He's 94 years old, it's honestly impressive he was still there.
Still, end of an era.
heresie-dabord · 33d ago
> Still, end of an era.
That is an enormous understatement. At 94, Buffet has witnessed history and has represented a vision of betterment, a just society, and sound economic stewardship. These things were not and are not hallucinations.
But for many, it seems, the lessons about co-operation, stable economic growth. the sane application of democratic principles, and the rule of law must be learned again.
It's the end of an era bona fides and respect for truth and accountability as the structural integrity of democratic society.
tw04 · 33d ago
I will say that his pragmatism seemed to fall apart pretty quickly when the rubber met the road - unless I’m misinformed (which I may be).
Berkshire was a key player in the rail workers strike of 2022 and Warren didn’t seem to want to give an inch to the working man when given the opportunity to do so.
The idea that companies should just agree to whatever proposal comes in from a union is preposterous.
postpawl · 32d ago
They were negotiating their way up from zero paid sick days per year.
mullingitover · 32d ago
IIRC they had PTO days which were apportioned pretty generously, but they didn't have sick days broken out separately. This doesn't mean they had less time off in general than the prevailing compensation packages. It was a great talking point for the media. However, TBH having a 'here's a bunch of time off, do what you need to with it' is kinda better than 'here's some time off for you to vacation, but then this other amount is only usable if you're sick, and if you're not sick it's money left on the table.'
ornornor · 32d ago
Crazy this is still a thing nowadays especially in so-called developed economies.
FirmwareBurner · 32d ago
Nothing crazy about that. It's mostly European countries that have mandatory paid sick leave by law for everyone, as they fought for that right in the post-war times when the economy was booming and the world outside the west less safe from outsourcing, and importing cheap labor less easy, so the perfect storm giving labor most power over employers, something that's not gonna repeat again in the globalized world of today.
It was the temporal global exception, not the rule, as the worldwide norm was working people to death for most of history. Companies would gladly give their workers zero benefits if they could get away with it.
danielmarkbruce · 32d ago
Compensation packages are just that - a package. Complaining about one individual component in isolation is disingenuous.
Unions sent a couple of the big car makers into bankruptcy. They've sent all kinds of companies into bankruptcy - the idea that anything they are suggesting is good by nature is about the same as suggesting communism is good by nature. Sounds pleasant, doesn't work.
mullingitover · 32d ago
> Unions sent a couple of the big car makers into bankruptcy.
It goes both ways, unfortunately. Industry in general couldn't exist without laborers, and it has a long history of brutal abuse and horrific, dangerous working conditions that killed and maimed many.
I think it's a cultural problem. We aren't far removed from a time when the general business model was to coercively work people to death to extract every penny of value from them, and that mindset hasn't completely been lost. Workers are callously discarded, not at the doorstep of bankruptcy, but at the first hint that profits might not grow as fast as they could.
danielmarkbruce · 32d ago
Yup, it goes both ways. It's not a given that what a company is proposing is good or bad, and it's not a given that what a union is proposing is good or bad. And they negotiate and it is what it is.
hhghkj · 32d ago
Businesses that can't stay afloat without underpaying workers have a failing business model. Blaming unions for their eventual demise is foolish.
Communism and Capitalism are actually quite similar in a sense. Neither of them works well in their purest form, both lead to formation of an oligarchy (party elite,billionaires). Most livable countries in the world mix them in form of free market social democracy.
FirmwareBurner · 32d ago
>Businesses that can't stay afloat without underpaying workers have a failing business model.
Yet companies have flourished under that model for decades/centuries. Employers and governments have plenty of levers to make sure workers have no choice but to work while being underpaid.
danielmarkbruce · 32d ago
Sure, but you say that as though the union is only representing underpaid workers. In many cases they represent overpaid workers.
sofixa · 32d ago
The idea that profits are more important than basic humanity is preposterous.
The unions wanted sick leave, because under the current system, employees were scheduled weeks in advance with zero margin. If the employee was sick, they had to ask for PTO which would get denied because of lack of notice and any margin (other employees to cover the job)
danielmarkbruce · 32d ago
When a company loses money year after year it goes bankrupt. The company disappears. The workers lose their jobs.
It is important for a company to earn a profit. You'll find companies like google and facebook, who are making fat profits.... pay fat salaries to their workers.
TFYS · 32d ago
They pay fat salaries because the talent they need is in high demand, not because they have fat profits. In any industry where that is not the case, a union is a must.
ethbr1 · 32d ago
> You'll find companies like google and facebook, who are making fat profits.... pay fat salaries to their workers.
And here I was, under the impression that both Google and Facebook paid their moderators as little as possible.
sofixa · 32d ago
> When a company loses money year after year it goes bankrupt. The company disappears. The workers lose their jobs.
If the company operates in such razor thin margins that it can't provide for sick leave for employees, something is terribly wrong.
> It is important for a company to earn a profit. You'll find companies like google and facebook, who are making fat profits.... pay fat salaries to their workers
And you'll find that most companies pay as little as they can get away with. Google and Meta need to compete to get a limited (until recently) amounts of top talent.
A railway couldn't care less about the employees.
danielmarkbruce · 32d ago
It's called competition - it's the reason you get to sit there and type away on an incredible machine at a very low cost and eat food at a very low cost... The vast majority of businesses are operating on thin margins. Get in the real world, not some fantasy land.
TFYS · 32d ago
Competition is not the reason. The reason is workers choosing to improve things, invent things and make things more efficient. Competition is a way to incentivize people to do that, but it's not the only way.
FeloniousHam · 31d ago
The evidence for (price) competition improving production efficiency and product fit is overwhelming, examples abound in everyday life, it's hardly worth mentioning.
What are some notable examples "workers choosing to improve things"?
TFYS · 31d ago
Most innovation is done by workers working for some company, no? Product development, research, etc is usually done by workers for a salary, not because they're competing against someone. Competition is not needed for paying people to improve things.
Competition has a lot of negative effects as well. Competition by definition has losers. Competition leads to resentment and conflict. Competition forces people to do things they might not want to to survive, because the moment someone is willing to do something to get an edge, everyone is forced to.
danielmarkbruce · 32d ago
Workers don't get to do that without some capital allocated. Rowing is one thing, deciding direction is just as important - and you'll find that the people deciding which way to row are largely trying to win.
TFYS · 31d ago
Deciding direction is also just work. Why does the reward for that kind of work have to be ownership over the work other people do? An architect makes decisions about a building, a doctor makes decisions about treatments, a developer makes decisions about software architecture without needing to own the resulting building, patient or software, and they usually try to do their best.
As long as there is some link between the quality of work you do and the rewards you get, people will in most cases try their best. Allocation of capital is no different, and in my opinion should not be treated differently. Giving capital allocators ownership/percentage of the work others do is too much, and leads to unnecessary centralization of power.
danielmarkbruce · 31d ago
Because everyone involved agrees to it. If you want to be a dictator and decide what others can and cannot agree to, go try. I'm an employee, I agree to do certain things and the company agrees to certain things. No one is forcing either side.
TFYS · 30d ago
Everyone "agrees" to it because there's no other choice, it's the system we have. Everyone agrees to it the same way people in communist countries agree to do what the state tells them to do. Most people have to agree, or the whole system will collapse.
Even if you could say that people truly choose to give a piece of their paycheck to someone simply for being named the owner, it's not a reason not to consider limiting that right to choose. We limit many things that we consider harmful. This system is producing ever increasing inequality of wealth and power. There are now people so wealthy that they're able to break democracies. This will only get worse and worse.
danielmarkbruce · 30d ago
It's not remotely close to a communist country - folks have many choices as to who to work for and on what terms. Employers have all many choices as to who to hire on what terms. Both sides have to agree. Employees jump around from company to company all the time.
Someone can decide to start a company tomorrow and keep 100% of the outcome (less taxes) if they want to do that instead - it's trivially easy to be 100% owner of a business - a couple hundred bucks online and you can set the legal entity up in minutes. Now, you then have to provide sufficient value to customers so that they make the choice to part with their hard earned dollars - and that's where it all falls down for many. But it has nothing to do with power or lack of it.
TFYS · 29d ago
You can choose who to work for, but you can't choose the nature of the relationship. It's always the same, you're a worker who has to give away a part of what you produce and you have to do what the owners tell you or you're gone. That choice closer to getting to choose which government official you work for in a communist country. That choice only prevents the worst abuses, and only if you're not in a position desperate enough that you have to accept any owner's offer. It does not give a person freedom from being exploited.
A capitalist system would collapse without workers, so not everyone can be a business owner. Someone needs to actually do the work, capital does nothing on its own. I guess you could imagine a world where everyone is a one man business and a subcontractor in someone else's business, but that wouldn't really change the nature of the relationship. The ones with capital would still be in a position power and take a part of what people with no power produce.
danielmarkbruce · 29d ago
Many employment contracts have equity components to them. As for "giving away what you produce" - no, you are agreeing to trade it for cash, not give it away. You basically imply that anyone trading work for cash is being exploited.
A capitalist system would collapse without workers, without capital, without a decent legal system.
Many people do work as one man businesses. It does change the nature of the relationship because the economy isn't a one way river. There are all manner of feedback looks - you mine copper, I buy your copper, make some electrical component, sell it to the manufacturer of a Komatsu, they make mining trucks, sell it to you. It all goes round and round.
sofixa · 32d ago
I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro, which is made by Apple with their net profit margin of 24.3% for Q4 2024. BNSF, one of the companies which is the topic of this conversation, has an operating ratio of 68% for 2024 (how much of their revenue goes towards operational costs). Their net income was $5 billion. They can afford to have a little extra employees to cover fucking sick leave.
> Get in the real world, not some fantasy land
Get out of a libertrarian's wet dream and look around you, read up a little bit on various companies financials.
FirmwareBurner · 32d ago
>I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro, which is made by Apple with their net profit margin of 24.3% for Q4 2024.
Apple's margins are so high because the margins of their suppliers are so low (used to work for one of them) with some used to have suicide nets at their factories. Apple is an exception worldwide when it comes to HW margins, not the norm.
>They can afford to have a little extra employees to cover fucking sick leave.
Shareholders care more about line going up then about the welfare of the workers.
danielmarkbruce · 32d ago
Apple barely make the product. Look at the margins of all their suppliers. That fat line showing about $200b of cogs is filled with low margin businesses - the vast majority of the world is not some outlier like Apple.
Gotta look more than one layer deep financial statement guy. People who actually read a lot of financial statements have looked at a looooot more than the ones of the names on TV.
sofixa · 31d ago
The topic of this conversation is BNSF and their ilk, I just threw Apple as a fun "you're even more wrong with your anecdote than with your main statement".
