Buffett to step down following six-decade run atop Berkshire

The idea that companies should just agree to whatever proposal comes in from a union is preposterous.

I'm not clear how this represents him not being pragmatic, could you say more?

That has to be about a different Angela Merkel, the one I know had one priority: preserving status quo.

Measured governance. I feel the same, although I'm sure the Europeans and Germans not at all, but they also talked Angela out of nuclear, so one might argue the Germans are a bit too measured compared to their Chancellor.

Silent approval of Putin's invasions to Georgia and Ukraine doesn't look like "good moral judgment, fair systems"

> They stood clearly and simply for good moral judgment

Merkel has severely underestimated Putin. She played a role in the continuous betting on Russian oil. Merkel has called the internet “neuland” and wasn’t her government also the one starting with hydrogen subsidies. I donno about you but to this day I only hear lots of talk about hydrogen but near zero results. So all the wrong bets.

Also I don’t know whether you noticed but Germany is expected to be in a recession for three years in a row now.

About equity and fairness okay I guess you are right. Everybody in Germany will be poor if things continue like this.

> They also based all their decision in facts, truth and science

What? She shut down nuclear power plants to ramp up coal and Russian dependence.

Idolizing people is rarely helpful.

It is ok, I understand how you are thinking.

But unfortunately I think Merkels legacy will be "Wandel durch handel".

Trying to pacify Russia and Putin through increasing trade. Did not work.

I cannot believe that there are people praising Merkel with a straight face. She is literally a laughing stock in Europe, I put her as the poster boy for immigration crisis together with the energy crisis. The only thing she did was shove problems further in the future not caring about the consequences.

"The current times" are a direct result of decisions like that of Merkel to throw open the borders of Germany to a million unchecked foreign men. If there's one reason that the AfD is the largest party in Germany today, it's because of that decision Merkel made a whole decade ago. How was that "based in facts, truth and science", or "slow and steady"?

> Who are these "many" that need to be taught about those "democratic principles" and the "rule of law". How are these related to Buffett?

The current status of things in US politics is what I assume is being referred to here. Happy to be corrected.

You can argue that no one should be able to accumulate that much because in the wrong hands it's too much power.

But that doesn't mean everyone who has made that much money is evil.

He’s giving away the vast majority of his wealth. He’s the literal embodiment of the opposite of what you’re saying.

Buffet is one of the rare good ones. IIRC he has talked how absurdly little he pays in taxes and that it makes no sense rich pay so little.

Generally I'm really glad that HN has resisted the social media brain-rot trends, but sometimes the ability to react to a comment with a heart emoji would be cool.

Doctors aren't that useful, unfortunately

Uniquely privileged position?

The only unique thing about America is free markets. Any country can become highly successful by enacting free markets. The only thing in the way is their disbelief that they work.

There's a common thread across the world and history. The more free market a country is, the more it prospers.

If you balance the trade, it means reduced foreign ownership of U.S. assets, yes, which means ownership of U.S. assets by domestic citizens will increase. One of the primary problems with an unbalanced trade deficit is that your own inhabitants are left with less wealth over time, as assets are sold off to fund consumption.

By this definition "investing in" includes people overspending and getting themselves in a huge hole with debt. Sure, tell yourself that "creditors are investing in them".

It was a problem to Warren Buffet and he used a parable in the past to explain the issue:

A perpetuation of this transfer will lead to major trouble. To understand why, take a wildly fanciful trip with me to two isolated, side-by-side islands of equal size, Squanderville and Thriftville. Land is the only capital asset on these islands, and their communities are primitive, needing only food and producing only food. Working eight hours a day, in fact, each inhabitant can produce enough food to sustain himself or herself. And for a long time that’s how things go along. On each island everybody works the prescribed eight hours a day, which means that each society is self-sufficient.

Eventually, though, the industrious citizens of Thriftville decide to do some serious saving and investing, and they start to work 16 hours a day. In this mode they continue to live off the food they produce in eight hours of work but begin exporting an equal amount to their one and only trading outlet, Squanderville.

