U.S. imports in 1970 were both about 5 percent of GDP. I mean, here we we were, selling 5 percent of our GDP and buying up 5 percent of our GDP, basically. Now people think we don’t export a lot of things. Our exports are 11 and a fraction percent of GDP. They’ve more than doubled as a share of this rising GDP. But the imports are about 14 1/2 percent, so there’s a gap of three percent or thereabouts. And I would not like that gap to get too wide. But when you think about it, it’s really not the worst thing in the world to have somebody send you a lot of goods that you want and hand them little pieces of paper. I mean, because the balancing item is, if you have a surplus or deficit in your trade, you’re going to have a surplus in investment. And so the world is getting more claim checks on the United States, and they - to some extent they buy our government securities, they can buy businesses.

And over time, you don’t want the gap to get to be too wide because the amount of claim checks you are giving out to the rest of the world could get a little unpleasant under some circumstances. But we’ve done remarkably well with trade. China’s done remarkably well with trade. The countries of the world have done remarkably well with trade. So it is a win-win situation. And the only problem gets to be when one side or the other may want to win a little bit too much, and then you have a certain amount of tension. But we will not sacrifice - the world, I mean - will not sacrifice world prosperity based on differences that arise in trade. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah, well I think that both countries have been advancing. And of course China is advancing faster economically, because it started from a lower base and they’ve had a little more virtue than practically anybody else in the world in having a high savings rate. And of course, a country that was mired in poverty for a long, long time, and that assimilates the advanced technology of the world, and has a big savings rate, is going to advance faster than some very mature company like Britain or the United States. And that’s what’s happened. But I think we’re getting along fine, and I’m very optimistic that both nations will be smart enough to realize that the last thing they should do is have any ill will for the other.

7. Deals don’t depend on Buffett: “The reputation belongs to Berkshire now”

WARREN BUFFETT: OK, Becky Quick. (Applause)

BECKY QUICK: This question comes from Kirk Thompson. He says, “Warren, in this year’s annual letter to shareholders, you referenced both cheap debt and a willingness by other companies to leverage themselves as competitive examples as to why it’s hard to get more acquisition deals done. “It seems like the trust in - and prestige of doing a deal with Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger allow Berkshire to get a hometown discount and beat out other firms that might pay a little more to a prospective seller. “Have you given thought to having other Berkshire managers have more public exposure, so future generations of successful business owners continue to bring deal opportunities to Berkshire like they have in prior decades?”

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, that sort of reminds me of - who was it? Tony O’Reilly remarked one time about the responsibility of a CEO. That the very first job of the CEO was to search through his organization and find that person who had the initiative and the brains, the determination, all of the qualities to be his logical successor, and then fire the guy. (Laughter) The - there’s no question. I think the reputation of Berkshire as being a very good home for companies - particularly private companies - but a good home for companies, I don’t think that reputation is dependent on me or Charlie. It may take a little, you know, there’ll be a little testing period for whoever takes over, in that respect. But, you know, basically we’ve got the money to do the deals. We’ll have the money to do the deals subsequently. People can see how our subsidiaries operate in the future. And the truth is that, I think some of the other executives are going - are getting better known.

But there will be a - you know, I’ll tell you this, if things get bad enough, you don’t have to worry. They’ll be calling us no matter what. (Laughs) So I do not worry about the so-called “deal flow,” which is a term I hate. But I don’t think there’s - I think that’s dependent on Berkshire and not dependent on me. And, you know, as I’ve mentioned, my phone isn’t ringing off the hook with good deals. So apparently this big winning personality or something is not delivering for you. (Laughter) So it may be the next person will be even more - get even more calls. Berkshire - the reputation belongs to Berkshire now. And we are, for somebody that cares about a business that they and their parents and maybe their grandparents lovingly built over decades - if they care about where that business ends up being after, for one reason or another, they don’t want to keep it or can’t keep it in the family, we absolutely are the first call.

And we will continue to be the first call, whether Charlie or I answer the phone or somebody else does. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, a lot of the subsidiaries have for a long time already been making all kinds of acquisitions with people they know and we don’t. So it’s already happening. And, in fact, it’s happening more there than it is at headquarters, so

WARREN BUFFETT: Don’t tell them, Charlie.

CHARLIE MUNGER: You’re getting your wish. (Laughter) And it is weird that about 99 percent of the public companies that change hands, in terms of control, change hands in a sort of auction presided over by an investment banker. And the people that buy are usually just leverage it to the gills, and when it starts doing a little better, they re-leverage it. And that money is coming out of the charitable endowments and pension plans who are making these highly-leveraged investments in all these companies changing hands at very high prices. Sooner or later, this is not going to work perfectly.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah.

CHARLIE MUNGER: And it’s going to have an unpleasant episode. And I think we’ll be around and in good shape at that time.

WARREN BUFFETT: There was one fellow who came to me many years ago. And he had a wonderful business. And he had been worried because he had seen a friend of his die. And the problems that arose later when the managers, to some extent, tried to take advantage of the widow. And it became a disaster. So he said he thought about it a lot the previous year. And he decided he didn’t want to sell the business to a competitor, who would be a logical buyer, because they would fire all of his people. And the CFO that would remain, and, you know, all up and down the line, they’d all be the acquirer’s people. He didn’t want to do that to his people. And then he thought, and he didn’t want to sell it to a private equity firm, because he thought they’d leverage it up. He never liked to leverage that much, and then they’d just resell it later on to somebody, so it would be totally out of control of what he wanted to do. And he wanted to keep running it himself.

So he said, “Warren,” he said, “It isn’t that you’re such a great guy,” he says, “It’s you’re the only one left.” So - (Laughter) Berkshire will continue to be the only one left in many cases.

8. “We don’t know what we’re doing” in cyber insurance

WARREN BUFFETT: Gary Ransom.

GARY RANSOM: Good morning. Warren, in your annual letter, you wrote about a potential for a $400 billion natural catastrophe event, something out in the tail of the loss distribution. I can think of another risk that could have a similar order of magnitude, and that would be cyberrisk. I’m sure all your managers have taken steps against that potential, but in - out in the tail of the cyberrisk distribution, it could hit a lot of industries, a lot of your companies. So how do you think about and prepare for the big one in cyber?

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. Well, I include, incidentally, in my - that part I wrote in the annual report where I said that roughly - nobody knows the answer on this. I mean, I could stick down two, and somebody else much smarter in insurance would stick down a different figure. But I think it’s about a 2 percent risk of what I call a 400 billion super-cat of all time. And But cyber is in that equation. I mean, that’s not just earthquakes and that sort of thing. And frankly, I don’t think we, or anybody else, really knows what they’re doing when writing cyber. I mean, we - it is just very, very, very early in the game. And we don’t know what the interpretations of the policies, necessarily, will be. We don’t know the degree to which they’ll be what - there’ll be correlated incidents, which we don’t really think are correlated now or haven’t had the imagination to come up with.

We know that every year when I go and hear these people from the CIA or wherever it may be, they tell me that the offense is ahead of the defense, and will continue that way. And I can dream of a lot of cyber incidents, which I’m not going to spell out here, because people that have twisted minds may be - they’ve probably got more - way more - ideas than I’ve got, but I don’t believe in feeding them any. But it’s a business where we don’t - we have a pretty good idea of the probabilities of a quake in California, or the probabilities of a three or a four hurricane hitting Florida, or whatever it may be. We don’t know what we’re doing in cyber, and we try to keep - we don’t want to be a pioneer on this. We do some business in that arena in Berkshire Hathaway Specialty.

But if you’re doing something for competitive reasons - which I’m OK with - but when I’m doing something where I - that people tell me is a competitive necessity, we are going to try not to have - we don’t want to be number one or number two or number three in exposures on it. And I don’t - and I am sure we are not in cyber. But I don’t I think anybody that tells you now that they think they know in some actuarial way, either what general experience is likely to be in the future, or what the worst case would be, I think, is kidding themselves. And that’s one of the reasons that I say that a $400 billion event has a - I think has roughly a 2 percent probability per year of happening. Cyber’s uncharted territory, and it’s going to get worse, not better.

And then the question is whether, if we have a whole bunch of $25 billion commercial limits out there, whether there’s some aggregation that we didn’t foresee or that the courts interpret those policies differently, then you know - they are generally going to give the benefit of the doubt to the insured. So you’re right in pointing that out as a very material risk, which didn’t exist 10 or 15 years ago and that - and will be much more intense as the years go along. And all I can tell you, Gary, is that, that’s part of my 400 billion and my 2 percent. But if you’ve got a different guess, it’s just as likely that yours is right than mine on that. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah, well, something that’s very much like cyberrisk is, you’ve got computers programmed to do your security trading and your computer goes a little wild from some error. And that’s already happened at least once where somebody just was fine one morning and by the afternoon they were broke because some computer went crazy. We don’t have any computers we allot - we allow to do big, automatically trading securities. I think, generally, Berkshire is less likely than most other places to be careless in some really stupid way.

WARREN BUFFETT: I do think if there’s a mega-cat from cyber, and let’s say it hits 400 billion, I do not think we’ll have more than a 3 percent

CHARLIE MUNGER: No, no

WARREN BUFFETT: - exposure.

CHARLIE MUNGER: No, no, we’ll get our share.

WARREN BUFFETT: And but it, you know, it will destroy - what will destroy a lot of companies that we will actually, if we had a $12 billion loss, I would think, except for the new accounting rule, but I believe from what I call operating earnings, we would probably still have a reasonable profit that year. I mean, we are in a different position than any insurance company I know of in the world, in our ability to handle the really - really super, super-cat. OK, shareholder from station 2.

CHARLIE MUNGER: May I point out that the main shareholder to my right here has almost all his net worth in one security. That’s likely to be more carefully managed than some public place with people just passing through.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, you don’t want a guy that’s 64 and is going to retire at 65. And a lot of decisions you really don’t want him or her to be making. (Laughter)

9. Capital allocation in the public sector

WARREN BUFFETT: Station 2?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Wally Obermeyer, Obermeyer Wood Investment Counsel, Aspen, Colorado. Warren and Charlie, you two have demonstrated great talent in private sector capital allocation and shown the world the power of excellence in this area. Do you think there is a similar opportunity for outstanding capital allocation in the public sector, at both the state and federal levels? And if so, what approach and/or changes would you suggest for society to achieve these benefits?

CHARLIE MUNGER: That’s too tough. Why don’t we go on to a new question? (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: I’m afraid I have nothing to add. (Laughter and applause) I don’t mean to be unfair to somebody asking a question, but it - you know, it is unfortunately an entirely different game. And the electorate - the motivations are different, the terms, the reward system is different. I mean, everything is different. And if we knew how to solve that, we wouldn’t - we can’t add anything to what you had in your view. I’m sorry on that.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, you’re correct that at one time I, and for some - for quite a while both Charlie and I took part in the pricing decisions at See’s Candy. And certainly, for some years, particularly with the question of the survival of The Buffalo News was really in question, I definitely took part in those decisions. In both cases, we had good managers, but still we wanted to - we thought those decisions were important. But it’s been a long, long time - very long time - since we’ve participated in anything like that. I can’t tell you what the per pound price is for See’s Candy, which is because people, and you’re invited to join this group, send me free candy from time to time. (Laughter) And I can’t - I really, I can’t tell you the prices at The Buffalo News. All I know is it’s very, very, very hard to move up prices on advertising, generally. So no, we The only thing is, Ajit [Jain] and I talk frequently.

And if there’s some very big risk, if somebody wants a $5 billion cover on a chemical plant some way excessive loss of over 3 billion or something - we have a certain amount of fun with him deciding on the price in his head. And I decide in my head, and then we compare notes. It’s the kind of risk that you really can’t look up in a book and see, actuarially, what it’s fairly the parameters - are fairly likely to be. I enjoy thinking through the pricing of that, and I particularly enjoy comparing it with Ajit. So the These are just oddball situations, but we do that sort of thing, and we’ve done it for three decades. And it’s part of the fun of my job. The candy prices, if you got to complain about those, you have to go to Charlie. (Laughter)

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, the answer is, Warren is still doing it and talking to Ajit, and - but that’s because Ajit likes it that way.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yep.

CHARLIE MUNGER: We have a very peculiar place where the - where Warren’s contact with the various people elsewhere in the organization largely depends on what they want, not what he wants.

WARREN BUFFETT: The CEO of one of our

CHARLIE MUNGER: It’s very unusual, and it’s worked beautifully.

WARREN BUFFETT: The CEO of one of our most successful subsidiaries, I may have talked to unless I saw him here and just said hello - I probably talked to him three times in the last ten years. And he does remarkably well. (Laughs) He might have done even better if I hadn’t talked to him those three times. (Laughter) And on the other hand, Ajit and I talk very, very frequently. And he’s got the kind of business, A, I do know - I know more about the insurance business than I know about a good many of the other businesses. And it’s interesting. And we are evaluating things that you don’t look up in a book, you know. I mean, actuarial talent is not what’s important in the things that Ajit talks to me about. It’s plenty important throughout our insurance operation. But in these particular cases, you know, we’re making judgments, and his judgment’s better than mine. But I like to - I just like to hear about them. They’re interesting propositions.

13. Putting business values in income account is “enormously deceptive”

WARREN BUFFETT: OK, Carol.

CAROL LOOMIS: … shareholder named Jack Ciesielski . He’s a well-known accounting expert, who for many years has written “The Accounting Observer.” “Mr. Buffett, in this year’s shareholder letter you have harsh words for the new accounting rule that requires companies to use market value accounting for their investment holdings. ″‘For analytical purposes,’ you said, ‘Berkshire’s bottom-line will be useless.’ “I’d like to argue with you about that. Shouldn’t a company’s earnings report cite everything that happened to, and within, a company during an accounting period? “Shouldn’t the income statement be like an objectively written newspaper informing shareholders of what happened under the management for that period, showing what management did to increase shareholder value and how outside forces may have affected the firm? “If securities increased in value, surely the company and the shareholders are better off. And surely they’re worse off if securities decreased in value. “Those changes are most certainly real.

In my opinion, ignoring changes in the way that some companies ignore restructuring costs, is censoring the shareholders’ newspaper. “So my question is, how would you answer what I say?” (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, my answer to the question that asks what my answer would be to what he said - the - I would ask Jack, if we’ve got $170 billion of partly-owned companies, which we intend to own for decades, and which we expect to become worth more money over time, and where we reflect the market value in our balance sheet, does it make sense to, every quarter, mark those up and down through the income account, when at the same time we own businesses that have become worth far more money, in most cases, and become, you know, since we bought - you name the company - take GEICO, an extreme case - we bought half the company for $50 million, roughly - do we want to be marking that up every quarter to the value - and having it run through the income account? That becomes an appraisal process. There’s nothing wrong with doing that, in terms of evaluation. But in terms of - and you can call it gain in net asset value or loss in net asset value that’s what a closed-end investment fund, or an open-investment fund would do.