What's your excuse for them abusing their employees? Why can't they afford to provide sick leave for their employees when not only do they have billions of net profit every year, many other railways around the world in the same type of business manage to do that and be profitable.
danielmarkbruce · 31d ago
You edited your comments... could you be more disingenuous?
sofixa · 29d ago
No answer, good to know you agree that companies like BNSF have the money to have basic human decency and empathy towards their employees.
Yes, I edited my comment to add more data points when I collected them.
tekknik · 31d ago
Where do you get your data on BNSF? The data I have shows you’re off by a factor of near 5.
Every quarter you click on, <70% operating ratio, $1.something billion net income.
tekknik · 29d ago
So you’re missing quite a bit of data. BNSF has pension liabilities and took a small loss there last year. Additionally BNSF has only about $500mil of cash reserves and just pushed another near $3bil in maintenance and investment that’s not on their Q4 financial data.
I don’t know how much sick leave costs them, but they’re not as wealthy as a company as you claim here.
hhghkj · 32d ago
The vast majority of companies can afford sick days for their workers. It's even good for morale, job satisfaction and performance.
Ones that choose not to treat their workers with basic dignity are badly managed.
0xBDB · 29d ago
American railroads have pretty good pay and benefits, including some of the last defined-benefit pensions left in the private sector.
They didn't want to give in on same-day sick days (not the same as prescheduled PTO, which they did have) because it kills what they call precision train scheduling, which is basically running trains with the absolute minimum number of people possible. I'm not saying this was right or wrong, just that it's the reason.
tim333 · 32d ago
That link mentions a dispute between 12 unions and 6 rail companies one of which is amongst the dozens of companies owned by Berkshire, run by Buffett. I see no mention of Buffett personally getting involved?
Mbwagava · 32d ago
...more personally involved than owning a large part of the company and directly running it? How much more personally involved can you get? Otherwise corporations would be above accountability. The whole system falls apart if executives and the board (and ideally, shareholders) can't be considered personally responsible.
palsecam · 32d ago
> and directly running it? How much more personally involved can you get?
Ms. Farmer is the CEO of BNSF Railway[1], she is the one “directly running it”.
Moreover, Berkshire/Buffet is notorious for _not_ micro-managing, for letting its subsidiaires enjoy greater autonomy than they would in an usual conglomerate.
Right, but what is the point of letting companies own other companies if this also doesn't imply transitive accountibility? It's hard to imagine we can't find reasons to imprison the board of blackrock, for instance. Such a massive company has disproportionately small social responsibility.
tekknik · 31d ago
We should extend this logic of accountability. If your kid does something wrong every living parent and grandparent should be held accountable. The world would instantly be better.
Not sarcasm.
karaterobot · 33d ago
I'm not clear how this represents him not being pragmatic, could you say more?
arrosenberg · 33d ago
Deteriorating conditions for the working class are the main driver of our push toward authoritarian government. A pragmatist would have been more sympathetic for reasons beyond pure capitalist economics.
pazimzadeh · 32d ago
Replying to @linotype, below your comment:
> I just don’t buy this argument. By global standards, even the poorest Americans (with obvious exceptions like the homeless) are relatively wealthy. Comparison is the theft of joy.
Define wealth. The cheapest option for many foods in other countries is often not only much cheaper, but also of much higher quality than the cheapest option for the same type of item in the US (bread, rice, etc..) in fact their cheap version could easily be pass for the US premium grocery version.
hhghkj · 32d ago
Bad education system and social media contribute too. Manipulating the masses has never been as easy and cheap as it is now. Russia in particular knows how to do it in scale.
linotype · 33d ago
I just don’t buy this argument. By global standards, even the poorest Americans (with obvious exceptions like the homeless) are relatively wealthy. Comparison is the theft of joy.
nandomrumber · 32d ago
You say comparison is the theft of joy, and then ask us to compare to an irrelevant metric.
If living standards are falling, grocery prices have increased, rents have gone up, wages have stagnated, what does the price of eggs in China have to do with my assessment of the local conditions.
linotype · 32d ago
Over what period of time have prices at grocery stores and rents not increased? Food and clothes are cheap by historical standards as a percentage of income.
What does the last two years of that graph indicate?
linotype · 32d ago
Gah. Maybe that people should stop eating out so much.
alex-korr · 32d ago
That Biden/Harris lost because they let inflation get out of control for a fairly short amount of time?
teaearlgraycold · 32d ago
Well it would be one thing if it were an inevitable natural conclusion. But working people are getting poorer because the owner class is hoarding wealth. It’s simply unjust. It’s the difference between losing your house to a hurricane and having someone burn it down.
arrosenberg · 33d ago
Seems kind of silly to pretend it won’t happen though. Especially since we’ve chosen to base social status on wealth.
JumpCrisscross · 32d ago
> Deteriorating conditions for the working class are the main driver of our push toward authoritarian government
I don’t buy this anymore. The evidence is for a simpler hypothesis: 20 to 30% of Americans are stupid. They vote against their own economic interests, which doesn’t make sense if wealth is the problem. My personal hypothesis is lead exposure. But further empowering that segment with wealth strikes me as counterproductive.
arrosenberg · 32d ago
Doesn't explain it at all. The biggest swing from 2020 to 2024 was people under 45 voting for Trump at a much higher rate, mostly driven by men. Anyone under 45 was born at least 5 years after lead gas was banned in cars. They're mad because they don’t see a path to the future they were promised. Calling them stupid is patronizing and counterproductive, even if true.
JumpCrisscross · 32d ago
I’m not saying all Trump voters are stupid. Just that there is a stupid subset that are not rationally motivated. It’s productive to call this out, because I think it requires reworking our political system to deal with their threat. Fortunately, MAGA seems eager to set the precedents we’ll need in the future. (It’s also not patronising because I don’t care what they do as much as that they don’t cause problems for other people. That’s defensive more than patronising.)
s1artibartfast · 31d ago
Are you using rationally motivated synonymously with economically motivated?
There there's a lot more that motivates voters besides economics.
My hypothesis is that it is simply broad spectrum culture war. Mass communication and global human mobility have simply raised the stakes or control over social Commons. The same time due to related factors, there is low agreement on shared social rules, vales, and priorities.
In the sense that good fences make good neighbors, there is no clear fence today.
There is no trust in institutional norms to provide protection, so every battle for power seems existential.
I find it hard to argue with this. Real politik and the rule of the jungle have always been in effect. It is just less dramatic when there is consensus on the rules and limitations.
tekknik · 31d ago
I propose another hypothesis, those that haven’t learned of the desire for real change instead of stagnant leadership will continue to make the same mistake each election cycle.
Learn to read the signs instead of calling people stupid for not agreeing with you, and then following it up with an attempt to force their alignment.
No comments yet
philipov · 32d ago
You are speaking as if there is a single objective agreement between people on what constitutes the most pragmatic answer. There is no such agreement. The foundation of liberalism is that we can not agree on first principles. An authoritarian crackdown is just as much an expression of pragmatism if the actor believes they can win.
dragonwriter · 32d ago
> Deteriorating conditions for the working class are the main driver of our push toward authoritarian government.
No, they aren't. It's dubious that even the widening relative gap between the working class and the capitalist class plays a major role, though that at least has the virtue of being a real condition and not a fantasy.
arrosenberg · 32d ago
If you have an alternative hypothesis, I’m all ears. The lack of good paying jobs and the knock on effects of expanding wealth disparity seems to be underlying most of the issues driving radicalism, left and right, up and down.
In America, at least, workers think tomorrow will be worse than today and they are resorting to populism to try and reverse the trend.
iepathos · 32d ago
I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the working class is “resorting to populism to reverse the trend.” If anything, the fact that so many working-class voters support a wealthy oligarchy—one that consistently advances policies benefiting the super-rich at the expense of ordinary people—suggests that a significant portion of the population is being swayed by misinformation and manipulation, not that they’re successfully advocating for their own interests.
Ironically, it’s often the opposite party that actually pushes for policies that would materially benefit the working class. The real fallacy is equating the current wave of so-called “populism” with a genuine effort to improve conditions for workers. In practice, what’s being called “populism” is frequently just another vehicle for entrenched elites to consolidate power, not a movement to empower ordinary people.
sumedh · 32d ago
> it’s often the opposite party that actually pushes for policies that would materially benefit the working class.
Except on immigration.
iepathos · 31d ago
Immigrants are a critical part of the working class in America. Always have been.
lurk2 · 32d ago
> Ironically, it’s often the opposite party that actually pushes for policies that would materially benefit the working class.
Such as?
lotsofpulp · 32d ago
All the Democrat led states have paid leave and higher minimum wages/overtime exempt laws. And higher unemployment benefits. And longer leave times for new moms. It’s also the Dem states that have free school lunches for kids and more robust Medicaid funding.
Democrats passed ACA, which made insurance even possible to purchase if you weren’t offered it by employer, and the annual out of pocket maximum, ban on pre existing conditions as a criteria for calculating premiums, and ACA premium credits made it more attainable than it was before ACA.
Build Back Better bill a couple years ago would have made paid leave policies nationwide and provided more assistance with childcare.
tekknik · 31d ago
Lets not forget higher taxes!
> Democrats passed ACA, which made insurance even possible to purchase if you weren’t offered it by employer, and the annual out of pocket maximum, ban on pre existing conditions as a criteria for calculating premiums, and ACA premium credits made it more attainable than it was before ACA.
Have you actually ever purchased a plan from the website? The last time I checked, the costs were the same as if I had a plan on my own. Also you could get policies prior to ACA, but were subject to health exams and non-coverage of preexisting conditions. In fact, one could argue that all ACA accomplished of benefit was forcing coverage of preexisting conditions. But let's also not forget the fine, which was applied to people who did not have health insurance under the assumption that it was a choice. In reality, people don't have health insurance if they can't afford it which made the penalty functionally a tax on the poor.
You speak of ACA like everybody will agree with you. A decade later I'm still mad at Obama and want my $4k back.
lotsofpulp · 30d ago
>In fact, one could argue that all ACA accomplished of benefit was forcing coverage of preexisting conditions.
Aka giving people access to healthcare.
Health insurance is not real insurance, it’s a facade where we pretend premiums are not taxes.
99% of people could never afford the healthcare they get, they would just die. Which is fine, but there is no situation where healthcare + low taxes (wealth redistribution) exists.
So it’s high taxes + healthcare, but with a flattening and top heavy population age histogram, even that doesn’t work.
The worst is when old people only get healthcare (Medicare, which is all there was before ACA). A country is doomed if it’s just sacrificing the future to eke out a few years its oldest.
tekknik · 29d ago
You ignored my post.
lurk2 · 32d ago
> All the Democrat led states have paid leave and higher minimum wages/overtime exempt laws. And higher unemployment benefits
They also have significantly higher unemployment rates.
> Build Back Better bill a couple years ago
This bill was named after policy advanced by people who want to turn the general population into a class of permanent renters.
dragonwriter · 32d ago
> If you have an alternative hypothesis, I’m all ears.
