Berky Meeting Nuggets

I've attended the Bershire Hathaway annual meeing in Omaha for roughly the past 15 years. It sounds boring, simply listening to Warren Buffett and his sidekick Charlie Munger answer shareholder questions for about 5 hours, but I find it to be one of the most entertaining and informative days of my year.

The 2011 meeting held on April 30th was one of the best I've been at in a long time. The questions were good, and the answers were even better. Here's a sample of some of the exchanges:

On commodities and gold:
Buffett said that if you collect all the gold in the world and melt it together, you could form a cube with 67 feet on each side. Here’s what you could do with it: “You could get a ladder and climb on top of it, you could fondle it, you could polish it, you could stare at it.” But his kicker was this: You can’t do anything with it. It has no inherent value. Buying into gold is betting that someone else will come along and pay more for it — who then is hoping that someone else will pay even more for it down the line. Then Munger added his two cents. “There’s something peculiar about an asset that will really only go up if the world really goes to hell,” he said. “I think you’d do better by buying our stock.”

On institutions as 'too big to fail':
Ultimately, Buffett believes in government intervention. But such a rescue must come at cost, perhaps by requiring directors to forfeit five years’ worth of fees, for instance. Munger said that a discussion of bubbles and crashes “isn’t one of evil, but of stupidity.” That said, he blamed unyielding devotion to theories of economics and other fields as a contributing factor.

On business schools in general:
Munger later again got to bash business schools and investment bankers. He couldn't recall Buffett having ever hired a graduate of such a school or a former banker. He noted that Berkshire doesn’t do exact financial projections or modeling, and that the company leaves a lot of wiggle room. Buffett cracked at bankers by saying, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a projection from an investment banker that doesn’t show everything going up. It’s like why you don’t ask a barber if you need a haircut.” Munger admonished current or incoming business school students to learn how to do financial projections the Berkshire way. But pay their teachers some lip service for the time being.

On growing up wealthy:
Buffett is well-known for not having showered his children with Berkshire riches, and for pledging most of his wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (Gates is a Berky director.) Buffett said that growing up rich could rob children of crucial drive and enterprise. And if a child of privilege grows up unproductive, it’s a matter of parenting. “If your kids grow up rich and without incentive, I don’t think you should point the finger at them,” he said. “You should point it at yourself.”

On his legacy:
When asked what he’d like to be known for in 100 years, Buffett responded: “old age.” Munger helpfully added that he thought Buffett would want to be known as “the oldest corpse I’ve ever seen.”