But to run that through an income account - if I looked at our 60 or 70 businesses, or whatever number there might be, and every quarter we marked those to market, we would have, obviously, a great many, in certain cases, where over time we’d have them at 10 times what we paid, but how quarter-by-quarter we should mark those up and run it through the income account, where 99 percent of investors probably look at net income as being meaningful, in terms of what has been produced from operations during the year, I think would be - well, I can say it would be enormously deceptive. I mean, in the first quarter of this year - you saw the figures earlier - where we had the best what I would call operating earnings in our history, and our securities went - were down six billion, or whatever it was, to keep running that through the income account every day you would say that we might have made on Friday, we probably made 2 1/2 billion dollars.

Well, if you have investors and commentators and analysts and everybody else working off those net income numbers and trying to project earnings for quarters, and earnings for future years, to the penny, I think you’re doing a great disservice by running those through the income account. I think it’s fine to have marketable securities on the balance sheet - the information available as to their market value - but we have businesses there - if we - we never would do it - but if we were to sell half, we’ll say, of the BNSF railroad, we would receive more than we carried carried for them - we would turn - we could turn it into a marketable security and it would look like we made a ton of money overnight. Or if we were to appraise it, you know, appraise it every three months and write it up and down, A, it could lead to all kinds of manipulation, but B, and it would just lead to the average - to any investor- being totally confused. I don’t want to receive data in that manner and therefore I don’t want to send it out in that manner. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, to me it’s obvious that the change in valuation should be noted, and it is and always has been - it goes right into the net worth figures. So the questioner doesn’t understand his own profession. (Laughter and applause) I’m not supposed to talk that way but it slips out once in a while. (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: Sometimes he even gives it a push. (Laughter)

14. McLane profits hurt by severe competitive pressure

WARREN BUFFETT: OK. Jonathan.

JONATHAN BRANDT: McLane’s core operating margins have dropped about 50 percent from where they’ve generally been since acquisition [from Walmart]. Could you elaborate on the competitive pressures in the grocery and convenience store distribution business that have caused the deterioration in profits? And do you expect the margin structure of that business to eventually get back to where it was, or is this the new normal?

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, I don’t know the answer to the second part about the future, but there’s no question that the margins have been squeezed. They were very, very narrow, as you know, they were about one cent on the dollar pretax, and they have been squeezed from that. Payment terms get squeezed. In some cases we have fairly long-term contracts on that, so it will go on for five years (inaudible). It’s a very, very tight margin business. And the situation is even worse than you portray because within McLane we have a liquor distribution business in a few states and that business has actually increased its earnings moderately, and we’ve added to that business, so within McLane’s figures there are about 70 million or so pretax from the liquor part that have nothing to do with the massive parts you’re talking about, in terms of food distribution. So it’s even - the decline is even greater in what you’re referring to than you’ve (inaudible). That’s just become very much more competitive.

We have to decide - if you’ll look at our competitors, they’re not making much money either. And that’s capitalism. I think, you know, there comes a point where the customer says, you know, “I’ll only pay X,” and you have to walk away. And there’s a great temptation when you’re employing - particularly employing thousands of people -and you’ve built distribution facilities, and all of that sort of thing - take care of them to meet what you’d like to term as “irrational competition,” but that is capitalism. And - you’re right. We took - the earnings went up quite a bit from the time we bought it. And we’re still earning more than then. And we’ve earned a lot of money over time. But, as I say, a fair amount of that is actually coming from liquor distribution, activities in about four states that we purchased - very well-run. And - we will do our best to get the margins up.

But I would not - I could not tell you - give you a really - your guess is almost as good as mine, or better than mine, maybe, as to what margins will be in that distribution business five years from now. It’s a very essential service. We do $40-some billion. And we move more of the product of all kinds of companies that names are known to you, than anybody else. But - when you get when you get - Kraft Heinz for that matter, or Philip Morris, or whomever it may be, on one side of the deal, and you get Walmart and some other - 7/11 - on the other side of the deal, sometimes they don’t leave you very much room in between. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: I think you’ve described it very well. (Buffett laughs)

15. Health care costs partnership with Amazon and JPMorgan

WARREN BUFFETT: OK. (Laughter) Station 4.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Good morning, Charlie and Warren. I know that seems a little bit out of order, but I’m a huge fan of yours, Charlie, mostly for your 25 Cognitive Biases. I’m from Seattle, Washington. I run a one-person digital marketing firm that specializes in Facebook ads and email marketing. I use these a lot. I - your breakdown of Coca-Cola was really, really solid. And I use that as reference when looking to how to understand the mechanics of my clients’ products and how to promote them. So I’m fairly certain that your cognitive biases work for internet-related companies. Now that you’re partnering with Amazon [and JPMorgan] on health care, I’m curious, have you started to understand how to apply these biases to internet-related companies? Or is there another set of tools you use to decide if you understand a business? Because you guys talk a lot about not investing in businesses that you don’t understand.

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, health care is a - we don’t plan to start health care companies or, necessarily, insurers or anything. We simply have three organizations with leaders that I admire and trust. And we - mutually goes around all three. And we hope to do something which Charlie correctly would probably say is almost impossible to change in some way a system which is - was taking 5 percent of GDP in 1960, and now is taking close to 18 percent. And we have a hugely noncompetitive medical cost in American business, relating to any country in the world. The countries that - there were some countries that were around our 5 percent when we were at 5 percent. But we’ve managed to get to 18 without them going beyond 11 or so. Literally, in 1960, we were spending $170 per capita on medical costs in the United States. And now we’re spending over 10,000. And, you know, every dollar only has a hundred cents. So there is a cost problem. It is a tapeworm, in terms of American business and its competitiveness. We don’t - we have fewer doctors per capita.

We have fewer hospital beds per capita, fewer nurses per capita, than some of the other countries that are well below us. And you’ve got a system that is delivering $3.3 trillion - that’s almost as much as the federal government raises - it’s delivering 3.3 trillion, or some number like that, to millions and millions and millions of people who are involved in the system. And every dollar has a constituency. It’s just like politics. And whether we can find the chief executive, which we’re working on now, and which I would expect we would - we would be able to announce before too long - that - but that’s a key part of it. And whether that person will have the imagination and support of people that will enable us to make any kinds of significant improvements in a system which everybody agrees is sort of out of control on cost, but what - but - but they all think it’s the other guy’s fault, generally - we’ll find out. It won’t be - it won’t be easy. But it is not a - the motivations are not primarily profit-making.

They’re - we want to deliver we want our employees to get better medical service at a lower cost. We’re not going to - we’re certainly not going to come up with something where we think the service that they receive is inferior to what they’re getting now. But we do think that there may be ways to make a real - significant changes - that could have an effect. And we know that the resistance will be unbelievable. And if we fail, we’ve at least tried. And - but they - the idea is not that I will be able to contribute anything to, you know, in some breakthrough moment, by reading a few medical journals or something - (laughs) - changing something that is as embedded as the medical system. But the idea is that maybe the three organizations, which employ over a million people and which, after we announced it, we had a flood of calls from people that wanted to join in, but there isn’t anything to join into now. But they will if we have - come up with any ideas that are useful. Whether we can - bring the resources, bring the person. And the CEO is terribly important. And then bring the person, support that person.

And somehow, figure out a better way for people to continue to receive better medical care in the United States without that 8 percent - 18 percent - going to 20 or 22 percent, you know, in the lifetime of, you know, our children or something of the sort - because there are only a hundred cents in the dollar. And we will see what happens. It’s - you know - if you were Ajit [Jain], actuarially figuring, it would not - you would not bet on us. But - I think there is some chance we will do something. There’s a chance - nobody can quantify it - that we can do something significant. And we are positioned better than most people to try. And we’ve certainly got the right partners. So, we will give it a shot and see what happens. Charlie? (Applause)

CHARLIE MUNGER: There is some precedent for success in this public service activity. If you go back many decades, John B. Rockefeller I, using his own money, made an enormous improvement in American medical care. Perfectly enormous. In fact, there’s never been any similar improvement done by any one man since that rivals it. So Warren, having imitated Rockefeller in one way, is just trying another. And maybe it’ll work.

WARREN BUFFETT: Rockefeller, incidentally, lived a very long time. So I actually am trying to imitate him three ways there. (Laughter) We’ll see what happens. But we are - we’re making a lot of progress. And I think we’ll probably have a CEO within a couple of months. But if we don’t have one, then we’re not going to pick somebody just because we want to meet any deadline or anything like that. We’ve got these wonderful partners. We don’t have a partnership agreement among us. Somebody started drawing up one in a legal department and the CEO just put a stop to it. They - you do have places that have a lot of resources. And while we all have our share of bureaucracy, we can cut through it if we’ve got something that we really think makes sense. And we will get the support - we’ll get - we’ll get a lot of resistance, too. But we will get the support of a lot of American business, if we come up with something that makes sense. But if it was easy, it would’ve already been done.

There’s no question about that.

CHARLIE MUNGER: It’s not easy.

WARREN BUFFETT: No. (Laughs) But it should be tried.

16. Weschler and Combs “slightly ahead” of S&P

WARREN BUFFETT: OK. Becky?

BECKY QUICK: This question comes from David Rolfe, who is with Wedgewood Partners, and has been - the company - has been shareholders in Berkshire since 1989. The stock is currently the largest holding in their stocks - 18 stocks. He asks this question: “Over the past two years, you have listed the individual fund-of-funds performance from Protégé Partners. When will you start showing the annual performance on 25 billion that Ted [Weschler] and Todd [Combs] manage? Can you state if either Ted or Todd has beaten the S&P 500 index over the last five years?

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. Both - A, we’ll probably never report their individual performance. But you can be sure that I have an enormous interest in - as does Charlie - in how much we think they contribute to Berkshire. And they have - they’ve been terrific. They’ve - they not only have the intellect, and the record, but they are exceptional human beings. And they Todd has done a tremendous amount of work, for example, on the medical project. And - Ted is - I’ve given him several things, and he’s done them better than I could do them. So the record, since inception - and I’m measuring it - Ted came later than Todd, a year or so later - but the record, since inception, is almost identical - both for the two managers - from their different inception and matching the S&P. And they’ve received some incentive compensation, which they only get if they beat the S&P. And as I say, they’re just slightly ahead. That really hasn’t It’s been better than I’ve done, so naturally, I can’t criticize it.

(Laughs) They - they were the - they were two very, very, very good choices. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: You did report it in a previous year. You just didn’t do it this year. And - but now you have your report. (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: I would - the problem that all of us has is size. It’s actually - it’s harder to run even 12 or $13 billion, frankly, than it is to run a billion. And if you’re running a million dollars or something of the sort, it’s a whole different game. You’d agree with that, wouldn’t you, Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Of course.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, OK. (Laughter) Just like any good lawyer, you never ask him a question unless you think you know the answer they’re going to give. (Laughter)

17. GEICO is on a good growth and profit track

WARREN BUFFETT: OK. Gary?

GARY RANSOM: My question’s on GEICO. Last year, you promised growth and delivered. But along the way, the combined ratio was moving up, and it was the first time it was over a hundred in about 15 years. Granted, some of that was catastrophes. But even excluding catastrophes, there was something going on in the loss trends that caused you to slow down that growth, at least at the - as we got to the latter part of the year. And I wondered if you could tell us what was going on. And I did look this morning, too, so it looked like the first quarter has settled down a little bit, but I’d still like to know about the fourth quarter.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, sure. It - the only thing I differ with the question on slightly - when you say it caused us to slow down - we didn’t want to slow down the growth. I mean, you’re looking at a guy here that has never wanted to slow down the growth of GEICO. The growth did slow down, but it wasn’t because we wanted it to. Our prices that led to the underwriting loss - we actually - we’d have been slightly in the black without the catastrophes. But, you know, if we hadn’t have paid our light bills, we might have been in the black, too. I mean, this “except for” stuff doesn’t mean much in insurance as far as I’m concerned. The - if you’ll look at the first quarter - our margins were around 7 percent, which is actually a little more than we aimed for. And I received the unaudited - I mean, the preliminary - figures for April, and they’re similar. So, the underwriting gain is - or margins - are perfectly satisfactory now.

And we’d love to get all the growth we can. And we will gain market share this year. And we gained market share Tony - when Tony [Nicely] took over the place, it was - in 1993 - it was two and a very small fraction percent. And it’ll be 13 percent of the - you know - 13 percent of the households in the country now. And we will keep gaining share. We will keep writing profitably - most of the time. And every now and then, our rates will be slightly - modestly inaccurate - inadequate, I should say. And/or we’ll have, maybe, some big losses on hurricanes or something of the sort, or we’ll have a [Hurricane] Sandy in New York. The - but GEICO is a jewel. And it’s - you know, it’s really a - we’ve got some others we feel awfully close to similarly about, but it’s an incredible company. It has a culture all of its own. It’s saving its customers probably 4 or $5 billion a year against which they would - against what they would otherwise be paying, based on the average in auto insurance.

And it will be profitable on underwriting a very high percentage of the year. It contributed another $2 billion to float last year. It is a terrific company. And like I say, the first four months are dramatically better. Now, there’s some seasonal in auto insurance. So, the first quarter is usually the best of the four quarters. But it’s not a dramatic seasonal. So, I think when you read the 10-Q - and you can take my word for April - I think GEICO is on a good profit track as well as a good growth track. And the more it grows, the better I like it. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, I think you’ve said it perfectly.

WARREN BUFFETT: Huh.

CHARLIE MUNGER: It was never very bad, and it’s better now. (Buffett laughs)

18. Munger on steel tariffs: “Even Donald Trump can be right”

WARREN BUFFETT: OK. Station five.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Good morning, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. My name is Ethan Mupposa (PH), and I am from Omaha, Nebraska. My question is, how will Donald Trump’s tariffs affect the manufacturing business of Berkshire Hathaway?

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, to date - (applause) - steel costs - we’ve seen steel costs increase somewhat. But as I said earlier, I don’t think the United States or China - there’ll be some jockeying back and forth, and there will be something that leaves some people unhappy and but I don’t think - I don’t think either country will dig themselves into something that precipitates and continues any kind of real trade war in this country. We - we’ve had that in the past a few times. And I think we’ve learned a general lesson on it. But there will - there will be some things about our trade policies that irritate others. And there will be some from others that irritate us. And there will be some back and forth. But in the end, I don’t think we’ll come out with a terrible answer on it. Charlie, I’ll let you

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, steel has - it reached - the conditions in steel were almost unbelievably adverse to the American steel industry. You know, even Donald Trump can be right on some of this stuff. (Laughter and applause)

WARREN BUFFETT: The - the thing about trade - you know, I’ve always said that the president, whether it’s president - any president - needs to be an educator-in-chief, which [Franklin] Roosevelt was in the Depression. That’s why he had those Fireside Chats, and it was very important that he communicated to the people what needed to be done and what was happening around them, and Trade is particularly difficult, because the benefits of trade are basically not visible, you know. You don’t know what you would be paying for the clothes you’re wearing today if we’d had a rule they all had to be manufactured in the United States, or what you’d be paying for your television set, or whatever it may be. No one thinks about the benefits day-by-day as they walk around buying things and carrying on their own business. The negatives, and there are negatives, are very apparent and very painful.