How about if I let you do that:
> In America, at least, workers think tomorrow will be worse than today and they are resorting to populism to try and reverse the trend.
See, belief about likely future conditions is a very different hypothesis than factually-existing current conditions, and a better one. To the extent that, IMO, its at least part of the actual explanation.
arrosenberg · 32d ago
It’s the same hypothesis. Its a line trending down, and there is an awareness that today is less than yesterday and more than tomorrow.
dragonwriter · 32d ago
> It’s the same hypothesis.
No, perception and reality are different things.
> Its a line trending down
Perception? Sure. Reality? No, it factually wasn't prior to the events that it is being invoked to explain.
Which is why perception of decline is a much more defensible hypothesis as to the cause than actual decline.
arrosenberg · 32d ago
It sounds like you think material conditions haven’t gotten worse? Cost of housing, food and healthcare, plus flat wages seem to disagree. I think in this case people’s perception matches reality.
I’ve noticed you refuse to put forward your own reasons, why is that?
lurk2 · 32d ago
> It's dubious that even the widening relative gap between the working class and the capitalist class plays a major role
This description could apply to the French Revolution, Tsarist Russia, the fall of the Weimar Republic, and the Colombian Civil War. Why do you think it is dubious?
jagged-chisel · 33d ago
Where did pragmatism enter this thread?
Rebelgecko · 32d ago
The comment above
kinnth · 33d ago
Buffet reminded me a lot of Angela Merkel.
They stood clearly and simply for good moral judgment, fair systems and looked at the bigger picture to carry most people forward. They also based all their decision in facts, truth and science. They learn't their trades (economics & politics) over time and weren't afraid to adapt as times changed.
Their slow and steady presence did more for equality and fairness than many others. We will need to find these values again after the current times have played out.
thi2 · 33d ago
That has to be about a different Angela Merkel, the one I know had one priority: preserving status quo.
btilly · 32d ago
She also was for making Germany economically dependent on gas pipelines to Russia, even though she knew that she was funding Russia's war in Ukraine.
I am not inclined to give her a free pass on that.
FirmwareBurner · 33d ago
Which recent German politician in power wasn't about preserving the status quo? The entire country and culture is all about the status quo.
riffraff · 32d ago
I'm. It sure of the "recent" definition but Schroeder's tenure brought a lot of changes (which one can argue against, but it was not conservative).
Aeolun · 32d ago
> slow and steady presence
> preserving status quo
That sounds like the same thing to me?
newbie578 · 33d ago
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.
riehwvfbk · 31d ago
I think you have a strange definition of "laughingstock". Germany went from an economic powerhouse of Europe to factory shutdowns and a bunch of bumbling sniveling elites who are afraid of the people they are leading and want to ban them from having a say.
sofixa · 32d ago
Buffet was "carrying most people forward" how exactly? Squeezing companies he had shares in to be as efficient as possible, leading to poorer quality and outright dangerous working conditions isn't bettering anyone other than shareholders, which aren't most people.
HeadsUpHigh · 32d ago
>the bigger picture to carry most people forward
The bigger picture of getting germany dependent on russian gas while screwing eu allies.
huijzer · 33d ago
> 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.
ponector · 33d ago
Silent approval of Putin's invasions to Georgia and Ukraine doesn't look like "good moral judgment, fair systems"
bergheim · 33d ago
> 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.
JimmyBiscuit · 33d ago
She shut down nuclear power because of extreme pressure from the population. Tens of thousands protested around her office. Nuclear is complicated (and mostly fear driven) in Germany. Oddly enough the first exit was done under Schröder who is a russian asset. Makes you think.
AdamJacobMuller · 33d ago
> Tens of thousands protested around her office
Germany has a population of 84 million people. 10,000 should not be able to dictate a policy decision of this magnitude, regardless of how loud they are.
> Nuclear is complicated (and mostly fear driven)
The politics of nuclear are complicated, the science (more engineering) of nuclear are complicated, the imperative is clear and simple. You are correct that it's mostly fear driven, but stoked by "green" advocacy organizations and/or manipulated by people with a stake in the continued use of fossil fuels (and largely the latter funding the former).
True leadership would stand up to both of these pressures, making people understand that the voice of 10,000 (or even 100,000) people can not dictate policy alone and educating people on the reality of nuclear power, while also fixing some of the real issues with nuclear power (an aging power plant fleet and an inability economically build better replacements).
Merkel totally flopped on energy policy.
cjpearson · 33d ago
The protestors were not a very vocal minority, but representative of the majority opinion. At the time well over 80% of Germans wanted an end to nuclear power. (Although now following the Ukraine invasion and rising energy costs the opposition has significantly softened.)
In a democratic system it is simply difficult to maintain such extremely unpopular positions. Governments which do so don't last long. Merkel flip-flopped and maintained her Chancellorship.
Sure, NRX and NRU were research rigs running experiments far outside normal reactor envelopes. And I think it's amusing that it's considered INES-5 when very little actually happened and there was...no..wider...events... literally. If the worst we can cite is a 70 year old research accident that killed no one and ultimately produced design fixes we still use, you have a the strong case for nuclear safety...Anyway: The Walrus needs to find some new civic interest story around Barrie to write about or something, it's an awful rag. We could decarbonize our grid completely with 15 new reactors, if I was PM we'd be popping them up like it was CANDU Christmas.
netsharc · 33d ago
She finally agreed to shut down nuclear because Fukushima happened just a few days before the state elections of Baden-Württemberg. She was afraid of a rout so she agreed to do the above, and her party lost to the Greens anyway.
codethief · 33d ago
> Oddly enough the first exit was done under Schröder who is a russian asset. Makes you think.
Oddly enough? Schröder was in a coalition with the green party that had emerged from the anti-nuclear movement two decades before.
neom · 33d ago
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.
fifilura · 33d ago
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.
jnwatson · 33d ago
Don't forget the climate-change-decision-accelerating decision to mothball all their nuclear reactors. This was a monumentally poor strategic decision from multiple angles.
impossiblefork · 33d ago
It doesn't have to have been totally wrong always, but it's certainly been wrong at least since the invasion of Georgia in 2008.
Aeolun · 32d ago
Yes. But that wasn’t a rational outcome. By any measure Russia is momumentally worse off after basically anything it’s done in the past three years.
FiniteField · 33d ago
"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"?
Aeolun · 32d ago
The million unchecked foreign men (and women) are presumably propping up the German economy as we speak.
There will always be people that dislike change, but it may ultimately be better to start integrating them earlier rather than later. If you make it through the bad times (e.g. now), at the other end is the outcome you desire.
alephnerd · 32d ago
> The million unchecked foreign men (and women) are presumably propping up the German economy as we speak.
The refugee crisis didn't appear to have a significant impact (positive or negative) on the labor market based on a recent study by the IZA and ZEW [0] - "Our estimates suggest that those migrants have not displaced native workers but have themselves struggled to find gainful employment. We find moderate increases in crime, and our analysis further indicates that while at the macro level increased migration was accompanied by increased support for anti-immigrant parties, exposure to asylum seekers at the micro level had a small negative effect." [0]
There are systemic issues with the German economy that aren't related to immigration. A lot of the current malaise can be attributed to the economic slowdowns in Russia (with the Russian Invasion of Ukraine) [1] and China (due to Zero COVID and the subsequent indigenization) [2], due to how tied German industry was with both markets [3].
>The million unchecked foreign men (and women) are presumably propping up the German economy as we speak.
How many of those unchecked are women? What's the point of having borders then? Or law enforcement putting criminals in jails, when they could be out there propping up the economy. As long as your illegal activities are putting money into the state coffers, you should be allowed to continue unchecked, screw the laws.
Yeah sure, they might cause some trouble for the lower and middle class living amongst them, but think of the economic gains for the top 1%! Their real estate and stock portfolios have never looked so good. And if people vocally disagree with this you call them fascist and put them in jail for threatening your "democracy".
How does Poland's economy manage to grow faster than Germany's without illegal immigration? Maybe they can send some researchers there to find out.
Aeolun · 31d ago
> How does Poland's economy manage to grow faster than Germany's without illegal immigration?
They are having babies.
FirmwareBurner · 31d ago
>They are having babies.
Do you research things before you say them? A quick google search shows Polish fertility rate (1,26) is lower than Germany(1,46).
solarkraft · 32d ago
> a vision of betterment, a just society, and sound economic stewardship
Please point out one case in which he wasn’t firmly on the side of capital over societal advancement. As far as I can tell he is deeply invested in oil and keeps shilling Coca Cola (and that’s probably only the surface).
gnulinux996 · 33d ago
> At 94, Buffet has witnessed history and has represented a vision of betterment, a just society, and sound economic stewardship
How exactly did he "represented a vision of betterment, a just society, and sound economic stewardship"?
> But for many, it seems, the lessons about co-operation, stable economic growth. the sane application of democratic principles, and the rule of law must be learned again.
Who are these "many" that need to be taught about those "democratic principles" and the "rule of law". How are these related to Buffett?
> It's the end of an era bona fides and respect for truth and accountability as the structural integrity of democratic society.
What?
throwaway314155 · 33d ago
> 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.
amy214 · 32d ago
>It's the end of an era bona fides and respect for truth and accountability as the structural integrity of democratic society.
You're splitting. Psychiatrically binarizing things into two possible states - a psychiatric pathology fueled by online propaganda in this context.
emchammer · 33d ago
I wish I could have breakfast with him and just talk about what it all means. I hear he goes to some local diner.
jasonpeacock · 33d ago
Chocolate chips[1] were invented in 1937, when Buffet was 6yrs old, and commercialized as we know them today in 1941 when Buffet was 10.
My father is 98. His health has declined gradually but visibly over the last 10 years. He's taking a mouthful of pills each day to keep himself alive. However, he's able to get up, walk, use the bathroom, feed himself etc. He can remember things that happened 5 minutes ago, last week and in his childhood. He keeps up to date with all the family affairs, and watches the news. Also my mother (his wife) is still alive and healthy, and they don't hate each other.
That's more than most people can expect if they even make it to their late 80s.
Frankly I'm astonished at people like Warren Buffet and David Attenborough (a hero of mine).
paulpauper · 33d ago
Munger was still going strong at 99, good genes both of them, i guess
mitthrowaway2 · 32d ago
I met a lady in her 90s who looks and acts the same age as her daughter, who is in her 60s. She lives independently, talks quickly, walks without a cane, and has a generally youthful appearance and demeanor.
I asked what her secret is to aging so well. "I don't know, just don't have any health issues, I guess", she said.
Maybe if you can make it that long without encountering Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, arthritis, or various other major issues... then you basically have a decent shot at still being fine and healthy at 94.
enjo · 32d ago
Maybe. But I often think about my grandparents. Both lived to be 96. Neither had significant health issues until the day they died.