The citizens of Squanderville are ecstatic about this turn of events, since they can now live their lives free from toil but eat as well as ever. Oh, yes, there’s a quid pro quo–but to the Squanders, it seems harmless: All that the Thrifts want in exchange for their food is Squanderbonds (which are denominated, naturally, in Squanderbucks).

Over time Thriftville accumulates an enormous amount of these bonds, which at their core represent claim checks on the future output of Squanderville. A few pundits in Squanderville smell trouble coming. They foresee that for the Squanders both to eat and to pay off–or simply service–the debt they’re piling up will eventually require them to work more than eight hours a day. But the residents of Squanderville are in no mood to listen to such doomsaying. Meanwhile, the citizens of Thriftville begin to get nervous. Just how good, they ask, are the IOUs of a shiftless island? So the Thrifts change strategy: Though they continue to hold some bonds, they sell most of them to Squanderville residents for Squanderbucks and use the proceeds to buy Squanderville land. And eventually the Thrifts own all of Squanderville.

At that point, the Squanders are forced to deal with an ugly equation: They must now not only return to working eight hours a day in order to eat–they have nothing left to trade–but must also work additional hours to service their debt and pay Thriftville rent on the land so imprudently sold. In effect, Squanderville has been colonized by purchase rather than conquest. It can be argued, of course, that the present value of the future production that Squanderville must forever ship to Thriftville only equates to the production Thriftville initially gave up and that therefore both have received a fair deal. But since one generation of Squanders gets the free ride and future generations pay in perpetuity for it, there are–in economist talk–some pretty dramatic “intergenerational inequities.”

Source: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/growing.pdf

So you're saying it's no different than a murder complaining about murders.

Hard to take him seriously when he doesn't himself pay more tax

They also get that way by inheriting wealth, by buying favorable laws and regulations, by anticompetitive practices (we've seen a few in the IT sector), and by other problematic behavior.

I agree that free markets are great in principle but your comments seem dogmatic - all free markets and only free markets. The conversation would be much more interesting if it was about the nuances.

As if the government could do better capital allocation in the economy than buffett

That seems to be what Buffett is suggesting.

Why couldn’t they, for the citizens of the USA? Buffett likely would not allocate it to optimize the outcome for US citizens.

comparing the video to 2024, he sounded similar to last year. not much of a difference

I heard he has a knack for prediction. Pair that with advantageous events (or prior to) and 7mo ahead is the result of a calculation.

He probably took a health insurance and plans to cash in.

Stepping down ASAP would look worse than doing it 7 months out

Munger really gave Buffet wings. They did it together.

His only miss was actually buying Berkshire. He estimates that he lost out on well over $200B had he never bought Berkshire.

Just because it beat indexes doesn't mean it couldn't have done better.

From 2017:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/06/warren-buffett-admits-he-mad...

I agree and I think furthermore no one has really understood technology enough to have consistently made the right moves, because tech stocks fundamentally were blazing a new trail.

Buffett invested in businesses that, relatively speaking, were already well understood, if not widely by everyone, the point being that you could look at the balances and financial statements of an insurance company and derive an investment plan that was based on basically nothing new. Google, and tech in general, were not like that.

I think now some tech stocks do look like that. Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, all have business models that are much more well understood at this point than 30 years ago.

Even though Google has been wildly successful, I do see them as riskier since they derive so much of their income from web search ads, which feels like a precarious position compared to selling office productivity suites, databases, and CRMs to enterprises (I know Google does some of this but it's not where they make the bulk of their income).

That money has already been committed to charitable use for the most part, or already donated. He is essentially managing billions of dollars on behalf of charitable causes. Seems like a pretty good use of his money management skills.

Besides all that he has advocated for that money to be taxed away from him for decades.

He pretty famously lives below his means in a normal suburban house and drives around in a car that most software engineers could afford (Cadillac sedan).

From a societal perspective, I’m not sure you could ask for much more from any one man.

The money isn't "out of circulation". That's not how money works.

Even as T-bills they're doing something.

“Sitting on”? He famously invests in companies that do things.