And if you’re laid off - like happened in our shoe business [Dexter Shoes] in Maine - and you know you are - been a very, very, very good worker, and you were proud of what you did, and maybe your parents did it before you, and all of a sudden you find out that American shoes - shoes manufactured in America - are not competitive with shoes made outside the United States. You know, you can talk all you want about Adam Smith or David Ricardo or something and explain the benefits of free trade and comparative advantage and all that sort of thing, and that doesn’t make any difference. And if you’re 55 or 60 years old, to talk about retraining or something like that, you know, so what? So, I - it is tough in politics where you have a hidden benefit and a very visible cost to a certain percentage of a - of your constituency. And you need to do two things under those circumstances, if you have that situation. You know what’s good for the country.

So, you have to be very good at explaining how it does really hurt, in a real way, somebody that works in a textile mill, like we had in New Bedford, where you only spoke Portuguese - half our workers only spoke Portuguese. And suddenly, they have no job. And they’ve been doing their job well for years. You’ve got to do two things. You can - you’ll have to - you have to understand that that’s the price individuals pay for what’s good for the collective good. And secondly, you’ve got to take care of the people that are - that - where retraining is a joke because of their age, or whatever it may be. And you’ve got to take care of the people that become the roadkill in something that is collectively good for us as a country. And That takes society acting through its representatives to develop the policies that will get us the right collective result, and not kill too many people economically in the process. And you know, we’ve done that in various arenas over the years. The people in their productive years do help take care of the people that are too old, and too young.

I mean, every time a baby is born in the United States, you know, we take on an obligation of educating them for 12 years. It’ll cost $150,000 now, you know? It We have a system that has a bond between the people in their productive years and the ones in the young and old. And it gets better over time. It’s far from perfect now. But it has gotten better over time. And I believe that trade, properly explained, and with policies that take care of the people that are roadkill, is good for our country and can be explained. But I think it’s a tough - it’s been a tough, tough sell to a guy that made shoes in Dexter, Maine or worked on a loom in New Bedford, Mass, or works in the steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio. (Applause)

19. Buffett won’t impose his political opinions on Berkshire

WARREN BUFFETT: Andrew?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: OK, Warren. This question comes from a Berkshire shareholder who says they’ve been a shareholder for ten years. I should say this may be one of the most pointed questions I’ve ever received for you. So

WARREN BUFFETT: But you elected to give it, though.

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: But I did. (Laughter) The shareholder writes, “I have watched the movie every year at this meeting, when you testify in front of Congress on behalf of Salomon, as the symbol of what it means to have a moral compass. Investors are increasingly looking to invest in companies that are socially and morally responsible. “So I was disturbed when you were asked on CNBC about the role that business could play in sensible policies around the sales of guns. “You said you didn’t think business should have a role at all, and you wouldn’t impose your values on others. I was even more surprised when you said you’d be OK with Berkshire owning shares in gun manufacturers. “At this meeting years ago, you said you wouldn’t buy a tobacco company because of the social issues. The idea that Berkshire would associate with any company as long as it isn’t illegal seems at odds with everything I think you stand for. Please tell us you misspoke.”

WARREN BUFFETT: Well - (applause) - let’s explore that a little. (Laughter) Should it be just my view, or should it be the view of the owners of the company? So, if I decide to poll the owners of the company on a variety of political issues, and one of them being whether, you know, Berkshire Hathaway should support the NRA, I don’t - if a majority of the shareholders voted to do it, or if a majority of the board of directors voted to do it, I would - I wouldn’t - I would accept that. I don’t think that the - my political views - I don’t think I put them in a blind trust at all when I take the job. And I - in the elections of 2016, I raised a lot of money. In my case, I raised it for Hillary [Clinton]. And I spoke out in various ways that were quite frank, but - (applause) - I don’t think that I speak When I do that, I don’t think I’m speaking for Berkshire. I’m speaking as a private citizen.

And I don’t think I have any business speaking for Berkshire. We have never - at the parent company level - we have never made a political contribution, you know And I don’t go to our suppliers. I don’t do anything of that sort where I raise money either for the school I went to, or for a political candidate I went to, or anything else. And I don’t think that we should have a question on the GEICO policyholder form, “Are you an NRA member?” you know, and if you are, you just aren’t good enough for us, or something. That - I think I do not believe in imposing my political opinions on the activities of our businesses. And if you get to what companies are pure and which ones aren’t pure - (applause) - I think it is very difficult to make that call. Thank you. I think with that response, I’m almost afraid to call on Charlie. But go ahead, Charlie. (Laughter)

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, obviously, you do draw a limit, Warren

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, we did.

CHARLIE MUNGER: - in all kinds of thing

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah.

CHARLIE MUNGER: - which are beneath us, even though they’re legal. But we don’t necessarily draw it perfectly because we’ve got some sort of supreme knowledge. We just do the best we can. And certainly, we’re not going to ban all guns, surrounded by wild turkeys in Omaha. (Laughter)

20. “Very unlikely” Berkshire would pay a special dividend

WARREN BUFFETT: OK, Gregg. (Laughter)

GREGG WARREN: Warren, this question’s also based on something you said more recently, so I can’t guarantee it’s going to be any easier. (Buffett laughs) You recently noted that you prefer share repurchases over dividends as a means for returning capital to shareholders should Berkshire’s cash balances continue to rise and hit the $150 billion threshold you noted as being difficult to defend to shareholders at last year’s annual meeting. While I understand the rationale for not establishing a regular dividend, a one-time special dividend could be a useful option for returning a larger chunk of Berkshire’s excess capital to shareholders without the implied promise to keep paying a regular dividend forever. The drawback with the special dividend, though, is that it would lead to an immediate decline in book value and book value per share. Whereas a larger share repurchase effort, while depressing book value, would reduce Berkshire’s share count, limiting the impact on book value per share.

If we do happen to get a few years out and Berkshire does hit that $150 billion threshold, because valuations continue to be too high, both for acquisitions and for the repurchase of company stock, would you consider a one-time special dividend as a means for returning capital to shareholders?

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, if we thought we couldn’t use capital effectively, we would figure - we would try to figure out the most effective way of returning capital to shareholders. And - you could - I would have probably - I think it’d be unlikely we’d do it by a special dividend. I think it’d be more likely we’d do it by a repurchase, if the repurchase didn’t result in us paying a price above intrinsic value per share. We’re never going to do anything that we think is harmful to continuing shareholders. So if we think the stock is intrinsically worth X, and we would have to pay some modest multiple even above that to repurchase shares, we wouldn’t do it because we would be hurting continuing shareholders to the benefit of the people who are getting out. But we will try and do whatever makes the most sense, but not with the idea that we have to do something every day because we simply can’t find something that day. We had a vote as you know - I don’t know, a few years back - on whether people wanted a dividend.

And - the B shares - so I’m not talking my shares or Charlie’s or anything - but the B shares voted 47 to one against it. So I think through self-selection of who become shareholders - I don’t think shareholders world - or countrywide - on all stocks would vote 47 to one at all. But we get self-selection in terms of who joins us. And I think they expect us to do whatever we think makes sense for all shareholders. And obviously, if we really thought we never could use the money effectively in the business, we should get it out, one way or another. And You’ve got a bunch of directors who own significant - very significant - amounts of stock themselves. And you can expect them to think like owners. It’s the reason they’re on the board. And you can expect the management to think like owners and - owners will return money to all of the owners if they think it makes more sense than continuing to look for things to do.

But we invested in the first quarter, maybe - have to look it up on the - well, certainly through April - probably close to 15 billion or something like that, net, so And we won’t always be in a world of very low interest rates - or high private market prices. So we will do what makes the most sense. But I can’t see us ever making a special - almost - it’s very unlikely we would just pay out a big, special dividend. I think that if we put that to the vote of the shareholders, and Charlie and I did not vote, I think we would get a big negative vote. And I’d be willing to - be willing to make a bet on that one. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, as long as the existing system continues to work as well as it has, why would we change it? We’ve got a whole lot of people that are accustomed to it, have done well under it. And if conditions change, why, we’re capable of changing our minds, if the facts change.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, and we’ve done that several times.

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yes.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah.

CHARLIE MUNGER: Although, I must say, it’s a little hard. (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: He always brings me back to earth.

21. Munger is more interested than Buffett in Chinese stocks

WARREN BUFFETT: OK. Station 6?

STEPHANIE YU: Hi, good morning, Mr. Buffett and Mr. Munger. My name is Stephie Yu from Horizon Insights, a China-focused research firm based in Shanghai. So I have a lot of mutual fund clients in China, who are very young - relatively younger - and they manage a smaller portion of funds. So my question is, if you only have $1 billion in your portfolio today, how would you change your investments? Would you consider more investment opportunities in emerging markets such as China? Thank you.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. I would say, if I were working with a billion, I would probably find within a $30 trillion market in the United States, where I understood things better, generally, than I do around the world - I’d probably find opportunities there that would be better, incidentally, by some margin, than what we can find for hundreds of billions. But I wouldn’t - there’s no way I’d rule out emerging markets. There was a time, 15 years ago or so, when just because it was kind of interesting and it took me back to my youth, I - on the weekend, I went through a directory of Korean stocks. And I bought - and these were small stocks - well, they weren’t small by standards of either Korean or American business. They were big, big companies. But I found 15 or 20 in - that were statistically cheap and bought some of each one myself. And there are opportunities with smaller amounts of money to do things that we just can’t do. And - but I - my first inclination always would be to comb through things in the United States.

And - But I’ve combed through - in other countries. I probably wouldn’t get into very, very small markets because there can be a lot of difficulties even in market execution and taxation, (inaudible). You can find - if you can’t find it, you know, in America and China and Britain and a few other places - (laughs) - you probably aren’t going to find it someplace else. You may think you’ve found it. But that may be - it may be a different game than you know. Our problem is size, not geography. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, I already have more stocks in China than you do, as a percentage, so I’m with the young lady. (Laughter)

WARREN BUFFETT: OK. Well, you can - you want to name names? Do these stocks have names? Or - (Laughs)

CHARLIE MUNGER: No, I don’t. (Buffett laughs)

BECKY QUICK: This question comes from Angus Hanton (PH), who - he and his wife are based in London, and he says they’ve been shareholders in Berkshire Hathaway for over 30 years. He says, “We have all read about the zero-based budgeting that has been so effective with Kraft Heinz and other investments that you’ve done with 3G Partners. Can we expect these costreduction techniques to be used by your managers in other parts of the Berkshire Hathaway enterprise?”

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, in general, we do not expect the managers, generally, to get in the position where there would be a lot of change in terms of zero-based budgeting. In other words, why in the world aren’t you thinking that way all of the time? The 3G people have gone into certain situations where there were - probably primarily in personnel, but in other expenses as well - a lot of expenses that were not delivering a dollar of value per dollar expended. And so, they made changes very fast that - to a situation that probably shouldn’t have existed in the first place. Whereas, we hope that our managers - take a GEICO. GEICO’s gone from, I think, 8,000 to 39,000 people since we bought control. But they’re all very productive. I mean, you would not find a way for a 3G operation to take thousands of people out of there. On the other hand, I can think of some organizations where you could take a whole lot of people out, where it isn’t being done because the businesses are very profitable to start with. That’s what happened with the tobacco companies, actually.

They were so profitable that they had all kinds of people around that didn’t - weren’t really needed. But they - the money just flowed in. So I - our managers have different techniques of keeping track of - or of - trying to maximize customer satisfaction at the same time that they don’t incur other than necessary costs. And I think, probably, some of our managers may well use something that’s either zero-based budgeting or something akin to it. They do not submit budgets - never have - to me. I mean, they’ve never been required to. We’ve never had a budget at Berkshire. We don’t consolidate our figures monthly. I mean, I get individual reports on every company. But there’s no reason to have some extra time spent, for example, by having consolidated figures at the end of April, or consolidated figures at the end of May. We know where we stand. And - you know, I’m sure we’re the only company that - probably in the whole Fortune 500 - that doesn’t do it. But we don’t do unnecessary things around Berkshire.

And a lot of stuff that’s done at big companies is unnecessary. And that’s why a 3G finds opportunities from time to time. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, if you’ve got 30 people at headquarters and half of those are internal auditors, that is not the normal way of running a big company in America. And what’s interesting about it is, obviously, we lose some advantages from big size. But we also lose certain disadvantages from having a big bureaucracy with endless meeting after meeting after meeting around headquarters. And net, I think we’ve been way ahead with our low overhead, diversified method. And also, it makes our company attractive to very able, honorable people who have companies. So generally speaking, the existing system has worked wonderfully for us. I don’t think we have the employment that could be cut effectively that a lot of other places have. And I think our methods have worked so well that we’d be very unlikely to change them.

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. I think if some - at headquarters, you could say we have kind of subzero-based budgeting. (Laughter) And we hope that the example of headquarters is, to a great extent, emulated by our

CHARLIE MUNGER: But it isn’t just the cost reduction. I think the decisions get made better if you eliminate the bureaucracy.

WARREN BUFFETT: Oh yeah.

CHARLIE MUNGER: I think a bureaucracy is sort of like a cancer. And it functions sort of like a cancer. (Applause) And so, we’re very anti-bureaucracy. And I think it’s done us a lot of good. In that case, we’re quite different from, say, Anheuser-Busch at its peak.

26. We’re experimenting with lower-cost commercial insurance

WARREN BUFFETT: OK. Gary.

GARY RANSOM: My question is on small commercial, and specifically, direct small commercial. You seem to have some websites that enable buyers to purchase small commercial insurance directly; biBERK is one of them. It’s a very competitive, fragmented market. But what is your strategy for that market? And then, can you ultimately GEICO-ize the small commercial market?

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, we’ll find out. I mean, it’s a very good question because that’s exactly the question we ask ourselves. And we have this incredible company at GEICO, which has gone direct in the personal auto field, and was, you know, first started it in 1936. And there’s no question in my mind that over a lot of years - and maybe not so many years something like small commercial - anything that takes cost out of the system, you know, makes it easier for the customer, is going to work over time, if you’ve got a system that was based on something that had more layers of agency costs and that sort of thing. So we are experimenting, and we’ll continue to experiment, on something like small commercial, workers’ comp, whatever it may be. We’ll try and figure out ways to take cost out of the system, offer the customer an equivalent product or better at lesser price, and we’ll find out what can be done and what can’t be done. And we’re not the only ones doing it, as you know.

But we are not going - we’ve got some managers that are going to be quite, I’m sure, enterprising on that. And we back them. And we expect some to fail and some - and if a few succeed - we’ll have some very good businesses. And the world is going in that direction. So - you could expect us to try and go with it. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, if it were easy, I think it would’ve happened more fast

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah

CHARLIE MUNGER: - than it has.

WARREN BUFFETT: It will happen as we go along. I mean, it wasn’t easy in auto, I mean, when you think about it.

CHARLIE MUNGER: No, it wasn’t.