My grandmother was extremely active throughout her life. She worked out. She was active at church. She volunteered throughout her 70's and 80's. She was always happy to go out to dinner with anyone that wanted.
Most of my memories of my grandfather (her husband) where him sitting on a recliner watching TV. He rarely left the house.
Their quality of life in the last 15 years of their lives was so different. Grandma died on her feet. She had a heart attack in the middle of the night and that was it. The day before she had been out with friends and had dinner with the family. My grandfather just sort of wasted away. He was weak, frail, and kind of miserable.
All I'm saying is there sure seemed to be a lot more than dodging all of those diseases and issues with those two. My grandmother invested in herself. She worked really hard to maintain that quality of life.
She's my role model as I age.
riffraff · 32d ago
Yeah I wonder how much of Buffet's decision to quit is just that it's less "fun" to be doing this without Munger.
nly · 33d ago
And the best healthcare money can buy anywhere in the world.
KajMagnus · 33d ago
Doctors aren't that useful, unfortunately
Ekaros · 33d ago
Yeah, quality years at end of life are not solved problem even for the rich. Being this active must be genetic.
xboxnolifes · 33d ago
And no amount of good doctors can make you change your lifestyle. At the end of the day, a ton of doctor advise is ways to change your lifestyle, and that takes personal effort.
liamwire · 32d ago
Buffet, famously, is known for not having great dietary habits. I agree with you, but he’s not a good example here.
tasuki · 32d ago
I think he's actually a great example: it's much more complicated than good dietary habits!
pirate787 · 32d ago
Buffett has never been a drinker. It's possible that abstaining from alcohol is the most important dietary habit
xboxnolifes · 32d ago
He's a perfectly fine example. I didn't suggest he had habits he changed.
Aeolun · 32d ago
Strong sense of purpose?
KajMagnus · 33d ago
Having friends also contributes to living longer (Buffet and Charlie)
HeavyStorm · 33d ago
I read the title and thought, about time, he's probably 80-something.
I really hope I could be productive at 90. Heck, I hope I'm productive at 70.
sbankowi · 33d ago
Heck, I hope I’m productive on Monday!
mckirk · 33d ago
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.
sebastiennight · 32d ago
I think for the upvoter, sending an upvote can trigger that same feel-good, "I agree to this!" dopamine hit as an emoji reaction would.
For the upvoted, seing their magical internet points go up can also feel the same as the notification that they received your heart emoji.
BUT - for the network, having scores be hidden and not displaying a loot of emoji reactions on each post makes a huge difference - it changes the incentives.
You don't get socially rewarded for engagement, because the loot is invisible in the thread (aside from being shown higher on the page). This disincentivizes Reddit-style snark, Twitter-style dunks, etc.
This probably disproportionally tends to attract the kind of people who like discreet positive reinforcement for smart well thought-out comments.
sagarpatil · 32d ago
Must be a record: 94 years old and CEO of a publicly traded company.
asdfman123 · 32d ago
It's the nominal end of a career spanning 4-5 eras
apexalpha · 33d ago
I’m not sure if it’s originally his but a small talk by him about getting a car made an impression on me and since watching it it’s become a good motivator to stay in shape.
The interesting thing about this is that Buffett himself has never really had a reputation for taking care of his body in terms of getting exercise or eating well.
colechristensen · 32d ago
At 94, there have probably been a dozen contradictory versions of what "eating well" meant to a large consensus of people. There should be a lot of skepticism for any particular version of "healthy" is when it comes to diet.
"Variety and moderation" is probably good enough advice for most people without specific health conditions.
brandon272 · 32d ago
Yes, but Buffett’s diet has been famously bad and well documented in the media. Cookies and ice cream for breakfast according to one article on LinkedIn by Bill Gates. Daily McDonalds, hamburgers, and a lifelong love of (addiction to?) Coca Cola.
So while the definition of eating well has always changed, I’m not sure it was ever what Buffett reportedly does. And if Buffett’s diet is actually as reported, he is likely an outlier in terms of typical effects of such a diet into old age.
“If I eat 2,700 calories a day, a quarter of that is Coca-Cola. I do it every day.”
I saw him at the Berkshire meeting about 25 years ago and he did walk very briskly. He probably figured he could exercise that way and get places quicker. He was always good at thinking that sort of stuff out.
jeanlucas · 32d ago
That is a very powerful analogy.
bamboozled · 33d ago
Real talk.
bloodyplonker22 · 32d ago
Charlie would scorn this "real talk."
tchalla · 33d ago
Buffet on Tariffs
> “It’s a big mistake, in my view, when you have seven and a half billion people that don’t like you very well, and you got 300 million that are crowing in some way about how well they’ve done - I don’t think it’s right, and I don’t think it’s wise,” Buffett said. “The United States won. I mean, we have become an incredibly important country, starting from nothing 250 years ago. There’s not been anything like it.”
sillysaurusx · 33d ago
I’m a bit slow in this field. Could someone explain how this quote relates to tariffs? I’ve re-read it three times now, looking for the connection to a tax on imported goods, but I just can’t see it.
I think it’s saying that the US population is crowing about how well we’ve done, and so we should be able to tax whatever imports we want? But what an odd way to say that if so. How well we’ve done seems completely unrelated to tariffs.
Then the quote caps off with some back-patting about how we’ve only been around 250 years, and that our rise is unprecedented. Again seemingly unrelated to tariffs.
terribleperson · 33d ago
Part of the justification for tarriffs is that America is somehow being 'taken advantage' of by the rest of the world and the tarriffs are the rest of the world finally paying their fair share. The reality is that (until now) America has had a uniquely privileged position in the world economy that got America, in general, very beneficial trade deals.
He's commenting on the attitude driving the tariffs.
WalterBright · 33d ago
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.
pyth0 · 33d ago
This is only true if you ignore the important material and historical factors that go into the success of a country. Like for example, the immense wealth of natural resources and variation in climates that the US has. Or how about escaping much of the devastation that Europe faced in WW2 and benefiting immensely from helping them rebuild. Or having (for the most part) incredibly safe and stable relationships with neighbors to the north and south. Free markets have certainly contributed to success, but to say it's the only unique thing about America is just wrong.
WalterBright · 33d ago
The Sovied Union and Communist China all had vast natural resources. But a third world economy.
Japan, S Korea and Hong Kong have next to no natural resources. Great prosperity.
Germany turned to free markets after WW2 and enjoyed the "German Miracle". (Germany has since turned to socialism, with predictable results.) Germany received far, far less Marshall Plan money than Britain and France, who had no miracle.
> but to say it's the only unique thing about America is just wrong
History shows otherwise.
dehugger · 33d ago
Consider, for a moment, the state that China was in at the conclusion of WW2. It hadn't even industrialized yet. The British and the Japanese absolutely trashed China for over a hundred years!
Russia was also not industrialized until after their revolution in ~1920, and suffered horrific losses in the homeland during WW2.
The US emerged from WW2 fully industrialized and nearly unscathed. The US mainland remained untouched throughout both world wars.
The starting positions were far from equal. You attribute too much to free markets.
pests · 32d ago
> The US mainland remained untouched throughout both world wars.
China didn't industrialize until after 1978, when they gave up on communism and began a transition to capitalism. Over 30 years after WW2 concluded.
Russia did not industrialize in the 1920s. They did collectivize agriculture, famine ensued. They turned back to free market farming, famine went away. They turned again to collectivization, and farming collapsed again. Eventually, the Soviets allowed farmers to farm small plots and sell what they could raise. These small free market plots kept the country from starving.
Russia did work hard at industrializing during WW2, but it was propped up by the US, who heavily supplied the Soviets. The US actually built factories in the US, dismantled them, and shipped them to the Soviet Union during the war. US engineers and craftsmen taught them.
When WW2 ended, the Soviets looted everything industrial they could find from the Soviet sector. Whole factories were moved east. Soviet industrial output grew during the war.
British industry was also untouched, because the German bomber fleet did not have the range to cover much of Britain, and because Hitler stupidly decided to bomb houses instead of factories. Britain had a pretty anemic recovery from the war - despite getting far more Marshall Plan money than Germany.
Japan did not have a free market before the war, and not much of an industrial economy. Curtis LeMay had a hard time finding industrial targets to bomb, as Japanese industry was characterized as "a drill press in every home". Japan turned to free markets after the war, and we know what happened next. Recall that Japan was burned into ash in WW2. They went from utter defeat to economic superpower, despite not having any natural resources, in just 30 years.
How much more of an "unequal" starting point could there possibly be?
The only common characteristic of prosperity is free markets. And the more free market an economy is, the more prosperous it is. Over and over. It goes back to the middle ages.
The other common characteristic is when countries turn towards socialism, things just get worse and worse for them.
lern_too_spel · 32d ago
The difference between the US and smaller countries is that the US government is powerful enough to stop powerful corporations from destroying it by enacting labor laws, environmental protection laws, and anti-monopoly laws with teeth. No other country is advocating for a Soviet style economy. You're fighting a strawman.
ii41 · 32d ago
Before opening up in 70s, China had acquired the ability to build by itself: huge numbers of machine guns and grenades, tanks, fighter planes, rockets and satellites (aka missiles), nukes.
These minus nukes and missiles plus battleships is pre-WWII Japan.
This may be helpful if you're curious why so many countries that choose free market instead of Communism after WWII are still not industrialized today.
brookst · 32d ago
This is painfully naive.
Simple, obvious contradiction: can every country enjoy the benefits of issuing the de facto reserve currency for the world? Just by having free markets?
The US has been incredibly privileged. I’d argue that was earned in some ways and lucky in others. But it’s undeniably true.
WalterBright · 32d ago
> The US has been incredibly privileged.
Free markets are a choice the US made. Any country can choose to have a free market, and some have. The reserve currency thing has nothing to do with it.
DavidPiper · 32d ago
Your position that the country controlling the de facto global reserve currency isn't in a privileged economic position is very hard to understand.
What would you say is the economic impact on a country of controlling a global reserve currency?
southernplaces7 · 31d ago
And pray tell, how did it become the de facto global trade currency? You believe the massive development of internal markets, free trade and relatively stable legal system that largely respects private property had little or nothing to do with this?
TeaBrain · 33d ago
>The only unique thing about America is free markets
This is less unique than the dollar being the dominant reserve currency and dominant currency for settling international trade.
Panzer04 · 33d ago
And why do you think the dollar is dominant in international trade?
You appear to be putting the cart before the horse.
TeaBrain · 33d ago
>And why do you think the dollar is dominant in international trade?
The dollar isn't dominant in international trade because the domestic market is free, like the above user was referencing. The dollar has been the dominant reserve currency and currency for international trade since it overtook the pound for both of those functions in the mid 20th century, which didn't coincide with the US having a free market.
Also, I wasn't make any causal relationship in my comment, like you seem to be implying. The fact that USD is the dominant reserve currency and dominant trade currency is unquestionably more unique than having free markets, considering that the US is truly completely unique in both of these regards, while it is not nearly as unique in having a free market.
WalterBright · 33d ago
The US was the most prosperous country in the world in the mid 20th century. It was also the free'est market in the world at the time.
TeaBrain · 33d ago
Once again, regardless of how free the US market was in the mid-20th century, this is not the most unique privilege about the US today, as you put it in your previous comment. Any country could institute the same market regulations and degrees of freedom as the US, but only one country can have the position of having the dominant reserve currency and dominant trade currency.
WalterBright · 32d ago
As countries that have turned to free markets have shown, they enjoy great prosperity from it. The reserve currency thing is irrelevant.
TeaBrain · 32d ago
>The reserve currency thing is irrelevant.
The little "thing" or status of having reserve currency has allowed the US to enjoy lower international borrowing costs than anywhere else in the world. This has immensely benefited the US, in facilitating ease of borrowing with relatively low interest rates and by facilitating lower exchange rate risk in borrowing than any other nation.
riffraff · 32d ago
Because of the bretton woods accords.
And those were not based on free market choices, as the UK would have been just as much free, but it was a devastated economy in a small country.
yodsanklai · 33d ago
> The only unique thing about America is free markets
Is that unique to America? I'm in EU, I thought we had free markets too.
> The more free market a country is, the more it prospers.
Some countries, including the US, reached prosperity by protecting their markets.
austhrow743 · 33d ago
One of the biggest “services” expenses, i think maybe the biggest, comes in the form of employees.
Afaik the EU is regulated much more heavily in that area than the US, like here in Australia.
It makes sense to me that some amount of the US’ economic advantage comes from their ability to more efficiently match employees with the work currently demanded by the market.
WalterBright · 33d ago
> I'm in EU, I thought we had free markets too
Significantly less free than in the US, and correspondingly less prosperity.
> Some countries, including the US, reached prosperity by protecting their markets.
Not true. If it was true, N Korea would be massively prosperous.
TeaBrain · 32d ago
>Significantly less free than in the US, and correspondingly less prosperity.
Which measures of freedom became restricted in the EU following the GFC that led to the prosperity of the EU diverging from the US?
I'm aware, and I'm not contesting this, but this is besides the point. What I'm getting at is that Walter seems to think that prosperity has a 1 to 1 correlation to market freedom. If the GDP of the US started diverging farther away from the EU at a greater rate than prior to the GFC, then to his way of thinking, this must have something to do with how the EU limited market freedom following the GFC.
WalterBright · 32d ago
One problem is you cannot fire people in the EU. This makes for companies being very slow to hire, and inefficient allocation of workers to jobs.
Free markets are chaotic, and are constantly reallocating resources from less efficient uses to more efficient uses.
Regulations that impede that make for lower prosperity.
disgruntledphd2 · 32d ago
But those laws have only got closer to the US ones since the 2008 crisis, and yet measures of productivity have diverged negatively in the EU.
How does your theory account for this?
yodsanklai · 31d ago
There are many differences in the EU vs US that may account for differences of wealth. Singling out how easy it is to fire workers seems ideological.
WalterBright · 33d ago
> Some countries, including the US, reached prosperity by protecting their markets.
Protecting markets is done with tariffs. Are you sure you want to assert that tariffs are good for the economy?
terribleperson · 33d ago
There are barriers to trade besides tarriffs. That's literally the only sensible part of the nonsense justification for the initial values of Liberation Day tarriffs. The E.U., for example, has barriers to trade like food regulations and PDO and such. Protectionism takes forms besides tarriffs. Tarriffs are probably among the least useful, most damaging, most blunt protectionist tools.
yupitsme123 · 33d ago
They created one kind of prosperity early on by protecting their markets and letting industries develop. Many other countries have done the same thing.
The unique thing was that they then created another, less broadly shared, kind of prosperity by eliminating those protections and offshoring those industries, and focusing instead on dollar diplomacy.
terribleperson · 33d ago
I would say that the dollar being the global reserve currency is a unique privilege, yes.
WalterBright · 33d ago
It's a result of American prosperity, not the cause.
terribleperson · 33d ago
Real life is rarely as simple as discrete causes and effects. The dollar being a reserve currency is the result of both advantaged position America was in at the end of WWII combined with subsequent economic policy. Economic policy alone would not have resulted in the powerhouse America became, and it certainly could have squandered its post-WWII position with bad policy.
The dollar becoming the reserve currency has given America a lot of power, however. It certainly is a factor in the way America is able to run a trade deficit and yet still benefit.
WalterBright · 33d ago
> Economic policy alone would not have resulted in the powerhouse America became
During WW2, the US was the most powerful economy in the world. It fought WW2 in both hemispheres (which required two navies), and supplied all the allies.
Japan was well aware they could never win a sustained war with the US, and hoped that the attack on Pearl Harbor would get them a negotiated settlement. Hitler, in probably the stupidest miscalculation in history, declared war on the US.
TeaBrain · 32d ago
You are getting two things confused here. The original question was what privileges the US had that others do not. The USD being the reserve currency is unquestionably a privilege. That it is not the original cause of American prosperity is completely besides the point.
WalterBright · 32d ago
Oh, it's exactly the point.
TeaBrain · 32d ago
Yes, it does happen to be a point, but it's completely besides the point of the subject in question existing as a privilege in the current day.
ajross · 33d ago
> Any country can become highly successful by enacting free markets.
And the existence proof for that assertion is which country, exactly? Lots of nations lack regulation of some form or another, many of them are "freer" than the US. The US isn't entirely "free" of trade barriers either (c.f. tariffpocalype).
Basically this sounds like a no-true-scotsman in the making. No, it's not that simple.
WalterBright · 33d ago
The US is not a perfect free market. But it is closer than other countries.
Socialism, on the other hand, makes things worse the closer one gets to "true" socialism.
mmooss · 33d ago
Worse for who? The US outcomes have been very good for the wealthy, especially the ultra-wealthy, but less good for other people than outcomes in many other wealthy countries.
WalterBright · 33d ago
During the 19th century, the US elevated scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class and beyond. The newly wealthy "aristocracy" sprang from the poor, much to the disdain of European royalty.
Poverty in the US continued going down until 1968, when it began edging up again. 1968 was the advent of the "Great Society" programs.
ajross · 32d ago
> Poverty in the US continued going down until 1968, when it began edging up again. 1968 was the advent of the "Great Society" programs.
Poverty rates are significantly lower in the industrial world outside the US, even (especially!) in the "socialist" countries you seem to liken to LBJ policies. Seems like the same data you're referring to above cuts directly and strongly against this point.
mmooss · 32d ago
The current wealth disparity, at historic levels, began growing mostly in the 1980s.
> 1968 was the advent of the "Great Society" programs.
1968 was when Nixon was elected.
> During the 19th century, the US elevated scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class and beyond. The newly wealthy "aristocracy" sprang from the poor
I don't grasp the relevance of these 19th century events to today. How does it address the fact that today, for most of the population, US outcomes are worse than many peer countries?
Who are you quoting with "aristocracy" and did they really come from poor people or from the middle class?
WalterBright · 32d ago
The US was not settled by wealthy people, or even middle class people. The poor people came by the scores of millions. Many came as indentured servants. The Irish came here because of the potato famine. And so on.
If you like, name a wealthy American who came from royalty. I can't think of any.
Fun fact: the Titanic was not built to transport rich people to the US. Quite the contrary, the bulk of it was for poor people immigrating to the US. The first class section was for status and marketing. The money came from the rest of the human cargo.
ajross · 32d ago
> If you like, name a wealthy American who came from royalty. I can't think of any.
You can play the opposite game too: name a wealthy American who did not come from a multigenerational-upper-middle-class background (i.e. someone who's parents and grandparents were all well above median income).
Of the big names, the only one I can think of is Bezos (his adoptive father was an engineer, but a first generation immigrant with no established wealth). Everyone else, all of them AFAICT, came from backgrounds where they never had to worry about money or support through the early parts of their careers.
bornfreddy · 32d ago
That doesn't matter anymore. The wealthy class might not be called "royalty" (yet?), but they effectively are. The chances today for someone who starts in a poor family to reach middle class, let alone become rich, are very slim. Pretending that the current system in the US is catering to anyone else except the rich is disingenuous.
That said, I agree that the economy of such a society has a better chance of succeeding, but it's at the cost of suffering of lots of people. Actually both extremes are bad - socialism has its problems, but so does the unchecked capitalism.
lern_too_spel · 32d ago
Somalia has the US beat.
jjani · 32d ago
Besides the many factors (e.g. reserve currency) others have already mentioned, here's another one:
Digital services not being taxed/tariffed when exported whereas physical goods are, is purely a historical artifact. The US has managed to get the whole world addicted to their doomscrolling dopamine algorithms, raking in trillions of dollars. If these were physical goods, this would've been entirely different.
The heroine dealer of the world. So far they've been allowed this position, which is incredibly privileged. And now that the EU sometimes takes a (paltry) step towards slightly taxing the drugs, the dealer screams and kicks, "it's unfair! They're targeting just me!".
Not sure is this is what OP meant, but it's a huge advantage that the current administration seems bent on getting rid of
mierz00 · 32d ago
Free markets are the end state, not what is required to become successful. We can see this in countries that have prospered over the last century.
Japan and South Korea both had huge land reforms effectively killing the landlord class and redistributing farms to families.
They then forced businesses to export while maintaining high tariffs and once that was all in place they relaxed the tarifs and opened up the markets.
Countries that took the free market approach include Indonesia and Cambodia.
tasuki · 32d ago
America was uniquely positioned due to the dollar being the world's most desired reserve currency. This enabled the USA to spend far beyond what it produced.
akdor1154 · 32d ago
> There's a common thread across the world and history. The more free market a country is, the more it prospers.
As long as the trend of capitalist market+power consolidation is considered to be 'less free market', I think I'd agree with you.
- Sincerely, an otherwise raging leftie
WalterBright · 32d ago
Just for fun, name the largest 10 US corporations in 1920, and how they came to consolidate power today.
zeven7 · 32d ago
Good question, and I think the misunderstanding is Buffett is speaking against, not for, tariffs here. I’m surprised none of the responses have spelled that out clearly yet.
He’s saying tariffs are making 7.5 billion people dislike us even more, and that jeopardizes our unique position in the world.
danielmarkbruce · 33d ago
He's saying starting a trade war with china is really dumb - you don't want 7.5 people mad at you.
tailspin2019 · 32d ago
China doesn’t (yet) have 7.5 [billion] people.
That number in his quote is referring to the entire rest of the world.