WARREN BUFFETT: No. I mean, it was a system with all kinds of extra costs that go back to the turn of the 19th century into the 20th. I mean, it was built on fire insurance and strong general agencies. And that slopped over into auto when the auto came along in 1903 from Ford or whenever. And - so it grew within a system that really wasn’t very efficient compared to what was available. But it took State Farm initially to go to a direct, or a captive agency system. And then it took USAA, and then later, GEICO, and then later, Progressive, to go to direct systems that are even more efficient and consumer-friendly. And the same thing is going to happen, to some degree, in all kinds of industries, and certainly small commercial - somebody will

CHARLIE MUNGER: It could happen, but it will be slow.

WARREN BUFFETT: It takes an amazingly long time. I mean, it - but you know, the battle doesn’t always go to the strong and the race to the swift. But that’s the way to bet, you know, as they say. So - (Laughs)

27. Health care partnership is attacking a huge “industry moat”

WARREN BUFFETT: OK, station eight?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Austin Merriam, from Jacksonville, Florida. Mr. Buffett, with the recent news of the partnership between you, Mr. [Jeff] Bezos, and Mr. [Jamie] Dimon, to challenge the health care industry and the self-admitted difficulties you are running across, this would lead me to believe the industry has higher barriers to entry than may have originally been hypothesized; a larger moat, if you will. Would that justify a higher earnings multiple for established players in the industries, such as PBMs, for example?

WARREN BUFFETT: Well, just - though the system may have a moat against intruders, it doesn’t mean that everybody operating within the system has individual moats, for one thing. Now, I - we are - if this new triumvirate succeeds at all, we are attacking an industry moat. And I’m defining industry very broadly; health care, not just, you know, health care insurers or this or that. We’re trying to figure out a better way of doing it and making sure that we’re not sacrificing care. And the goal is to improve care. And like I say, that is a - that’s a lot bigger than a single company’s moat. It’s bigger than a component of the industry’s moat. The moat held by the whole system, since it interacts in so many ways, is actually - that’s the moat that essentially has to be attacked, and that’s a huge moat. And like I say, we’ll do our best. But - I hope if we fail, I hope somebody else succeeds. Charlie?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, I suspect that eventually when the Democrats control both houses of Congress and the White House, we will get single-payer medicine. And I don’t think it’s going to be very friendly to many of the current PBMs. (Applause) And I won’t miss them. (Laughter)

28. Buffett vs Elon Musk on whether competitive moats are “lame”

WARREN BUFFETT: Andrew?

2018年年度股东大会

第4部分，共6部分

参会者： 巴菲特先生，我叫Daphne Collier Starr，今年8岁，住在纽约市。我已经做了两年股东，这是我第二次参加年度股东大会。伯克希尔·哈撒韦赖以建立声誉的最佳投资都是资本效率极高的企业——（笑声）——比如可口可乐、喜诗糖果、美国运通和GEICO。但最近，伯克希尔在一些需要巨额资本投入来维持、且只能提供受监管的低回报率的企业上进行了非常大的投资——（笑声）——比如 Burlington Northern 铁路。我的问题是，巴菲特先生，您能解释一下为什么伯克希尔最近最大的投资偏离了您过去资本效率的理念吗？以及为什么您特别投资了 Burlington Northern，而不是像美国运通这样资本效率高的公司？（掌声）

沃伦·巴菲特： 你说得我都快招架不住了，Daphne。（笑声）是啊。

查理·芒格： 我很庆幸她不是九岁。

沃伦·巴菲特： 是啊。（笑声）我正坐在这儿想，明年我们六个嘉宾里该把谁换掉，把你请上来。（笑声）嗯，我当初11块买城市服务公司的时候，还以为自己干得不错呢。（笑）答案是，我们一直——我们总是更喜欢那些资本回报率很高的企业，比如我们买的时候的喜诗糖果，或者很多其他企业。而且，你知道，美国运通的净资产收益率非常高，而且已经持续了很长时间。我们买了Burlington——BNSF，Burlington Northern——这个事实，本质上意味着，我们无法以合理的价格在资本密集型较弱的业务中部署更多的资金。因此，我们转向了那些资本密集型但本身是好的企业。但是，如果我们能不用火车、铁轨、隧道、桥梁这些东西来运营铁路，那该多好啊？我们在资本密集型业务上获得了不错的回报。

我们买入它们多数时价格都非常合理，而且自买入后它们一直运营得很好。我们仍然热爱那些资本占用少、回报高、持续增长且几乎不需要增量资本的企业。但我们无法用我们拥有的那么多资金去这样做。因此，作为次优选择，但仍然是好的选择，答案是肯定的。它不如最优选择那么好。查理？

查理·芒格： 是的，我喜欢这位年轻女士的志向。她本质上希望从别人的销售额中收取版税。当然，这是一个非常好的模式，如果每个人都能这样做，那别人就什么都不用做了。我们对公用事业和铁路的回报感到满意，因为它们相当令人满意。而且我们——非常满意。我希望我们还有两个像这样的业务。是吧，沃伦？

沃伦·巴菲特： 是的。

查理·芒格： 所以——

沃伦·巴菲特： 没错。

查理·芒格： 所以答案是，它们已经足够好了。你要求我们做到完美，是希望我们把所有钱都投在可口可乐上，比如说，以当前售价的5%买入。

沃伦·巴菲特： 是的。像苹果这样的业务其实并不需要太多资本。但是——所以，你必须花很多钱才能买到这样的企业。但很少有企业愿意出售。答案是，我们没有因为要买这些其他业务，而放弃任何以合理价格买入那些能获得高回报——非常高的回报——净资产收益率的企业机会。所以它们没有挤掉任何其他机会。不过，你绝对可以在我们的资本配置部门找到一份工作。（笑声）

9. 巴菲特对报纸衰落速度未放缓感到”惊讶”

沃伦·巴菲特： 好的，Carol。

卡罗尔·卢米斯： 这个问题来自芝加哥的Max Taylor，涉及伯克希尔拥有的报纸。巴菲特先生，您在2012年致股东信中用了一个章节专门讲述伯克希尔在刚刚过去的一年里购买了28家报纸。此后，您没有再回到报纸这个主题。但今年，在年报末尾，您列出了伯克希尔目前拥有的报纸及其发行量。我将这份名单与五年前，即2012年底您公布的那份进行了比较。您比任何人都清楚，伯克希尔最初购买的28家报纸中，目前仍持有的26家报纸的发行量大幅下降。在许多情况下，降幅高达30%到近50%。我知道五年前，您承认了拥有报纸的风险，但您仍然说：“查理和我相信，为紧密联系的社区提供全面可靠信息，并拥有明智互联网策略的报纸，将在很长一段时间内保持活力。” 回到今天，假设您正在撰写关于伯克希尔在报纸领域的经验，您会怎么说？

沃伦·巴菲特： 是的。我会说——我忘了那个关于互联网策略的修饰词——但我可以说（听不清）。问题在于——美国大约有1300家日报，而不久前还有1700家——除了《华尔街日报》、《纽约时报》，现在可能还有《华盛顿邮报》之外，没有一家报纸推出了一个真正能显著替代因印刷版报纸发行量和广告双双流失而损失的收入的数字产品。如果你看看我们运营所在的社区，或者其它报纸运营的社区，这些社区可能很繁荣。我们目前处于一个繁荣的经济中。但所有报纸都在失去日发行量、周日发行量、街头零售和家庭投递。在过去五年里，我对衰落速度没有放缓感到惊讶。我们以合理的价格购买了所有这些报纸，所以这对伯克希尔来说没有太大的经济影响。

但我希望日报，实际上，能够经济上可行，因为它们对社会的重要性。但我要说的是，这些趋势——我把这些发行量数字放进去，是因为我认为股东有权逐年了解正在发生的事情。而且这不仅仅是——这发生在美国各地的1300家报纸身上。它发生在我们认为替代信息渠道可能不那么好的小镇。它无处不在。《华尔街日报》、《纽约时报》，可能还有《华盛顿邮报》，在数字世界有可行的经济模式，并且可能会继续萎缩——我几乎可以肯定它们在印刷版领域会继续萎缩。但数字世界将足够大——而且它们会足够成功——所以在我看来，它们拥有可持续的商业模式。但鉴于数字领域未能带来重大收入，很难看到印刷产品能够长期生存。

这就是——恐怕对于这个国家的1300家报纸来说都是如此。我们会继续寻找是否有办法做到这一点。但你必须看看我们的经验，以及所有其他人的经验。McClatchy报纸前几天公布了数据，我认为那份报纸——非常好——它们运营所在的城市也很好——广告收入下降了大约17%或18%，发行量也是如此。但这不只是它们，是所有从业者都这样。我希望我能给你一个更好的答案，但我没有。我要说的是，这对伯克希尔的经济影响几乎可以忽略不计，但我认为对社会的影响实际上是巨大的。而且，你知道，我希望我们能找到办法。我希望其他人能找到办法，因为我们会效仿。但到目前为止，我们还没有成功。查理？

查理·芒格： 嗯，衰退比我们想象的要快。所以这不是我们最精彩的经济预测。我认为情况甚至更糟。我想，我们之所以误判，部分原因可能在于我们都热爱报纸，并且认为它们对这个国家至关重要。这些地方性的小型报纸垄断企业，通常由行为得体的人拥有，并且倾向于控制政客。如果这些报纸消失，我们会怀念它们。我们会非常怀念它们。而且——

沃伦·巴菲特： 我认为可能会继续——

查理·芒格： ——我祈求上帝这不会发生，但数据不好看，沃伦。

沃伦·巴菲特： 不，确实不好看。而且这不仅仅是——你知道，这不是某个城镇因失业或类似问题而遇到特殊情况。也不是由于整体经济状况。这是因为，如果你想知道当天的棒球赛果、球员数据和其他一切，报纸会在第二天早上告诉你，那对你来说还是新闻。我从报纸上读到的财经资料，比如股票价格等，第二天早上对你来说也还是新闻。太平洋地区战争的发展，当你早上在《纽约时报》上读到它时，对你来说也是新闻。新闻就是你想知道的、你不知道的事情。那些分类招聘广告，虽然可能被分隔开来，但仍然是找工作的地方。你可以逐项分析，日报印刷版曾经是主要渠道的每一个元素，现在都不再是主要渠道了。

这个行业已经发生了实质性的变化，我们一直没能想出任何解决方案，我们会继续尝试。就像我说的，这没有经济上的后果，但我认为有社会后果。我们没能解决这个问题。

10. TTI在过去一年”大幅改善”

沃伦·巴菲特： 好的，Jonathan？

乔纳森·勃兰特： 自伯克希尔11年前收购TTI以来，它一直是一个不错的增长故事。由于良好的内生增长和至少两次成功的补强收购，其税前利润翻了一倍多，达到约4亿美元。业务势头在第一季度似乎有所加速。您能否谈谈电子元件分销行业的竞争格局，以及TTI的优势是什么？是因为它处于一个优秀的行业，还是TTI的商业模式和/或管理团队特别出色？

沃伦·巴菲特： 嗯——

乔纳森·勃兰特： 您是否预计它将继续成为伯克希尔增长最快的非保险子公司之一？

沃伦·巴菲特： TTI由一个叫Paul Andrews的人经营，他为我们做得非常出色。他是一个了不起的人，一个了不起的经理。在过去——他基本上让业务翻了四倍，但在过去一年，直到现在，势头仍在加速。他们分销小型电子元件。实际上，他们的平均售价——他们是一个价值数十亿美元的业务——他们售出的平均单价不到5美分。所以这有点像在做果冻豆生意之类的。只不过这些东西被用在各种我不懂的精密机器里。我们在全球都有业务，总部设在达拉斯-沃斯堡地区。由一个人创建，他在45或50年前离开了通用动力公司的一个部门。一步一步建立了这个业务——比如我们在过去两个月内刚刚收购了一家韩国的业务，这将是另一个重要的补充。我们在全球范围内开展业务。去年电子元件的业务绝对起飞了。他们使用一种叫做——嗯，本质上是衡量积压订单的指标。

他们称之为”book-to-bill”比率。但这只是一个专门的术语。但——业务增长了——我的意思是，在过去一年里它大幅改善。而且这种情况一个月接一个月地持续。所以外面肯定有什么事情在发生，因为没有人买这些东西是为了把它们存在地下室里。我的意思是，这些电子元件都会被用掉。有些还处于配给状态。我们与供应商关系很好。我们与客户的关系也非常好，因为我们比大多数竞争对手持有更多库存。所以，特别是在业务紧张的时候，我们能够交付并做得非常出色。所以我把功劳归于Paul。他几年前就开始扩大他的实体设施。他这样做真是天赐良机，因为以目前业务量通过那里，我们根本无法处理。但这是一个竞争激烈的行业。我的意思是，如果你看看纽约证券交易所的Arrow Electronics——我们有竞争对手。我认为Paul做得比他们好得多。

我很高兴他是伯克希尔家族的一员。这个业务有时会放缓，因为他们的客户会有自己的周期。它的表现会下降。但随着时间的推移，这个业务会增长。查理？

查理·芒格： 是的，这是一个美妙的生意，因为它太难做了，以至于竞争对手不想尝试。当我住在奥马哈时，有一个人过着非常富裕、几乎不工作的生活。他的生意是收集和处理死马。他从来没有竞争对手。（笑声）他常常在上午11点左右到奥马哈俱乐部开始喝酒。这不是一个困难的生意。但从来没有人带着新的竞争来挤对他。很少有人想要分销数以亿计、每个价值5美分的电子零件。这非常复杂。当然，那个业务非常擅长这个。而且它不断地得到越来越多的同样的业务。所以你说得对。这是一个巨大的增长业务，有点像电子版的收集和处理死马。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特： 想象一下，要跟踪近一百万种不同的物品，每一个价值都很小，并且要快速将它们送到客户手中，因为他们希望在全球范围内快速得到它们。你知道，这些事情不容易管理。我是说，是的。

查理·芒格： 并且要维持这么多物品的库存。非常复杂。那个业务非常擅长这个。

沃伦·巴菲特： 是的，我们很幸运——

查理·芒格： 当然它会增长。马匹消失了，但这些零件不会消失。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特： 查理把研究那种所有者可以整天坐着喝酒的生意当成了一种职业——（笑声）——他认为那是我们应该竞争或者买入的地方。

查理·芒格： 我的理论是，沃伦，如果它连一点糟糕的管理都承受不了，那它就不是一个好生意。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特： 是的，我们有时候在测试这个理论。（笑声）

11. Phillips 66 与保持低于10%的所有权

沃伦·巴菲特： 好的，2号站。

参会者： 嗨，Ben Sherber，来自堪萨斯州托皮卡。只是想对沃伦和查理说，再次感谢你们接待我们所有人。这是一个很棒的活动。

沃伦·巴菲特： 谢谢。

参会者： 我的问题是关于最近决定卖回Phillips 66股票的事。不是要让您难堪。但就在那之后，股价上涨了大约22美元。您当时提到，如果您拥有一家公司超过10%的股份，会有一些监管要求。您能否谈谈，在决定是持有超过10%的门槛还是低于该门槛时，您会考虑哪些因素？然后，您对Phillips 66的长期看法是什么，比如他们的中游炼油业务？

沃伦·巴菲特： 是的，嗯，这就像是去年的城市服务公司优先股。（笑声）我们在93或94美元左右卖出了股票。现在大概是115美元。但我们持有该公司略低于10%的股份。随着Ted、Todd和我对与监管问题和交易问题相关的各种问题思考得越多，我们绝大多数情况下会将对可流通证券的持股保持在10%以下。我们对航空公司也是这么做的。但这并不意味着我们要减持美国运通之类的股份。但是——Greg Garland在Phillips 66做得非常出色。我们与该公司关系非常好。他是一位非常非常有经验且明智的经理。但我确实决定，我希望在该持股中低于10%。就像我说的，我们会保持在富国银行股份略低于10%。实际上，我们卖出了少量股份，我认为是为了在American Airlines和United Continental的案例中都保持在10%以下。

除非有特殊情况，否则我们会保持在10%以下。但我们持有Phillips约9点几的股份。我认为他们的运营做得很好。我认为他们在资本配置方面做得很好。几年前，我们与他们做了一笔交易——我们用股票换来了一个业务，这个业务我们保留运营后一直非常好。所以我们在Phillips仍然有大量资金。我希望这笔交易是在更高的价格上达成的。但我们在卖出的部分上赚了钱，并且实现了一个目标。查理？

查理·芒格： 嗯，我们喜欢那个我们用股票换来的子公司。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特： 我错过了——

查理·芒格： 我们用股票换了一个子公司。

沃伦·巴菲特： 嗯，是的，嗯。

查理·芒格： 我们喜欢那个子公司。

沃伦·巴菲特： 哦，是的。嗯，它改善了——

查理·芒格： 这不像股票凭空消失了。

沃伦·巴菲特： 是的。是的，实际上我们在Phillips上做得相当不错。

12. 加密货币热潮将”以糟糕的结局收场”

沃伦·巴菲特： Becky？

贝基·奎克： 这个问题来自乌克兰的Vlad Koptev。他说：“去年加密货币的市值已接近伯克希尔和苹果。显然，加密货币背后的理念将影响伯克希尔作为股东的传统银行集团。您总是说您没有深入了解加密货币。那么，是什么因素让您说这是一个泡沫？”

沃伦·巴菲特： 嗯，通常来说，非生产性资产不仅——如果你在基督时代买了黄金，然后计算复利，你知道，可能只有千分之几。它本质上除了所谓的稀缺性之外，不会产生任何东西，因为只能开采那么多。但那又怎样呢？我的意思是，它本身能生产什么？你知道，支票是一个绝妙的创意。想象一下，如果无法开支票或进行电汇转账，世界会是什么样子。但这并不意味着支票本身价值连城。如果你说不能使用一种叫做”支票”的东西，那你会用别的方式转账。我认为，任何时候你买入一种非生产性资产，你都是在指望将来会有别人买入另一种非生产性资产，因为他们认为可以以更高的价格卖给别人。这在郁金香上尝试过，也被尝试过。历史上在各种东西上都尝试过。它最终都会以糟糕的结局收场。

我的意思是，你很难。你可以想想未开发的土地。比如，路易斯安那购地案，大约是1500万美元买了80万平方英里的土地。事实上，你现在坐着的土地就是路易斯安那购地案的一部分。那么我们付了多少钱？每平方英里20美元。一平方英里是640英亩。算下来大概3美分一英亩。所以那是当时一笔相当不错的对非生产性资产的购买。但这取决于——这非常困难。你可以买邮票。Bill Gross，你知道，收集了一套很棒的邮票。最终卖出了更多的钱。但这取决于别人想买，希望他们能卖更多的钱，等等。最终，你的钱是从生产性资产上赚来的。如果你买一个农场，你会试图估算农作物——每英亩能产出多少大豆或玉米，你需要付给为你耕作的农民多少钱，你的税收是多少，以及其他各种因素。

然后你根据资产本身在未来能产生什么来得出结论。这是投资。当你买入某样东西是因为你希望明天早上醒来时价格会更高，唯一的原因是你需要有更多的人进来而不是离开。你可以做到这一点。它会自我强化一段时间，有时是长时间，有时达到惊人的数字。但最终——它们会以糟糕的结局收场。加密货币也会以糟糕的结局收场。此外，除了该资产本身不产生任何价值之外，你还有一个问题，就是它会吸引很多骗子和类似的人，他们试图创建各种交易所或其他什么。你知道，这是一些品行不端的人看到机会，去欺骗那些试图致富的人，因为他们的邻居买了这种他们都不懂的东西而暴富。它将以糟糕的结局收场。查理？

查理·芒格： 嗯，我比你更不喜欢加密货币。（笑声）所以对我来说，这简直是痴呆症。我认为那些专业交易员去交易加密货币，这简直令人作呕。这就像别人在交易粪便，然后你决定：“我不能被落下。“（笑声和掌声）

沃伦·巴菲特： 在某种程度上——我们的会议正在全球网络直播，我希望我们的一些话翻译得不太好，真的。（笑声）

13. 股东将从企业减税中获得大量好处

沃伦·巴菲特： 好的，Gary。

加里·兰瑟姆： 是的，我有一个关于企业税率的问题。在我的投资领域，关于减税好处落在哪里的问题存在争论。我可以说共识是，随着时间的推移，它会通过竞争转嫁给消费者。但也许有一部分留给了股东。我的问题是，您认为，从长远来看，一部分好处是否留给了股东？也许这超出了汽车保险的范畴？也可能是您拥有的其他业务。

沃伦·巴菲特： 嗯，人们通常对此的做法是，他们先选定他们想要的答案，然后他们雇——或者他们只是依附于某个经济学家，后者给他们一个更复杂的方式来解释一切都会很美好，因为事情已经发生了。但答案是，对于我们的受监管公用事业来说，好处应该全部——而且将会——传递给公用事业客户，因为如果我们表现良好，我们有权获得净资产回报。我们无权因为税率变化而获得超额回报。同样，如果税率回升，我们会期望因此得到补偿。所以在这个领域——这对我们来说有50到60亿美元。但在这个领域，绝对会传递给用户，即消费者。这是应该的。那么问题来了，对于剩余部分，它是否会被竞争掉？答案是有时是，有时会很快且显著地被竞争掉。有时可能很慢。其他时候可能不会。

有一点要知道的是，企业税法的改变总体上对股东有利，对伯克希尔股东有利。我的意思是——这就是国会通过的。意图肯定是，如果你要减税，这一次股东将获得特别大的份额。你们中有些人会在政治上同意这一点，有些人不会。但你们都会平等受益。（笑）我认为，如果你得到了好处，就说是对其他人也很棒，这是人之常情。我们会发现到底是不是这样。在经济学中，衡量单一变量的影响非常非常非常困难。你不能在经济学中只做一件事。人们在物理学中多少学到这一点，谈论中国的蝴蝶效应之类的东西。但是——你在经济学中遇到的每一个问题，接下来的每一个陈述，你都应该问”然后呢？”

当你开始问”然后呢”的时候，你就会开始偏爱那些在政治生活中给出答案的人，这些答案碰巧在某些方面对你有帮助，包括你的钱包。我们在这个问题上看到了这一点。这对伯克希尔·哈撒韦的股东有帮助。我会说，有些会被竞争掉。有些（听不清）公用事业，有些将使伯克希尔股东受益。查理？

查理·芒格： 我没什么要补充的。

14. 利用多元文化背景改善国际经济，以及多元文化的好处

沃伦·巴菲特： 好的。3号站。

参会者： 您好，巴菲特先生和芒格先生。我叫Kevin，来自中国深圳，目前在波士顿学院学习金融和哲学。我有一个比较宽泛的问题。在这个日益全球化的世界里，您认为我们年轻一代怎样才能最好地利用我们中美两国的背景和经验，为两国经济和关系的利益创造价值？您认为具有多元文化背景的人有什么价值？谢谢。

沃伦·巴菲特： 嗯，对于最后一个问题，我认为拥有多元文化背景是非常棒的。我语言能力从来都不好。但如果我今天在上大学，无论是在哪个国家，我都会学习另一个国家的语言，因为我认为随着时间的推移，这将是一个巨大的优势。对于问题的第一部分，我希望再给我重述一遍。我想确保我回答了你具体的那方面——我认为这对你的未来有好处。但能不能把麦克风再递到那边？

参会者： 问题的第一部分是，您认为我们年轻一代怎样才能最好地利用我们中美两国的背景和经验？

沃伦·巴菲特： 嗯，我会从掌握多种语言开始，我的意思是，当然，从某种意义上讲，显然你希望能用两种语言表达自己。你越能理解另一个社会的文化，显然，这越有好处。但我认为，市场体系，无论在中国还是美国，可能都有所修改，在某种程度上，它确实——会有一只无形的手，在一定程度上通过中国、美国以及世界其他地区的进步，来改善未来几代人的命运。我的意思是，情况好多了，尤其是在一个拥有核武器的世界里。但让全世界的人们都繁荣起来要好得多，部分是通过他们自己的努力，部分是通过他们与世界其他地区的互动。特别是自二战以来，我们在这一方面取得了很大进步。我的意思是，实行马歇尔计划是一个绝妙的主意，而不是像我们在第一次世界大战后那样行事，并得到那样的结果。

我认为我们在二战后表现得明智得多。所以我看好美国的未来。但我也看好中国的未来，并且在很大程度上，看好世界其他地区的未来。10年、20年、50年后，人们的生活会更好。我认为即使没有大规模杀伤性武器，这也是无法阻止的。查理？

查理·芒格： 是的，嗯，多元文化的东西，如果你只是一个在中国或内布拉斯加州的肛肠科医生，那么流利掌握英语和汉语可能对你没太大用处。（笑声）所以，如果你要利用你的多元文化背景，你必须在美中之间的某个接口工作。你可以像李录那样在美国筹集资金并投资到中国，或者你可以成为某种进口商或贸易专家。但你必须靠近那个接口才能从双语能力等中受益。

沃伦·巴菲特： 但你可以打赌，这个接口将显著增大。

查理·芒格： 巨大的。

沃伦·巴菲特： 是的。

查理·芒格： 巨大的。

沃伦·巴菲特： 这就是你所要准备的。

查理·芒格： 是的。而且我认为，一般来说，我们可以多元文化也可以多元学科。但总的来说，我认为如果人们非常专业地专精于一个领域，比如肛肠科医生，他们能赚更多的钱。（笑声）对于大多数人来说，如果试图模仿沃伦和我，很难赚很多钱。

沃伦·巴菲特： 我很高兴我没有早点遇到他。我的意思是——（笑声）

15. 鼓励子公司提供低成本的401(k)选项

沃伦·巴菲特： 好的，Andrew。

安德鲁·罗斯·索尔金： 好的，这个问题来自一位自称”伯克希尔员工兼股东”的人。

沃伦·巴菲特： 嗯哼。

安德鲁·罗斯·索尔金： “我读到ProPublica和《华盛顿邮报》的一篇调查文章，称伯克希尔的许多不同单元只提供收费高昂、主动管理的401(k)计划，而不是您所倡导的作为退休储蓄最佳路径的低成本指数基金。文章作者说他联系了公司，但没有人愿意评论。您是否会采取行动改善我们的401(k)产品，以匹配您的投资理念？从运营角度来看，鉴于您对此问题的强烈观点，这种情况是如何发生的？”

沃伦·巴菲特： 嗯，我确实说过——很多很多次了，通过年报——我们的经理们知道我对拥有指数基金选项的看法。但他们都有不同的计划，不同的历史。他们经营自己的业务。谁知道呢，你知道，具体是哪一个——如果你回溯到更老的业务，它们通常有固定收益养老金计划。现在没有人再设立这种计划了。那么问题来了，你是否要过渡到其他东西。最终，我们绝大多数情况下认为我们的经理做出这些决定和其他决定。我猜测，在拥有401(k)计划的公司工作的员工中，有非常高比例的人会有一个指数基金选项，但在某些情况下可能没有。我们唯一做的事情是——我想我们要求公司通过401(k)计划投资于伯克希尔股票的比例设置一个上限。我们不希望那些与伯克希尔紧密相连的人失去工作。我们当然不希望处于鼓励他们将100%或类似比例的储蓄投入伯克希尔本身的境地。

我不想处于那个位置。但我认为即使在那方面，我们也没有坚持任何公司必须这样做。我想，当我们在被问及一两次时，我们可能提出了这个建议。但经理们会经营他们的公司。员工，如果他们觉得——我们有些公司有人力资源部门——如果他们希望有不同的选择或类似的东西，你知道，他们应该向经理表达这些观点。在某些情况下，经理们会关注这些意见，在另一些情况下可能不会。我们有各种各样的经理来经营我们的业务。我们不会开始试图从奥马哈来管理他们。查理？

查理·芒格： 嗯，你说得对。这种情况确实存在。那种高收费选择的问题，是因为我们把整个主题都授权给了子公司的经理们。所以总部完全没有关注员工的选择。你所指出的是，很多子公司的员工，如果他们选择指数基金而不是他们实际选择的那些，情况会更好。我猜你在这方面绝对正确。你知道。

沃伦·巴菲特： 是的。

查理·芒格： 如果今天业务中有任何经理人，我希望我们能在鼓励更好选择方面多做一点。

沃伦·巴菲特： 是的，尽管我们不希望他们过多干预——

查理·芒格： 不。

沃伦·巴菲特： ——指导他们，你知道，我们可以接管人力资源。

查理·芒格： 不，这取决于经理们。但我们不会反对一些不同的观点。

沃伦·巴菲特： 而且我们已经非常清楚地表达了我们的想法。我的意思是，有些人就是不听我们的。（笑声）

16. 伯克希尔的文化将持续，因为”它行之有效”

沃伦·巴菲特： 好的，Gregg。

格雷格·沃伦： 沃伦，您一再指出，伯克希尔子公司之间共享一种强大的共同文化，这种文化建立在诚信正直的承诺、对长期的关注以及对客户关怀的重视之上。在收购运营公司时，找到与伯克希尔文化契合的公司也至关重要。在大多数情况下，目前管理这些子公司的经理人，正是当初将公司出售给伯克希尔的家族成员，这使得他们对所经营的业务拥有既得利益，并且与他们与伯克希尔共享的文化有着紧密联系。在我看来，更大的挑战在于确保那些已被收购的大型上市公司——它们占伯克希尔整体价值的很大一部分且比例在不断增长——能够保持正轨。您能否评论一下情况是否如此，以及对于您和查理来说，在不仅要维护伯克希尔文化，还要寻找与您们所建立的企业文化契合的公司方面，最大的挑战是什么？