EasyMark · 33d ago
Because we're letting one clown running a circus toss it all on a bonfire because 10% of the population lost manufacturing jobs.
next_xibalba · 33d ago
Buffett actually does share a fear of trade deficits, though. His proposed solution, as an alternative to tariffs, were "import certificates"-essentially a marketable credit required to import goods. These would be earned via exports by exporters, be freely priced and traded, and would essentially bind import levels to export levels.
Keyframe · 33d ago
That sounds awful a lot like we had it back in the Yugoslavia days. It wasn't exactly free market, as you might know. Companies that exported stuff had credits attached to them and with that quota they could then import goods. They couldn't trade those credits. You then had absurd situations like a company that sells agricultural stuff and has stores for those was also selling, for example, commodore 64 in their stores since that's what they imported.
nabla9 · 33d ago
It's really a non-problem.
Net capital inflows into the U.S. = U.S. trade deficit.
The balance of payments is simply: Sales of assets – Purchases of assets = Purchases of goods – Sales of goods
If you balance the trade, it means foreigners must stop investing into the US.
chrisco255 · 33d ago
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.
ChadNauseam · 33d ago
That’s zero-sum thinking. Increases demand for US assets can make americans wealthier in many ways (e.g. providing more capital to american businesses).
bnjms · 33d ago
Some goods are zero sum. Land is zero sum. Ownership of land by non local entities is… idk seems bad
yellowapple · 33d ago
The solution to that is land value taxation, not foreign trade policies that have zero bearing on land ownership.
epolanski · 33d ago
Why?
What's the issue, if me, an Italian, own land in Indiana or North Cali?
chrisco255 · 33d ago
You, a single actor, probably wouldn't be a significant factor. However, an international government or corporate entity owning hundreds of thousands of acres and exploiting resources on the land and routing them back to their home country can be problematic. It places additional strain on limited resources and the profits are not spent in the local economy...just sent overseas. Absentee ownership of non-productive real estate can also drive up the costs of housing for citizens, making homeownership more difficult and driving down wealth in the middle class.
epolanski · 33d ago
I see it completely opposite of you.
1) The foreign entity is investing where Americans aren't.
2) There is a very huge risk for the foreign entity to own such an operation because of political changes. By law or decree the US or the state can always nationalize these lands.
Thus, ultimately, I see no issue there.
gwbrooks · 32d ago
1. Foreign entities are also investing in land that is strategically or tactically important -- agricultural land is a good example of the former; land near military bases an example of the latter. China has demonstrated a willingness to do both.
2. I think this represents a misunderstanding of the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law. The Constitution provides no power for the federal government to acquire land without just compensation, which courts have regularly held to mean fair market value. Put another way: The feds can likely devise a path for buying your land, but can't outright nationalize it. Changing that is not a matter of presidential decree or even a law by Congress; it would require an amendment to the Constitution itself, which is an extraordinarily heavy political and policy lift.
epolanski · 32d ago
I still see no issue, the government can always buy it out at fair price, whatever it is, and it can just print money or easily issue debt to fund that.
dragonwriter · 33d ago
> 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.
Proportionately, perhaps, but that doesn't mean by value of assets owned. It just means the aggregate value of assets in the US will be less.
nabla9 · 33d ago
>U.S. assets by domestic citizens will increase.
You think zero sum like accountant or land owner.
They money coming is invested for opportunities. There will be less opportunities for startups, less VC money. Less affordable loans for corporations to expand and invest.
epolanski · 33d ago
Why would it even be desirable to have less foreign ownership of US assets?
Like what is the sound logic here?
As an Italian I would love more foreign ownership of Italian businesses, that would not only bring capital but more scrutiny.
robocat · 31d ago
> I would love more foreign ownership of Italian businesses, that would not only bring capital
Capital investments are like credit card spending, feels good for a while, but ultimately outwards-capital value should always exceed inwards-capital value (that's why somebody makes an investment).
Sometimes everybody is better off (the ideal founder story with VC investment) but all too often the investment money is stolen or misused (but the debt remains for the country to repay).
The 1MDB investments didn't help Malaysia:
US investment bank Goldman Sachs helps 1MDB sell bonds worth $3.5bn... Goldman Sachs helps 1MDB raise a further $3bn in an additional bond sale, this time to cover “new strategic economic initiatives” between Malaysia and Abu Dhabi
On one side it could mean that less money leaves. That is no dividends are paid to outside the country. All profits stay in.
On other hand the economy overall and stock market especially have enormously increased due to outside investments. As injection of money in later one directly pushes valuations up. And the borrowing is only possible when someone loans money...
yupitsme123 · 33d ago
The extreme opposite of zero foreign ownership would be full foreign ownerhship, ie. colonization. All your resources and wealth belong to a foreign nation.
If we agree that that's a bad thing, then it stands to reason that there's a certain point where foreign ownership becomes a bad thing.
I think China has done an excellent job of bringing in foreign investment while keeping those foreign investors from running amok.
chrisco255 · 33d ago
If the foreign entities are not aligned with your country's values, what good is it? For example, Putin is arguably one of the wealthiest individuals in the world. Would you be bothered if he scooped up a controlling share in Italy's defense contractors or machining manufacturers?
monadINtop · 33d ago
>which means ownership of U.S. assets by domestic citizens will increase
Which to be clear will be largely domestic oligarchs and other whales since the vast majority of domestic citizens in the US don't have enough capital to own any significant amount of assets, US or otherwise.
chrisco255 · 33d ago
It applies across the spectrum, but to your point, at least domestic billionaires pay domestic taxes and spend money domestically.
Speaking to the middle class, home ownership (traditionally one of the most reliable sources of wealth for the middle class) would increase.
monadINtop · 30d ago
Yeah that's a fair point as well.
johntarter · 33d ago
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.”
The failure of this parable is the assuming that money that comes in to Squanderville is spent on consumption.
In reality people in Thriftville invest money in Squanderville and that money grows new sectors other than manufacturing while the share of manufacturing as GDP declines everywhere.
yupitsme123 · 33d ago
If they're the "investors" then aren't they also the equity owners? Yes they're growing new sectors, but they own the profits of those sectors, not the people in Squanderville, who have no capital left to invest. Hence the "colonization" analogy in the parable.
danielmarkbruce · 32d ago
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".
next_xibalba · 32d ago
With respect, I’m not sure I’ll take an internet commenter’s Econ 101 dismissal over the word of the greatest investor of all time.
chrisco255 · 33d ago
Sounds like it would achieve a similar effect, but would be far more complex to implement and yet would still have the effect of being a tax on imports while not actually generating any revenue for the federal government.
Though he makes the distinction between "import certificates" and Trump's version of tariffs.
throw0101b · 33d ago
Contra:
> A common response I’ve seen to this is Warren Buffett repeatedly expressing concern about the trade deficit. Buffett’s main concern has always been that we’re sending pieces of paper abroad that give foreigners claims on US assets. And this is true, but I’d argue it’s been a massive net positive on the whole. First, as a percentage of total ownership, foreign ownership of US securities is actually flat since 2008. So despite 20 years of a persistent current account deficit there hasn’t been a huge change in foreign ownership as a percentage of the total. But the current account deficit also reflects the way many firms in the USA outsource their comparative advantage. And that accrues to US firms (and households) as increases in net worth. This is a big reason why corporate profit margins have expanded so much in the last 30 years. Global competition has made US firms more efficient and that’s accrued to Americans as a huge gain in net worth. So this isn’t a situation where we’re just sending Dollars abroad for no good reason. We’re doing it in large part because that is investment in our businesses that has added value to those very firms and their owners. Could that all reverse? For sure. And weirdly, the thing that would cause it to reverse is ultra protectionist measures thereby reducing demand for US Dollar assets and reducing investment in US firms.
Change in general, should always come gradually , that way the inevitable consequences rear their head early. Its the bold paintstrokes that topple the world on its side.
Obamas biofuels come to mind triggering the arab spring by raising bread prices.
mikem170 · 32d ago
> Obamas biofuels come to mind triggering the arab spring by raising bread prices.
Why do you call them "Obama biofuels" when biofuel mandates were passed while Bush was president?
Standards for biofuels appeared in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 [0] (mandating 4 billion gallons of biofuel by 2006, 7.5 billion by 2012) and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 [1], aka the Clean Energy Act of 2007 (mandating 36 billion gallons of biofuel by 2022). Bush signed both laws.
I assume that corn-state representatives were pushing for more biofuels, since farmers want to sell more corn, regardless of how green anything is, or is not. At the time Obama was one of many in congress, both Democrats and Republicans, who voted in favor of these laws.
I would agree with you that biofuel production exacerbated food supply issues leading into the Arab Spring.
I always run across great quotes from Warren Buffett, but I never spent any time actually reading any of his writings or anything written about him. What's the best place to start to absorb some of his wisdom? Anything that's applicable to startups, tech, and life in general, beyond being the CEO of a holding company?
dehrmann · 33d ago
Not to diminish any of his accomplishments, but read his quotes and story as being a product of his time. He famously missed out on a lot of solid tech investments because of his background as a value investor. Value investing doesn't exist the same way it did when Berkshire started making a name for itself. Tech investing also isn't them same as 1997, 2004, or 2010.
nabla9 · 33d ago
Berkshire has outperformed Nasdaq and SP500 from the IPO (May 9, 1996), 10y, 5y, 1y time periods and he has now $340B in cash.
All this with low risk holding lots of cash. He has not missed anything.
nojito · 33d ago
His only miss was actually buying Berkshire. He estimates that he lost out on well over $200B had he never bought Berkshire.
dehrmann · 33d ago
Just because it beat indexes doesn't mean it couldn't have done better.
"Not to diminish the accomplishments of Magnus Carlsen , but he has lost many games."
"Not to diminish the accomplishments of the world's best poker player, but he did lose many hands."
dehrmann · 33d ago
My point is that you have to put all of his wisdom and stories in the context of what he's good at and the environment he was in. He tried to apply his value investing playbook to early Google, and it looked like a bad investment. He later realized this (see my link), but that gets talked about less than value investing in its heyday. Aside: for debated reasons, value investing, which used to outperform, has been in a slump for a long time.
It's east to hear his story and think if you do the same thing, you'd be successful. If you did the same thing in 1970, you might be! And some of his wisdom is generally applicable, but reading his story as a guide for investing today isn't the right approach.
tim333 · 32d ago
He's always been an independent thinker. He stopped the low price to book value thing ages ago and went more for companies with good long term growth such as Apple. And recently he's switched a lot to cash/t-bills. We'll see if that proved a wise move but he's got a good track record of doing smart things rather than always doing the same thing.
nabla9 · 33d ago
Think of the time horizon.
The current tech investing boom is just a blip just like previous tech booms (Auto industry boom, aircraft boom, personal computer boom).