沃伦·巴菲特： 是的，我认为这种文化非常非常强大。而且我认为它得到了加强——坦率地说，我认为它得到了我们拥有的股东们的加强。我的意思是，我们有一个不同的股东群体，我认为我们看待这些股东的方式与许多其他公司有些不同。我的意思是，我认为有相当多的上市公司希望他们没有公众股东。我们很高兴有公众股东。我们也喜欢有个人股东。我们不偏爱机构。而且我们不会，你知道，给他们提供指引并在投资者电话会议上特别与他们交谈等等。我们希望——我们希望直接与——我们希望股东基本上是合伙人。这是基础。然后是董事。我们有董事，他们不是——嗯，我担任过19个董事会成员，我从未见过另一个像我们这样的董事会。我认为我们拥有这样一群人是非常棒的，他们在很多情况下自己就持有大量股份。

他们没有获得特殊交易。这是一群以所有者为导向、关注伯克希尔、精通业务的业主。我们的董事会中没有因为某人是领先的教育家或其他人而让其加入。我们希望那些基本上思考如何为自己和合伙人良好经营企业的人。我们拥有融入这种文化的经理人，他们选择了这种文化并与我们一起。有时我们有第二代、第三代或第四代，比如在内布拉斯加家具市场，他们也有同样的理念。它完美吗？不，远非完美。我的意思是，你不会让每个人都以同样的方式思考。我们有非常独立思维的人经营着许多业务。他们中的一些人持有不同的政治信仰，他们通过与我们不同的视角看问题，在一定程度上。但就拥有一个共同的、强大的、积极的文化而言，我认为没有任何一家大型上市公司比伯克希尔做得更好。我认为这将继续下去，因为人们在很大程度上选择了加入。

文化会被传承。你做与文化一致的事情，所以你做的——你谈论的就是你做的。你不会发现人们说”我们是一个美妙的合伙人关系”，然后投票给自己巨额期权。然后一大群其他人会投票给自己低于他们的期权，因为他们不能显得把所有好处都拿走了，并且安排——我前几天读到一些交易，可能会产生数十亿美元的回报。我们不点名。但我们拥有你能得到的最好的文化。我会说，总体上，它越来越强大。我们总是有一些人并不完全认同它。我的意思是，不是100%。但它已经很接近了。我认为随着我们的发展，它总是越来越接近。我们会继续——我们会努力保持一种强化它而不是稀释它的行为方式。

而且我认为这不仅对查理和我有效，对我们的继任者也会非常有效。它不会是完美的。查理？

查理·芒格： 每次我来参加这样的会议，坐在经理午餐会上，在午餐结束时，我都更强烈地感到伯克希尔·哈撒韦的文化和价值观将在现任管理层离开后很长一段时间内继续传承下去。事实上，我认为它会在所有现任经理人都离开后继续存在。我认为我们在这里开启了一些行之有效的东西，它将持续下去。它会持续下去的原因之一是它不那么容易被复制。所以现有的那个很可能就只是继续前进。想想对伯克希尔体系进行直接模仿是多么少。

沃伦·巴菲特： 但它不会产生像过去那样的回报。

查理·芒格： 不，我认为它会持续很长时间，原因很简单。它会——

沃伦·巴菲特： 它行之有效。

查理·芒格： ——值得持续很长时间。

沃伦·巴菲特： 它行之有效。

查理·芒格： 而且它将继续有效。

17. 支持伯克希尔保险业务所需的现金

沃伦·巴菲特： 好的。（掌声）4号站。

克里斯蒂安·马克斯： 我叫Christian Max。我是来自德国科隆的一名自豪的股东。很高兴来到这里。我的问题与伯克希尔的保险业务有关。当我查看过去二十年的季度资产负债表时，我注意到一个模式，恳请您讨论一下。现金加上固定收益的总和始终徘徊在保险浮存金金额的100%左右。因此，我的问题是，说截至3月，1280亿的合并现金加固定收益中，有1160亿实际上是为了支持保险业务而必需的，这样说公平吗？

沃伦·巴菲特： 不，我感谢——

查理·芒格： 答案是否定的。是的。

沃伦·巴菲特： 答案是否定的。但他值得得到一个解释，说明这是怎么回事——也许我没有像他那样看待这个问题。我们更希望这个数字接近20，而不是116。我们并不将浮存金与决定在现金或固定收益中配置多少资金相关联，或者实际上进行衡量。事实是——我们的浮存金在持续增长。最近，我们的——这是有意为之，对我们来说非常棒——我们的现金及现金等价物也在增长，因为收购竞争变得更加激烈，一方面是由于资金在买家手中堆积，另一方面是因为债务如此便宜以及各种因素。但我认为这些不一定是永久性的。事实上，说它们不是永久性的，是相当合理的。问题只是它们何时会改变。我们并没有将现金及现金等价物与浮存金挂钩，就像查理说的那样。浮存金是（听不清）。第一季度浮存金增加了20亿美元。而且，浮存金不可能在短期内大量缩水。

它在结构上被设置成这样，它不会——它不可能缩水。实际上，我认为它短期内还会略微增长。我的意思是，我一直对它的增长幅度感到惊讶。我们拥有的浮存金比世界上任何一家财产意外保险公司都多得多。而且非常令人惊讶的是，这一切都来自Jack Ringwalt建造的那座小房子，他选择那个位置是因为它靠近网球场。（笑）好的，Carol。哦，还有查理。

查理·芒格： 最近有一些令人鼓舞的发展。一些现金最近已经用于我们非常偏好的证券，远远胜过持有现金。我们还有很多剩余的现金——可以用于我们可能比国债更喜欢的证券。所以敬请关注。

沃伦·巴菲特： 是的，简单来说，第一季度我们从运营中赚

2018年股东大会

第5/6部分

坦率地说，如果你是一名销售员，带着客户出去，你能掏出那张带有百夫长标志的美国运通卡，你看起来就像摩根大通的人。而如果你掏出的是大来卡，上面有一堆花哨的符号，你看起来就像一个靠来回跳票过活的人——（笑声）一个叫拉尔夫·施奈德的人——拉尔夫·施奈德和阿尔·布卢明代尔开发了大来卡。他们非常聪明，率先进入了这个市场，但他们在随后的营销上并不聪明。RC可乐，你知道，它确实——可口可乐之后出现了各种各样的可乐。我是说，你知道，回到1886年，在雅各布药房推出了一款极其成功的产品，你知道，很快就会有大量模仿者。但可口可乐才是真正的正宗。

你知道，你给我RC可乐，说：“我给你一半可口可乐的价格，”就饮用而言，我是说，这就是一个6.5盎司的产品，1900年卖5美分，你知道。现在如果你在周末买，大量购买等等，你支付的也并没有多多少。这份报纸在1942年是3美分，你知道。我是说，你实际支付的价格带来的享受程度——就实际价值而言——已经大幅下降，按通胀调整后的货币计算。所以它是一个物美价廉的产品。你知道，你必须看看——喜诗糖果，你知道，如果你住在加州，你是一个十几岁的男孩，你去女朋友家，给她或她的父母一盒糖果，她亲了你，你知道，这时你就失去了价格敏感度。（笑声）所以我们真的想要那些让人们觉得想亲你的产品，你知道——（笑）——而不是想扇你。这是一件有趣的事。

我是说，你知道，实际上我们是在押注苹果产品的生态系统，但——以iPhone为主导。我在其中看到了一些特征，让我觉得它非常出色。但我可能错了。你知道，到目前为止，我们——我会说我们在美国运通和可口可乐上是对的。1960年，美国运通发生了巨大的salad oil丑闻——实际上是63年11月，大约在[约翰·肯尼迪总统]遇刺的时候。当时真的担心这家公司能否生存下去。但没有人停止使用他们的卡。没有人停止使用他们的旅行支票。而且他们的旅行支票收费很高。所以，在消费品上，有时你能看到一些东西，让你对未来有相当好的洞察。然后有时我们会犯错。查理？

查理·芒格：我没什么要补充的，除了如果可口可乐刚发明出来时有人给我们机会投资，我们很可能也会说不。

沃伦·巴菲特：我们会拒绝的。是的。

查理·芒格：在我们看来，那会显得有点傻。

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，除非我们当时喝了它，现在，查理，听着。（笑）不，他说得对。我是说，我们不会去预见那些我们没有大量证据的事情。而且——

查理·芒格：不会。

沃伦·巴菲特：我们想看到很多——如果我们谈论的是消费品——我们想看到消费品在很多不同情况下的表现，然后我们想利用一些东西——实际上，费雪在1960年左右写过一本书，叫《普通股与不普通的利润》。这是投资界最伟大的著作之一。它讲的是投资的“小道消息法”，与本·格雷厄姆在数字方面教我的东西相去甚远。但这本是非常非常好的书。你可以学到很多东西，你知道，只要走出去，用一些鞋底功夫。现在他们称之为渠道检查或类似的东西。但它——你可以对某些产品有感觉，而有些产品你则无法感知。然后有时你会犯错。但这是一个好的技巧。我会说，这是一个重要的投资技巧。泰德和托德在这方面做了很多工作。

他们还有别人——有些人帮他们一起做。查理在好市多上也这么做过。我是说，他——（笑）我是说，他总是在好市多发现新的优点，你知道，然后——他是对的，顺便说一下。我是说，好市多对其顾客群有着巨大的吸引力。他们让顾客惊喜和愉悦。这在商业中没有什么是可以比拟的。如果你有愉悦的顾客，你就离目标很远了。

21. 恶意收购并非“邪恶”，但伯克希尔不做

沃伦·巴菲特：好的，贝基。

贝基·奎克：这个问题来自Brightstar Capital Partners的John Hegarty，他写道：“沃伦，你在卡夫亨氏正在寻求大规模收购（比如联合利华）的时候辞去董事会职务。你是否从根本上反对恶意收购、激进投资和竞争性代理权之争的对抗性质？”

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，我们自己不会发起恶意要约。我并不认为这个想法本身有什么根本性错误。我是说，如果你看看《财富》500强公司，我敢肯定这500家公司并非都由最优秀的管理层管理，有些甚至并非对投资者最友好。所以我不认为对公司发起恶意收购是邪恶的或什么。只是我们不会这样做，我们也不想卷入其中。我们喜欢被我们加入的公司管理层喜欢，因为我们依靠他们来经营公司，我们不会带来一大堆知道如何改变业务的人。我们很少在涉及代理权的事情上与管理层持相反立场——非常少——但——某种竞争。但我们并不排除它。我们不认为每个管理层都有权——你知道，他们不会对业务有终身控制权。

但这完全不是我们的风格——嗯，我们不会自己发起，而且我们非常非常不可能支持一场竞争。但在50年中，我们就管理层提出的关于股票期权的几项提案投过反对票。几年前我们对可口可乐的一项提案投了弃权票，以表达我们的意见。但我们并不认为在某些情况下，股东对谁应该经营公司、薪酬是否合理或类似问题有不同意见是邪恶的。股东仍然拥有这家公司。查理？

查理·芒格：我没什么要补充的。我不羡慕那些一直处于不友好纷争中的人。想象一下，在你已经富有之后还做这些事。这太疯狂了。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。是的，我们绝对不追求这个。我们不——当然有些公司值得被挑战。他们有时也会提出值得挑战的事情。但同样，这不是我们的主要活动。顺便说一下，这个问题是参考卡夫亨氏提出的。3G的人是非常非常优秀的管理者。他们是出色的合作伙伴。在参与之前，我就已经决定不再担任任何上市公司的董事会成员。我曾经担任过19个董事会职务，那很花时间。他们问我是否愿意暂时加入，我同意了。但实际上，这就像每年七天半的时间。如果你在银行董事会，可能需要更多时间。我是说，担任上市公司的董事会成员通常意味着季度会议，可能再加一次。

你知道，在87岁的年纪，我想我现在已经知道会发生什么了，这没问题，但我不想每年花七天半时间——也许我可以花五分钟打电话给我信任和钦佩的董事会成员，找出发生了什么或任何可能出现的问题。所以我们是他们的合作伙伴，很高兴成为他们的合作伙伴。现在我们卡夫亨氏董事会有两个人，他们可以出差，我可以待在家里。查理，你担任过多少家上市公司的董事会——你当然在好市多——在你的一生中，你担任过多少家上市公司的董事会？

查理·芒格：哦，我——好市多——除非是一些——

沃伦·巴菲特：堪萨斯城电力公司。

查理·芒格：——像《每日日报》这样的公司，我拥有部分所有权，好市多是唯一的上市公司董事会——

沃伦·巴菲特：你曾在堪萨斯城电力公司。

查理·芒格：——如果它不是伯克希尔或我个人拥有的东西。

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。

查理·芒格：我曾经在堪萨斯城电力与照明公司。嗯，那真是很久以前了。但基本上这种情况没有发生。我不羡慕那些经常参加不同董事会会议的人。

沃伦·巴菲特：不，一般来说，你几乎没有影响力，却花很多时间。问题在于，如果你要去参加董事会会议，特别是如果你去了国际会议，有时他们认为必须召开一次国际会议，你知道，他们认为必须占用你相当多的时间，否则就不值得千里迢迢来。所以你会得到很多展示和讲述的东西——我发现我的思绪会飘走。好的。（笑声）

22. 伯克希尔仍未进入国际企业卖家的雷达

沃伦·巴菲特：加里。

加里·兰瑟姆：是的，您说过您正在寻找非保险类的大规模收购来利用这些现金。当您这么说时，我通常想到的是美国，因为您是美国企业的忠实粉丝。我只是想知道，随着世界其他地区的开放和增长，您是否看到了更多机会，在世界其他地区（比如亚洲或欧洲）是否存在进行一些大型交易的机会。

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，加里，我会说我对这方面感到失望，因为我们确实在美国以外看到了一些机会，谢天谢地，几年前我们在以色列看到了一个[伊斯卡]，当时伊坦给我写了一封信。但是——你知道，我们收购了一家现在对伯克希尔非常重要的企业。但我们仍然没有——他们当然知道伯克希尔·哈撒韦在美国之外。但他们不会自动拿起电话。在美国，我认为任何大型——尤其是私有——公司，如果正在考虑做些什么，他们至少会想到伯克希尔。但在欧洲或亚洲，我们并没有以同样的方式深入他们的脑海。他们知道我们，知道我们有很多钱，知道我们喜欢买东西。

但我们真的，我们在美国的雷达屏幕上很大，而我们并不——我们不——那种确保他们考虑过伯克希尔选项的立即愿望在美国之外并不以同样的方式发生。我们尝试过几种方式来鼓励这一点。但我得说结果一点也不理想。但我希望明天，你知道，我能接到来自德国、英国、意大利或任何国家，澳大利亚，无论哪里的电话。我希望接到电话，我们有机会去做。有很多国家我们很乐意投入大量资金。就像我说的，我们在以色列的经历非常棒。查理？

查理·芒格：是的，但现在企业收购游戏被杠杆收购和所谓的（不管他们叫什么）战略收购所驱动。我通常将其翻译成粗俗的语言。（巴菲特笑）从我们的角度来看，价格上存在如此多的疯狂。当然，我们很难做到。那些从事杠杆收购游戏的人，喜欢大规模杠杆，不介意高价格，即使是他们也出现了流鼻血。这很困难。这种环境并不意味着——允许伯克希尔就直接出去收购一大批公司。