TeaBrain · 33d ago
Someone probably said something similar in the 1960s when Buffet avoided crowded Go-Go era investments in the 1960s to his benefit.
readthenotes1 · 33d ago
It's not that he missed out on it, both Buffett and munger said that they didn't really understand technology so they didn't feel a reason to go there. They felt they better understood insurance and railroads and candies and whatnot and they made Bank doing it.
zhivota · 33d ago
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).
robocat · 31d ago
> 1997
Yeah, looking at the NASDAQ from 1997 is a good reminder of everyone's selection bias. Saying Buffett missed out on the winners (with 20/20 hindsight) is forgetting that he also missed out on a lot of losers.
Here's some of the now lesser known NASDAQ tech stocks that were doing well in 1997:
You are, and you're doing so naively, because one of the reasons Buffett has been successful is that he stuck to things that were in his circle of competence.
xNeil · 33d ago
Not by Buffett, but you'll love Poor Charlie's Alamanack, by Charlie Munger, his lifelong business partner.
For Buffett I recommend Essays of Warren Buffett. Regarding Munger’s Almanack, I wrote a nice summary just before his death:
”A real estate investment of $24 by the Dutch to buy the island of Manhattan would today be roughly equivalent to $3 trillion. Across 378 years, that’s about a seven percent annual compound rate of return…”
> “In terms of managing money, there wasn’t anybody better in the world to talk to for many, many decades than Charlie.”
Buffet gets all the press, but he acknowledges Munger as a huge part, if you listen.
nabla9 · 33d ago
Munger really gave Buffet wings. They did it together.
KajMagnus · 33d ago
It's a great book (I think), reading it now. It's the only book this far that I've brought with me to the gym (because I wanted to continue reading it, in between the exercises)
tchalla · 33d ago
Start here - The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville
I still remember the feeling I got when I first read the first paragraph and especially this phrase:
"For one thing, if (a) you had taken 225 million orangutans distributed roughly as the U.S. population is; if (b) 215 winners were left after 20 days; and if (c) you found that 40 came from a particular zoo in Omaha, you would be pretty sure you were on to something."
Compared to anything in finance I've read up until then, it felt like I just found the right guy.
Animats · 33d ago
"The Intelligent Investor", by Benjamin Graham. He was Buffett's mentor, and contributed to that book. It's straight value investing. Never buy a startup.
There are biographies of Buffett. I read one of them years ago. It goes into great detail about the early deals that got him started. I never did quite understand the deal that moved him into the big leagues, the takeover of GEICO insurance.
edouard-harris · 33d ago
Somewhat dated (10 years old), but a classic and probably the best single place to get started:
His shareholder letters are on the Berkshire website and are excellent.
jxjnskkzxxhx · 33d ago
I downloaded his letters to shareholders to an ebook reader, starting I believe in 1971 or so. Read all of it to the present, about 1500 pages (there's a lot of repetition)
What sticks out the most is what a clear thinker he is.
bluocms · 33d ago
Would be possible for you to share it? I think would be a very interesting read. Thanks
physicles · 32d ago
For his personal background, the history of his companies, and insight into his overall investment philosophy, the Aquired podcast did a three part series on Berkshire Hathaway back in 2021. They also interviewed Charlie Munger just before he passed away. They’re good overviews and enjoyable listens.
Read his annual letters to shareholders. Fantastic writings.
DontchaKnowit · 33d ago
Honestly his ex wifes book about how he reads 10k reports is really good. Cant remember the name.
vmurthy · 33d ago
If you’re talking about Mary Buffett, it is his ex daughter-in-law. How to read financial reports like Warren Buffett is the book (I think)
DontchaKnowit · 33d ago
Thats the one, thank you
TheAlchemist · 33d ago
Never heard about it, and can't find a trace on google. If you remember, please post here.
DontchaKnowit · 33d ago
Warren Buffett and the interpretation of financial statements by Mary Buffett
TheAlchemist · 33d ago
Thank you !
Ps. That's not his ex wife though, it's his son's ex wife
andrewl · 33d ago
Buffett worked, at least informally, with the Obama administration on some financial policy issues. And he is a proponent of greater taxes on the very rich. Here's one short video (2:46) in which he talks about it:
If the US government really wanted to bring back industrial manufacturing, tax policy is one obvious route - eg a 2/3 tax on billionaire and corporate wealth, such as on the huge pile of cash Buffet-Berkshire is sitting on, but then offer a way out - invest that cash in domestic manufacturing and R & D and it won't be taxed.
This could motivate the private sector to go back to the Bell Labs model, too.
WalterBright · 33d ago
Billionaires get that way by investing in companies. You don't have to force them into it.
mmooss · 33d ago
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.
WalterBright · 33d ago
> They also get that way by inheriting wealth,
Then their parents must have been billionaires, generating it with investments. If the inheritors divest from those investments, then they incur enormous income taxes. So it's likely to stay.
> by buying favorable laws and regulations,
Then it's not free market. There is no government system that is immune from buying influence and corruption.
> by anticompetitive practices (we've seen a few in the IT sector), and by other problematic behavior.
Nothing is perfect.
> The conversation would be much more interesting if it was about the nuances.
Perhaps, but nuances do not drive prosperity. It would also be more interesting if you showed me a prosperous socialist economy.
riffraff · 32d ago
> the inheritors divest from those investments, then they incur enormous income taxes.
But isn't this sidestepped buy the "buy, borrow, die" approach, often criticized?
The investments remain if they borrow against them. They just become collateral for the loan.
riffraff · 32d ago
But when they die the basis for the capital gain is the value at the time of death, not the original value, so you basically sidestep capital gains taxation, your children or spouse pay back the loan and get a ton more money than they would otherwise.
I'm not an expert on taxation, but this is something people have been complaining about for a long time.
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe · 32d ago
> Then it's not free market. There is no government system that is immune from buying influence and corruption
The point is that if you're forced to put your money into industries / r&d etc then you don't have enough money to bribe people / political parties / news outlets etc.
mmooss · 32d ago
Your Manichean divide between 'free market' and 'socialist' doesn't reflect reality. You seem obsessed.
> nothing is perfect
The same could be said about anything, including free market economics. It's meaningless.
> nuances do not drive prosperity
They certainly do. The differences are often in the details.
> Perhaps
That's honest, at least ...
WalterBright · 32d ago
> You seem obsessed
Being rude is not persuasive.
> including free market economics. It's meaningless.
I've explicitly said many times that free markets work even if they're not ideal or perfect.
33MHz-i486 · 33d ago
that doesnt really work if they have to compete on price with foreign producers that have lower labor costs, looser environmental regulations, deeper supply chains and better process knowledge. might as well eat the tax (waiting for monopolistic opportunities) or light the money on fire
maxilevi · 33d ago
As if the government could do better capital allocation in the economy than buffett
Someone · 33d ago
Why couldn’t they, for the citizens of the USA? Buffett likely would not allocate it to optimize the outcome for US citizens.
andrewl · 33d ago
As if the government could do better capital allocation in the economy than buffett
That seems to be what Buffett is suggesting.
nu11ptr · 33d ago
Wow, not sure why this surprises me, but I guess I figured he would be like Charlie and keep working until he passed.
bloodyplonker22 · 33d ago
The difference is that Charlie didn't have his partner die.
danielmarkbruce · 32d ago
I bet he does. He has money outside berkshire and I'm sure the thought of spending hours every day investing his own money in smaller things, taking more risks etc sounds like fun.
rufus_foreman · 33d ago
I would assume this means that he is not in great health. Hopefully I'm wrong and he just decided that 85 years or so of hustling for dollars was enough.
On one hand, he doesn't sound that great (in terms of subtle overall health markers in his voice) when he talks.
On the other hand, he's 94 and most people (especially men) don't make it into their 90s, so...
paulpauper · 33d ago
comparing the video to 2024, he sounded similar to last year. not much of a difference
unsnap_biceps · 33d ago
At 94, if he had a health concern, I don't think he'd be planning out 7 months for stepping down.
Supermancho · 33d ago
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.
unsnap_biceps · 33d ago
Sure, but at his age, heath issues spiral out of control very very very fast. I fully expect that he doesn't have a specific health concern right now and is planning ahead because if he did have a specific health issue, I don't expect that he would be able to plan 7 months ahead.
0cf8612b2e1e · 33d ago
I suspect there has been succession a plan in place for at least 20 years.
paulpauper · 33d ago
Stepping down ASAP would look worse than doing it 7 months out
unsnap_biceps · 33d ago
Sure, but if there is a health concern, announcing a date and then passing away before then is even worse then just stepping down asap.
nabla9 · 33d ago
He probably took a health insurance and plans to cash in.
andsoitis · 33d ago
You want an orderly succession.
Lammy · 33d ago
Had to look this up because I am not rich enough to be on a first-name basis with my close personal billionaire friend Charles Thomas Munger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger
palmotea · 33d ago
> Had to look this up because I am not rich enough to be on a first-name basis with my close personal billionaire friend Charles Thomas Munger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger
It's almost certain that the GP isn't either, and is only parasocially on a first name basis.
danielmarkbruce · 32d ago
"had to look this up because i've been living under rock"
pests · 32d ago
Everyone lives under a rock, just different rocks. I'm sure there is plenty you don't know too.
danielmarkbruce · 32d ago
Yeah but most people don't go around making out that anything they don't know is some esoteric thing that should be laid out in detail for them personally.
Lammy · 32d ago
Tell Ray I said “hey” when you see him at the Summer Jinks this year
ivape · 33d ago
It's kind of a damn shame a man like that was not tapped for any major economic position in the government. I don't know how men like Peter Navarro got so far. In a sense, all the money in the world didn't actually fulfill his true potential, and I say that with the utmost respect.
gen220 · 33d ago
He was asked by Schwarzenegger for advice on California economic policy. Warren did his research, and astutely suggested they should try to scrap Proposition 13 (IMO it's among California's worst policies, but it's a political third rail). I don't think he was asked for economic policy advice ever again :)
I'm sure he's full of good ideas. I think they were just a bit more ambitious than the last 40 years of politicians were willing to stomach or advocate for.
johntarter · 33d ago
Warren Buffet has warned about the trade deficit problem since 2003 and has proposed an alternate solution called "import certificates" where exporters could earn them and sell them to the importers who must use them. This would result in an even trade balance. He admitted it's essentially a tariff by another name but a more fair and systematic one. In other words, he aligns with Peter Navarro in the problem but differs in the solution.
xNeil · 33d ago
Not convinced working for government is the best use of your potential, though considering he owns 5% of all US Treasury Bills, I wouldn't say his impact is any less than being a government employee.
curiousgal · 33d ago
> best use
Well I don't think him sitting on billions of dollars at 94 is better from a societal perspective.
dghlsakjg · 33d ago
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.
knorker · 33d ago
The money isn't "out of circulation". That's not how money works.