沃伦·巴菲特：你有没有做过一笔你认为是战略性的交易——

查理·芒格：我们必须等待。

沃伦·巴菲特：我们有没有做过一笔你能记得的战略性交易？

查理·芒格：嗯？

沃伦·巴菲特：我们有没有做过一笔我们认为具有战略性的交易？

查理·芒格：我们从来没有过战略计划，除非你对我隐瞒了。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：好的。这就回答了问题。

23. 投资“不需要高等学习”

沃伦·巴菲特：6号站。

观众：嗨，我是来自密苏里州圣路易斯的Brady Ritchie。自1996年以来的股东。

沃伦·巴菲特：太棒了。

观众：沃伦，你和查理过去批评过商学院以及它们教授的内容。对于价值投资，在《格雷厄姆-多德都市的超级投资者》中，你展示了许多拥有不同教育背景的伟大投资者的回报，其教训是：“遵循哲学是关键。”要在今天取得成功，是否仍然只需要回归《聪明的投资者》第八章？你如何看待CFA、CFP等项目和称号，它们声称高标准，但根植于学术界？我还想挑战你明天打一轮桥牌。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：最后一部分是什么？

查理·芒格：嗯，他是在说——我们怎么看待——

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，商学院之类的。

查理·芒格：——商学院之类的。

沃伦·巴菲特：我没听清最后——

查理·芒格：它们更好了——

沃伦·巴菲特：哦，他挑战我打一轮桥牌。好的。那个——（笑声）我上过三所商学院，每所我都找到了一两位老师。我专门去了一所学院为了得到一位特定的老师。但在每一所学院，我都找到了一两位让我真正受益的老师。所以我们完全不反对商学院。我们确实认为，比如说30年前——或者40年前——在有效市场理论等方面，神职人员们偏离了投资现实。如果我可以从排名第一、第二或第三的商学院的前五名毕业生中雇用一个人，我的选择是一个聪明——但把《聪明的投资者》第八章——绝对——内化于心的人——他们骨子里就有——我基本上会选择第八章的人。这不是——我们所做的事情并不复杂。

它必须是一门纪律严明的业务，但它——它不需要超级智商或任何类似的东西。有一些基本原则极其重要，而且你必须懂会计。出去和消费者交谈，在很多方面开始像消费者一样思考，所有这些都有帮助。但它就是不需要高等学习。而我——我当然——你知道，我不想上大学，所以我不知道如果我高中毕业后就辍学，读我读的那些书等等，我会做得更好还是更差。我认为如果你遇到几位伟大的老师，他们在某种程度上真正改变了你看待世界的方式，你知道，你很幸运。你可以在学术界找到他们，也可以在日常生活中找到他们。我非常幸运有伟大的老师，包括查理。我是说，查理一直是位了不起的老师。

你知道——任何你能找到给你提供你以前不理解的东西的见解，可能让你成为一个比以前更好的人的地方，你知道，你——这是非常幸运的，你想充分利用它。如果你能在学术界找到，就充分利用它。如果你能在生活的其他部分找到，就充分利用它。查理？

查理·芒格：嗯，当你找到本·格雷厄姆时，他是非传统的，而且非常聪明。当然，这对你非常有吸引力。然后当你发现它有效，你可以坐在那里赚很多钱时——（笑声）——你当然立刻就成了皈依者。所以——

沃伦·巴菲特：它现在仍然吸引着我，实际上。我是说——（笑声）

查理·芒格：但世界变了。在他去世前，比尔·格雷厄姆——我是说，本·格雷厄姆——认识到他寻找被低估公司的那种确切方式并不一定在所有时间、所有条件下都有效。我们的情况当然就是这样。我们逐渐演变成试图在好公司被低估时购买它们，而不是在差公司被低估时购买它们。当然，这对我们来说效果很好。而本·格雷厄姆，他活得比他个人大部分时间玩的游戏更久。他活着看到了它大部分消失。我是说，找到一家售价只有其营运资本三分之一的公司，并且认为它可以很容易被清算，每1美元市值分配3美元。如果你能在当前市场上找到这些，那运气真好。如果你能找到它们，它们又太小，伯克希尔觉得没用。所以我们不得不学习一个不同的游戏。这对在座的所有年轻人来说是一个教训。如果你要长寿，你必须不断学习。

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。

查理·芒格：你以前知道的东西永远不够。所以如果你不学会不断修正你之前的结论并变得更好（听不清），你就是——我总是用同一个比喻。你就像一个在踢屁股比赛中只有一条腿的人。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：如果有人有另一个比喻的建议，请发给我。（笑声）格雷厄姆，顺便说一句，有一点很重要。格雷厄姆的方法不可规模化。我是说，你不能用真正的大笔资金去做。当我为格雷厄姆-纽曼公司工作时，他是所有分析师中的院长。你知道，他的智慧超越了当时所有其他人。但是我们的——投资基金只有600万美元，与该投资公司协同运作的合伙公司也大约有600万美元。所以我们只有1200万美元在运作。现在，你可以考虑通货膨胀等因素进行调整。但这只是一笔很小的数目。它真的不可规模化。事实是格雷厄姆并不在乎，因为他真的对为自己赚很多钱不感兴趣。所以他没有理由想找到一种可以持续下去、变得越来越大、越来越大的方法。因此，把股票视为企业的第八章的实用性具有巨大价值。关于安全边际的第二十章的实用性也具有巨大价值。但这并不复杂。

查理·芒格：我终于想明白为什么公司金融的教授们经常教授很多错误的东西。当我早年眼睛有些问题时，我咨询了一位非常著名的眼科医生。我意识到他的诊所正在做一种完全过时的白内障手术。在更好的程序被发明之后，他们仍然在用刀切。我说：“为什么在一所伟大的医学院里你还在执行绝对过时的手术？”他说：“查理，这是一个非常好教的手术。”（笑声）嗯，这就是公司金融领域发生的事情。他们得到这些公式，这是一种很好的教学体验。（笑声）你给他们一个公式，你提出一个问题，他们使用公式。你会感受到一种真正有价值的活动的感觉。（笑声）只有一个问题。全都是胡扯。

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，每当你听到一个理论被描述为“优雅”时，要小心，你知道。（笑声）

查理·芒格：对。

24. 随着女性进入劳动力市场，巴菲特“看好人类”

沃伦·巴菲特：好的，安德鲁。

安德鲁·罗斯·索金：这个问题——我们收到了几个类似的问题——来自Impactive Capital的管理合伙人劳伦·泰勒·沃尔夫。“沃伦，你最近说让你对美国感到乐观的事情之一是女性进入劳动力市场，以及‘有效就业的人才翻了一番’。然而，在领导职位方面，女性在标普500指数公司董事会中占比不到21%，在CEO中占比更小，只有5%。作为许多大型公司的主要投资者，伯克希尔能做什么，又具体在做什么，来推动董事会层面和高级领导层中的性别平等？”

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。嗯，再次——（掌声）——你知道，正如我过去指出的，我的一个姐妹在这里。我有两个姐妹，她们绝对和我一样聪明。而且她们的性格更好，任何认识我们两个人——或者我们所有人——的人都可以证明。她们根本没有和我一样的机会。你有1942年的《纽约时报》——你知道，女性可以当护士、教师、零售店员或速记员。这实际上在30年代我小时候在奥马哈对我非常有利，因为我有好得多的老师，因为那是女性可以从事的工作，我在小学没有一位男老师，查理在邓迪上学时我想也没有。我们有巨大的人才库被引导到极少数机会中，因此我们得到了比市场体系应得的更好的老师。

再说一遍，我们的经理们经营他们的公司。但在我做出这次管理层变动之前——在过去的五六年里，我可能只任命了六七个CEO。我们变动不多。但我得说我任命的CEO中大约一半是女性，这大约是能力上应该有的比例。现在，存在一定的管道问题，但这会随着时间得到解决，你不能永远用这个当借口。你知道，我对我们为CEO所做的决定感觉非常好。我希望我们所有的CEO都能永远活着。我们雇佣的一位女性几乎做到了。B夫人活到104岁。她在103岁退休。这对我们其他的经理来说是一个教训，如果你过早退休，你知道——（笑声）——不知道会发生什么。但这绝对是真的。这确实让我看好。它让我看好人类。但当然它也对我们的国家有利。

因为如果你看看发生了什么，你知道，在第十九修正案之前，然后第十九修正案之后很长一段时间，直到今天，但——已经有了显著的改善。我对未来确实感到更乐观，因为我认为会有更多基于能力的选择，而不是基于性别、种族或继承。我认为如果你有一个系统，所有企业都传给长子或类似情况，我认为——我认为社会取得的进步会比基于能力的少得多。查理？

查理·芒格：嗯，我们确实生活在一个不同的时代。有句老话说，过去是一个很奇怪的国家。那里的人们行为截然不同。而且完全不同。可笑的是——我不记得——我在高中有一位或两位男老师。但几乎没有。世界真的变了。在伯克希尔内部，我从未在任何地方看到过基于性别的公开歧视。

沃伦·巴菲特：但可能也有一些。我是说——

查理·芒格：不，不，我敢肯定我们有我们的——

沃伦·巴菲特：哦，有——

查理·芒格：——人性所有奇怪之处的份额。

沃伦·巴菲特：当然。

查理·芒格：但总的来说，一切都在改善，你不这么认为吗？

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。

查理·芒格：我认为它会继续改善。

25. 伯克希尔回购不受各州保险法规限制

沃伦·巴菲特：好的。格雷格？

格雷格·沃伦：沃伦，在今年的年报中提到（几乎每年都这样），公司保险子公司的股息支付受到保险法规和其他规定的限制，伯克希尔的保险业务目前在2018年被允许宣布高达160亿美元的普通股息。我的问题是，我们是否应该将这个每年的监管股息门槛视为允许股票回购的基准？如果伯克希尔想要回购更多股票，或者支付更多股息，你使用非保险业务持有的资本来返还额外资本会不会有问题？附带的问题是，BNSF的年度现金分配（记录在国家保险公司的账面上）是否会被排除在外？

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。我们显然会遵守我们注册所在州的规定，以及所有规定，当然。但基本上，这是保险公司注册州的规定，它们确实限制了任何一年的股息金额。尽管如果你愿意，你可以申请额外的金额。但我们从不考虑这个。但回购——如果回购真的很有吸引力，我们会大规模进行。而且，你知道，我不会排除——有很多方法我们可以安排来做一个非常大的收购（这是我更喜欢的），或者一个非常大的回购（我认为可能不太可能，仅仅是因为我们股票的交易方式，而不是因为我们在大幅折价时不想要）。所以查理和我，我们有胃口。我们会有——我们有很多现金——但我们可以有更多的现金。我们可以做任何交易——甚至是非常大规模的。

任何出现的事情——我们都能想办法完成。我们会——我们不会这样做，但我们会有合作伙伴，他们会加入并给我们合伙企业的优先部分。这很可能不会发生。但我们可以做很多事情。所以不要基于保险公司分红的法定限制来排除任何事情——

查理·芒格：而且——我们可以获得特别许可来——

沃伦·巴菲特：哦，我们可以——

查理·芒格：——宣布更大的股息。我们不是——你不应该假设我们受到自然规律的限制，即我们目前可以提取的金额。

26. 芒格：“我不认为机器智能会改变世界那么多”

沃伦·巴菲特：好的，7号站。

观众：嗨，沃伦和查理。感谢你们所做的一切。我是David [听不清]，上海的一位投资经理。我来这里已经八年了。如果投资是奥运会的一项运动，你就是我们的冠军团队。所以我的问题是，面对快速增长的机器挑战，您如何看待新的竞争对未来资本配置生产力的影响？对查理来说，从一般经济利益的角度来看，资本配置的首要原则是什么？谢谢。

查理·芒格：嗯，两个问题。机器智能。恐怕我唯一的智能是由非机器的东西提供的。我不认为我会学习机器智能。是的。如果你问我如何用自己的智能击败围棋，我做不到。而且我认为对我来说学计算机科学太老了。总的来说，我——我认为机器智能已经起作用了。毕竟，现在机器可以击败最好的人类围棋选手。但我认为这个领域的炒作多于可能的成就。所以我不认为世界会因机器智能而改变那么多。会有一点，但不会很大。另一个问题是什么？

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯——

查理·芒格：一个是机器智能。

沃伦·巴菲特：我认为他是在谈资本配置——

查理·芒格：哦，是的。那是一个非常笼统的问题。一般来说，我们总是试图获得最好的——获得值得购买的东西。如果你在学术界，人类思维会拒绝这一点，因为你可以在学期开始时发表一句宣告性的话，然后剩下的时间就没事可做了。所以人们想找到某种公式。这就是我所说的“物理嫉妒”。这些人希望世界像物理学一样。但世界并不像物理学，除了物理学之外。那种虚假的精确只会让你陷入麻烦。所以我得说，你必须掌握一般性的想法，你必须努力慢慢提高你的判断力，就像我们其他人一样。我不认为大多数人能从机器智能中获得多少个人收益。

沃伦·巴菲特：不，我不——我不认为——当机器击败围棋或类似的东西，甚至在象棋或任何其他比赛中获胜时，我印象深刻。但我不认为它们在资本配置或投资方面能带来太多东西。然后我可能完全漏掉了什么，你知道，也许我只是对那里的东西视而不见。

查理·芒格：你错过了很多非常赚钱的、能产生费用的废话。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：是的，嗯。嗯，那就这样了。我们继续到8号站。（笑声）

27. 芒格：“美国投资者错过了中国”

观众：尊敬的巴菲特先生和芒格先生，非常感谢你们主持这次会议。这真的很了不起。谢谢。我叫Yen（音），我是老虎证券（中国一家领先的电子经纪公司）的合伙人。让我重新表述一下。我和我的同事们从半个地球之外飞过来（听不清）来到这里，和体育场里的每个人一样，我们很荣幸来到这里。我的问题是，您早些时候提到，投资者真的不必费力挑选正确的股票。他们可能会在挑选正确的市场和正确的国家方面做得很好。中国是世界第二大经济体，可能拥有最大的增长潜力。仅仅通过被动地加权一个投资组合——通过被动评估一个投资组合——美国投资者显著低配了中国。所以，在您看来，是什么阻止了投资者投资中国？谢谢。

查理·芒格：嗯，我认为答案是你说得完全对。我们——美国投资者错过了中国。他们错过是因为它离得很远，看起来不同，他们不习惯，很复杂，头条新闻让他们困惑。换句话说，坐在奥马哈，要智取中国市场，看起来太难了。但我认为你完全正确。那是他们应该关注的地方。

沃伦·巴菲特：好的。（笑声）我们实际上在中国做过几笔投资。做得相当不错。但是——嗯，如果你回溯很多年，（听不清）。就投入大量资金而言，你知道，几十亿美元，我们必须将数十亿美元投入到能有所作为的事情中，这在你不熟悉的市场上可能会更难。在任何情况下都很困难。但在美国以外积累60亿、80亿或100亿美元的投资头寸可能非常困难。例如，在英国和欧洲大部分地区，当我们持有一家公司3%的股份时，我们必须报告。事实上，即使我们持有低于3%，也可能被要求报告。当我们有一堆追随者和大量可能不值得（就我们在市场中所做的一切而言）的关注时，这就变得非常困难。一些问题纯粹是由我们的规模性质引起的。

如果我们在运营一个较小的基金，会容易得多。中石油，我们设法获得了非常大的头寸。但政府拥有其90%的股份。所以我们买了政府不持有的14%，但这仍然只占公司总股份的1.4%。但查理，查理实际上一直推动我在中国做更多。我们实际上尝试过几次。有一次我们参与了一项业务——

查理·芒格：嗯，你第一次做得太差了，你投了20万，得到了大约20亿，所以。

沃伦·巴菲特：是的。是的。嗯。

查理·芒格：还不够鼓舞人心。（笑声）

28. “杰夫·贝索斯所做的近乎一个奇迹”

沃伦·巴菲特：好的。9号站。

观众：我叫Sherman Silber博士。我是来自圣路易斯的一名不孕症医生。我是股东，参加这个会议已经23年了，非常感谢你们让我的孙子们变得非常富有。（笑声和掌声）他们有时在医学界——不孕症领域——把我比作不孕症领域的伯克希尔·哈撒韦，因为我很老，来自一个相对较小的社区。但我想知道你对不仅是苹果，还有所有科技股（如亚马逊和谷歌）的兴趣。因为你过去回避了它们，你说因为它们很复杂，你应该坚持做你理解的事情。另一方面，亚马逊和谷歌拥有你所说的非常持久的竞争优势。它们几乎没有任何竞争对手。在中国，阿里巴巴和腾讯也是如此。所以这似乎是一个矛盾，我想知道你是否会转过弯来，进入这些似乎没有严重竞争的科技公司。

沃伦·巴菲特：嗯，我们当然看过它们。我们不会考虑我们是否应该投资科技公司或类似的事情。我们在寻找那些具有持久竞争优势的东西，并且我们认为我们的观点在评估这种持久性的概率时可能比其他人更好。但事实是，我从一开始就关注亚马逊，我认为杰夫·贝索斯所做的近乎一个奇迹。问题是，如果我认为某件事会成为奇迹，我倾向于不去押注它。（笑）显然，如果我当时对某些业务有洞察力，结果会更好。但你知道，事实上，比尔很早就告诉我——比尔·盖茨很早就告诉我——你知道，我想我那时在用AltaVista，他建议我转向谷歌。但问题是，我看到谷歌正在超越AltaVista，然后我想知道是否有人能超越谷歌。我在GEICO看到，我们为某项东西支付了很多钱，而他们为此增加的成本为零。

我们看过它，你知道，我犯了一个错误，无法得出一个我真正感觉到的结论，即以当前价格，前景远比价格所显示的要好。我投资苹果，完全不是因为它是一只科技股。我是说，我投资苹果是因为我得出了一些结论——关于资本将被明智地使用，但更重要的是，关于生态系统的价值以及这个生态系统能有多持久，以及它面临的威胁是什么，等等一系列事情。而这并不——我认为这不需要我拆开iPhone或类似的东西来找出所有组件是什么。它更多是关于消费者行为的本质。有些事情让我觉得比其他事情有更多的持久性。但答案是，我们会错过很多东西——或者我会错过很多东西——那些我觉得自己不够了解的东西。

在投资中，如果你不在好球区挥棒，只要你最终在某些时候挥棒，你知道，最终你会找到你喜欢的投球，这是没有惩罚的。这就是我们将继续做的方式。我们会尽量待在我们的能力圈内。查理和我通常对于我们能力圈的边界，以及什么样的情况我们可能在推理或经验上有某种优势——我们可能评估某些东西的方式与他人不同——大致达成一致。但答案是，我们会错过很多东西。查理？

查理·芒格：是的，我们有一个很好的系统。如果我们其中一个人在某个领域很蠢，那另一个人也一样。（笑声）当然，我们不是成为高科技专家的理想人选。我们这个年龄有多少人很快掌握了谷歌？我去过谷歌总部。他们看起来像——它看起来像一个幼儿园。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：一个非常富有的幼儿园。

查理·芒格：是的。（笑声）

沃伦·巴菲特：不，他们所做的一切非常令人印象深刻。就像我说的，在GEICO，在他们上市的时候，我们付给了他们很多钱。三位主要人物——埃里克、拉里和谢尔盖——实际上都来见过我。但他们更感兴趣的是谈论上市以及相关的机制等等。但并不是他们做的事对我来说是个谜。谜团在于会有多少竞争，他们会多有效，以及这将是一场四五个人混战而赚不到如果一家公司主导时那么多钱的游戏。这些都是很难的决定。有些行业可能只有两家公司，但它们仍然表现不佳，因为它们互相打得头破血流。这就是航空业的问题之一。

它现在比以前好，但以前是自杀，所以——（笑）你知道，航空业的竞争因素非常极端，四人运营在85%的运力下比七八人运营在70%左右并用更多飞机的情况要好多少？这些都是艰难的决定。但我在谷歌上做了错误的决定。而亚马逊，我只是——我真的认为那是一个奇迹，你可以在没有大量资本的情况下，同时做亚马逊网络服务和改变零售，而且亚马逊的速度和效率如此之高。我只是——我低估了——我第一次见到杰夫时，对他的能力有非常非常高的评价。而我低估了他。（笑）查理？

查理·芒格：嗯，我的评论是，股东有一件事要感谢。总部一些与年龄相关的愚蠢行为已经被泰德和托德的加入所改善。我们现在借助一些更年轻的眼睛看世界。他们做出了贡献——

伯克希尔是环保局“甲烷挑战”和“ONE Future排放强度承诺框架”的自愿成员，应因其将整个价值链的泄漏率降至低于1%目标而受到赞扬。由于这一框架相较于指令性方法更具成本效益，股东希望了解伯克希尔采用的这种成本效益方法是否足够——维护和加强信息披露应有助于减轻这些财务和监管风险的潜在可能。最后，我们认为伯克希尔·哈撒韦发布一份报告，披露公司在甲烷资产方面的具体最佳实践、政策、安全标准以及设施所需的升级成本，以减轻潜在的业务风险，是审慎之举。该报告将便于投资者、客户和监管机构理解伯克希尔管理甲烷排放和风险的整体方法。感谢您的考虑。

沃伦·巴菲特： 凯思卡特女士，能帮我个忙吗？还有其他人要发言吗？我这里看不太清楚。

声音： 没有，没有其他股东想就这个问题发言。

弗里达·凯思卡特： 我身后没有人要发言。

沃伦·巴菲特： 查理，你听到了吗？

查理·芒格： 没有。

沃伦·巴菲特： 格雷格——能否把幻灯片一放出来，然后如果有人给格雷格一个麦克风，会有帮助。他可以详细说明这张图表，并且知道我们在做什么。

格雷格·阿贝尔： 好的。谢谢沃伦，也感谢刚才的评论。我们这里准备的内容是对该提案的回应。它展示了被强调的“ONE Future倡议”目标。他们希望我们的管道到2025年运营时的吞吐量损失为1%。我很高兴地报告，如本幻灯片所示，2017年我们的吞吐量损失为0.046%，比2025年的要求好了20倍。（掌声）谢谢。这显然是对我们运营团队的巨大赞誉。他们非常重视被强调的问题。我还要补充一点，正如所指出的，我们是环保局计划的一部分，我们自愿进行报告。我们的做法已向环保局披露并接受其审查，同时也在我们的网站上公示。因此，我坚信我们正在取得成果并披露了适当的信息。谢谢。

沃伦·巴菲特： 是的，谢谢格雷格。凯思卡特女士，在这件事上我们基本上和您立场一致。我们只是不想寻求更多方式进行研究、准备报告，那些可能会花费资金并产生更多报告等等。但我可以告诉您两件事。这件事每季度都会向伯克希尔·哈撒韦能源公司的董事会报告。我是该董事会成员。我们相信要实现同样的目标（听不清），并且我们认为伯克希尔·哈撒韦能源公司在减少甲烷排放方面既敏感又有效——既敏感又有效。所以，如果——我想我们现在准备好了。现在可以对这项动议进行表决。如果有股东进行现场投票，请现在在动议上标记选票，并将选票交给过道中的一位会议工作人员。阿米克女士，当你准备好时，可以给出你的报告。

贝基·阿米克： 我的报告已经准备好了。根据截至上周四晚上收到的投票代理，代理持有人的投票结果显示，对该动议投了48,040票赞成，558,640票反对。由于反对票数超过就此事项正确投出的所有A类和B类股票票数的多数，也超过所有未决票数，该动议未获通过。特拉华州法律要求的精确投票计数证明将交给秘书，并附入本次会议记录。

沃伦·巴菲特： 谢谢你，阿米克女士。该提案未获通过。

33. 关于可持续发展报告的股东提案

沃伦·巴菲特： 下一项议程是由股东弗里达·凯思卡特提出的动议。该动议已在代理声明中列出。动议要求伯克希尔采取一项政策，鼓励更多伯克希尔子公司发布年度可持续发展报告。我现在请弗里达·凯思卡特女士介绍这项动议，并请所有感兴趣的股东发表意见，我请她将发言时间限制在五分钟内。凯思卡特女士，请发言。

弗里达·凯思卡特： 非常感谢。能来到这里是一种荣幸，我也有幸能感谢我的祖父詹姆斯·凯思卡特，他从通用再保险的收发室开始工作，经过努力成为该公司的董事长。在那段时间里，他积累了大量通用再保险的股票，并慷慨地赠予了他的家人。当他这样做时，他鼓励他的家人行善并将此传递下去，做一些能够在世界和社区中产生影响的事情。我的父亲通过向教育机构做慈善来实现这一点，他的理念是：授人以鱼，不如授人以渔。而我的关注点则在于环境，我认为当人们钓鱼时，如果鱼是可以安全食用的，那将是件好事。我想借此机会澄清我关于可持续发展报告的提案，并强调“鼓励”这个词。显然，伯克希尔·哈撒韦允许子公司自主运营而不从您那里得到指导——或者说指令——的管理方式非常成功。

我不建议改变这一点。你们做得很好。请继续保持。但我确实认为，鼓励和支持它们是有价值的，而且在很多方面你们已经在做了。投资者和公众对企业社会责任有着高度的兴趣。五分之一的投资基于社会责任投资策略。早在2012年，我发现《地球先驱报》上的一篇文章写道：“当沃伦·巴菲特讲话时，人们会倾听。他现在正在谈论环境问题。他认为公司需要有三重底线。尊重环境对公司的经济表现至关重要。” 有一段时间——这是直接引用您的话，巴菲特先生：“在这样的时代，公司必须投资于盈利的关键要素：其员工、社区和环境。” 伯克希尔·哈撒韦三分之一的子公司已经在网上有了可持续发展相关的内容。

其中一个是伯克希尔能源公司，它有一个缩写词“RESPECT”，代表责任（Responsibility）、效率（Efficiency）、管理（Stewardship）、绩效（Performance）、沟通（Communication）和培训（Training）。伯克希尔·哈撒韦还举办年度可持续发展峰会，以帮助各子公司聚集在一起，学习如何更具可持续性，如何分享技巧，以及如何盈利。这非常棒。但是，当我试图在网上找到关于可持续发展峰会的信息时，我没能找到。我认为这正是伯克希尔·哈撒韦在向我们股东和外界沟通我们所做的出色工作时可以做得更好的地方。一个简单的解决方案就是在伯克希尔·哈撒韦网站上创建一个可持续发展相关的链接，让人们可以点击进入，了解像可持续发展峰会这样的倡议活动。然后，也许他们可以点击进入那些拥有可持续发展相关网页的子公司，看看他们在做什么。

通过这样做，我们向世界打开了一扇窗，让他们看到我们正在做出的改变，这可能会激励其他公司效仿。或者，一个正在写论文的大学生可能会读到这些，认为这是一个好的商业模式，是他在未来职业生涯中想要推广的东西。有一个名为“伯克希尔·哈撒韦的可持续发展”的Facebook页面，股东和外界可以查看相关内容，进行研究，并互相鼓励，了解如何支持可持续发展的实践。这个页面现在已经可以使用了。我非常感谢今天有机会与您交流，并澄清我的提案。我也非常赞赏并感谢您为我们公司和世界所做的一切工作。非常感谢。

沃伦·巴菲特： 谢谢您。（掌声）许多管理者——伯克希尔的很多管理者——都在这里，正在听您讲话。我认为他们中很大一部分人同意您所说的。至于他们是否在网页等方面采取行动，我们认为这基本取决于他们自己。但我可以告诉您，正如您提到的，一位主要的支持者是格雷格·阿贝尔，他直到最近一直负责伯克希尔·哈撒韦能源公司，现在是副董事长。格雷格可能也想对此说几句。但我可以向您保证，管理者们正在听您讲话。

格雷格·阿贝尔： 谢谢沃伦。是的，我们做了刚才提到的所有事情。我只想为我们的股东补充几点。显然，可持续发展对伯克希尔和我们每个运营子公司来说都是优先事项。正如刚才提到的，许多公司都有可持续发展报告。但我想更进一步。如果您访问我们各个公司的网站，您会看到他们在可持续发展方面采取的具体行动。所以它可能没有汇总成一份具体的报告，但这类信息是可以获得的。我还要补充一点，在伯克希尔·哈撒韦能源公司，我们在沃伦、查理、沃尔特·斯科特的支持下，正努力以身作则。我很高兴地报告，看看我们目前的能源生产情况，截至2017年底，我们生产和供客户消费的能源中，有50%来自可再生能源。这是我们在美国和全球积极传达的信息，作为我们行业能够实现的目标的范例。我很高兴地报告，到2021年底，我们在爱荷华州的客户所需的所有能源都可以通过可再生能源满足。

因此，我理解可持续发展的概念。我们正在整个组织内分享最佳实践。但正如沃伦强调的，这确实落实在我们每个公司中。但我们会鼓励这一点，你们将继续看到出色的成果。谢谢。

沃伦·巴菲特： 谢谢。（掌声）现在可以对这项动议进行表决。如果有股东进行现场投票，请现在在动议上标记选票，并将选票交给过道中的一位会议工作人员。阿米克女士，当你准备好时，可以给出你的报告。

贝基·阿米克： 我的报告已经准备好了。根据截至上周四晚上收到的投票代理，代理持有人的投票结果显示，对该动议投了67,282票赞成，544,256票反对。由于反对票数超过就此事项正确投出的所有A类和B类股票票数的多数，也超过所有未决票数，该动议未获通过。特拉华州法律要求的精确投票计数证明将交给秘书，并附入本次会议记录。

沃伦·巴菲特： 谢谢你，阿米克女士。凯思卡特女士，我想说，我们的管理者听到了你的声音。我的意思是，你已经产生了影响，我感谢你所做的一切。沃尔特，我想我们现在可以提一个动议了？

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？

罗恩·奥尔森： 我附议。