Even as T-bills they're doing something.
mulmen · 33d ago
“Sitting on”? He famously invests in companies that do things.
wood_spirit · 33d ago
> I don't know how men like Peter Navarro got so far.
It’s a weird story. IIRC in the run for president before trumps first term he sent Jared Kushner to find out about trade. Kushner browsed Amazon, looking at book covers, and picked Navarro’s book because he liked the title… and the rest is history
I'm guessing the real problem is he's irrationally bullish on the US stock market when there's no sane reason to be.
y-curious · 32d ago
I wish there was a way for me to automatically show you this post in 10 years in a smug and hostile fashion
danielmarkbruce · 32d ago
Selling billions of dollars in equities to hold cash doesn't scream bullish.
zahlman · 33d ago
I have been hearing about him being overall bearish for quite some time (or at least, more cautious than average). I have no idea what your sources might be. He does pick individual stocks that he expects to do well, of course.
khazhoux · 33d ago
For all I've heard about WB the last few decades, I couldn't tell you a single thing he's done that's impacted my life, the country, or the world. AFAIK he's a guy who makes a ton of money, plays bridge with Bill Gates, gives advice, and has a fund that made money for other people. Am I missing something?
zhivota · 33d ago
Buffett invested in boring industries like insurance. As unexciting as it is, businesses like that basically are the invisible infrastructure that makes society work smoothly.
Don't misunderstand flashy at the only way to be important.
khazhoux · 33d ago
Which kind of investment was it though?
* An investment that makes something possible that otherwise wouldn’t happen. Like the US investing in NASA
* Investment that is not consequential in the big scheme except it makes people money.
Did his insurance investments keep some companies alive?
gen220 · 33d ago
I think the right way to think about Berkshire Hathaway these days is that it's a highly decentralized, minimum viable civilization. They do everything from freight locomotives, to furniture-making, shoes, petroleum, chocolates and more. Then there's a layer of financialization on top of it all (insurance, re-insurance, loan issuance, market-making etc.).
If the U.S. became a failed state tomorrow, there's a genuine chance that Berkshire businesses would keep on operating and trading with each other, on Berkshire rails. It's like a hive of cockroaches -- businesses which are individually strong, that when woven together are un-killable.
derivagral · 33d ago
Generally the latter. The very short version is that he focused on cash flow, and liked (re) insurance due to success managing float and risk. From there, he'd buy/invest stable businesses and brands. Insurance wasn't his first go, he started bookie work as a kid.
As for saving, he was the guy with a big pile of money in '08 (and other times). Someone you call when your business is dying or you want to retire; he gets the deal, not you. His Bank of America warrant play was a big one from that time.
I didn't finish snowball, but the first half goes over a lot of it.
I like WB as much as the next guy and while he was wildly successfully at making money, he hasn't really done anything else. His main motivation has always been to make money for himself and his shareholders, so why would we expect anything else?
Some of his biggest investments are in things like candy, soda, beer. Not exactly great for society overall and not really enabling anything other than diabetes.
He was already an massively wealthy in 2008 and just having a huge pile of cash and using it to make more deals is not some great achievement to be celebrated.
Yes he made billions off of his 2011 bofa investment, so good for him and brk but what did this do for anyone else?
If BH didn't exist would it really matter? I don't think so.
0xBDB · 29d ago
If you have ever purchased insurance, including car insurance, he has impacted your life either because he probably insured or reinsured you. There's a good chance if you've ever purchased anything shipped by railroad, or electricity in any of several states, or boots, or industrial parts, or a manufactured home, or a financial product of any kind, or an Apple product, or a Coca-Cola, or any of a bunch of other things, it was from a company he either owned or owned a huge stake in and influenced.
If you liked the fact that the Great Recession didn't turn into the Even Greater Depression, he seems to have had quite a bit of influence there behind the scenes as well.
tim333 · 32d ago
He was intellectually interesting if you read his letters and the like.
IncreasePosts · 32d ago
He's impacted your life, but only in a diffuse manner of having boring businesses sell you useful products or services at a good price.
epolanski · 33d ago
He's not a politician, he doesn't have to.
Still, he's given dozens of billions in charity, given important counsel to the government during the 80s and 2008 financial crisis.
During 2008 financial crisis he essentially saved Goldman and General Electric both preventing further escape of capital and an even worse situation for the US and potentially world economy.
In any case, he's a capitalist who likes making money for himself and his shareholders, he ain't a medical researcher or your mayor.
ralph84 · 32d ago
Lol, his important counsel was “bail out my portfolio plz.” Saving businesses that deserved to fail using free money printed by the fed isn’t a virtue. He was also a big cheerleader for the frauds at Wells Fargo.
How much of Berkshire actually relied on Buffet toward this announcement? I'm increasingly suspect of 90+ or 80+ adults operating the machinery of massive entities. Lots of examples of this.
Frost1x · 33d ago
You’re probably right, but I suspect he guided the general direction of investments. I suspect they had very clever highly qualified younger people dealing with most the day to day decisions within those boundaries. I wouldn’t discount the contribution of either: both broad vision and narrow focus can add a lot of value.
blitzar · 31d ago
If he did nothing it would be a lot, he sets the tone.
A young investor who thinks the whole portfolio should be in shitcoins because they are going to moon next week won't get a look in and the culture holds.
Take away the figure head and things can creep in a bad direction.
meerab · 30d ago
Warren Buffett’s decision to step down as Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO is both wise and timely, capping an incredible career that transformed the company and inspired investors worldwide.
Im predicting the stock market dies with him; or probably more accurately becomes far more chaotic and unstable with far higher profits for those who follow his rules.
Something that's happening in the markets is that nobody owns anything anymore. With the exception of elon and bezos. Most fortune 500s have no owner; they are all on low risk autopilot.
deeg · 33d ago
Conventional wisdom (which I believe) is that long term individual investors do not beat the market. However, from my mostly-uniformed view, Buffett did exactly that. What was his "secret"? Did he build most of his wealth outside the market?
Flatcircle · 33d ago
Charlie Munger used to talk about how easy it used to be because there was so much less competition and the competition wasn't that smart. Think by the 70's once they figured out how to accurately price options with the Black-Scholes model things started to ramp up. By that point, Buffett was already a player and had the funds to make moves.
deeg · 33d ago
Interesting. I've never heard of that model. So what Munger is implying is that by the 80s even Buffett wasn't beating the market but was leveraging his money for gains. Thanks!
Flatcircle · 32d ago
Sorry I didn’t mean Buffett and munger used the option pricing, I mean regular people did. They also got more money by buying up insurance companies and investing the float
tim333 · 32d ago
Buffett did one time write some option but he got a lot of grief from the credit rating people over it.
ETH_start · 32d ago
Buffett's father, Howard Buffett, was perhaps the most libertarian congressman in U.S. history.
He was also a vehement opponent of foreign military intervention, including military aid:
"Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns. Persuasion and example are the methods taught by the Carpenter of Nazareth, and if we believe in Christianity we should try to advance our ideals by his methods. We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice power politics."
moomin · 33d ago
Someone at my firm went to a BH AGM. There’s literally nothing like it; it’s like a Star Trek con, but for capitalism.
lokimedes · 33d ago
And now after decades of stock buybacks, quantitative easing and other mad financial manipulation, comes again the time for value investors, and he leaves?! :)
AustinDev · 33d ago
They have like half a trillion in cash on the balance sheet. I'm sure they're going to scoop up a bunch of value in the coming years. Whoever takes over has a hell of a war chest to work with.
tim333 · 32d ago
He did so before in 1969 when he closed his investment partnership because the markets were overvalued.
Supermancho · 33d ago
What are you trying to say? It's not clear at all.
lucianbr · 33d ago
Pretty clear and funny to me. Not sure how to explain it without just repeating the same thing.
It seems the markets will soon go through a period when Buffet's approach will work best, which makes it an inoportune moment for him to retire. Of course at his age retirement is expected, maybe even inevitable - that's the joke.
epolanski · 33d ago
> It seems the markets will soon go through a period when Buffet's approach will work best
Why would you think so?
US equity is still at insanely high valuations, markets are full of denials about it and about the future tariff related uncertainty.
HarHarVeryFunny · 33d ago
I don't know how much of Bershire's funds Buffet personally manages nowadays - he's had other people managing a lot of it for years.
Supermancho · 33d ago
> And now after decades of stock buybacks, quantitative easing and other mad financial manipulation, comes again the time for value investors
These are things that have happened in the past. Mad financial manipulations? Like what is "mad"? "Comes again the time." How is it different than any other day?
> Pretty clear and funny to me.
You're making up your own interpretation of nonsense then calling it obvious. Good luck with that.
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lokimedes · 33d ago
Just finding it mildly amusing to consider that in the messed up economics we are entering with Trump, there may be a shift to value investing, something I have always associated with Buffett.
drumhead · 32d ago
He dropped the mic and left the stage.
martin82 · 32d ago
Now count the days until they finally load up on Bitcoin.
All that money and he's still a mortal just like the rest of us. I wonder if mega billionaires like him have done private research on life longevity, cryosleep, mind-upload, etc. It's the only useful thing they can do with that much money that directly benefits them. Anything else (legacy, influence, children, etc.) doesn't benefit them when they're gone.
locallost · 33d ago
There are things I don't like about him, and the way he is idolized by people that want to accumulate money. But I will say you can't really throw that "all that money and he's still mortal" thing at him because in reality he lived really below his means. So the money part is interesting, why did he try to get so much if he didn't really need it? I think (without really knowing anything about him), that he wanted money like everyone else to be independent, but at one point it turned into a game to see how much he can win.
DontchaKnowit · 33d ago
Hes literally like, autistic or something. If you've ever watched the documentary on him he has a got a weird way about him. Hes got an obsessive knack for numbers and just got into the finance game where literally your job is to make as much money as possible. Its your fiduciary obligation. The rest os history.
deadbabe · 33d ago
With all the billionaires we've had, the fact that no one is living unnaturally long or in some kind of cryosleep or AI simulation probably means one thing: It's simply not possible, and if it is, all the money in the world won't get you there.
sebastiennight · 32d ago
Or maybe "optimizing for the most personal wealth over anything else" and "optimizing for the longest healthy lifespan over anything else" are two different goals, pursued by different people.
As a result, extreme results in one or the other are not usually attained by people who do not have extreme prioritization of just one.
It is totally possible that a rare talented unicorn pursuing (and succeeding at) both goals simultaneously is needed for us to achieve radical life extension.
D-Coder · 33d ago
> the fact that no one is living unnaturally long or in some kind of cryosleep or AI simulation probably means one thing: It's simply not possible
_Yet_.
If you looked at the Wright Brothers aircraft, what real use is there for a vehicle that carries one person, maybe 50lbs of cargo, and moves at 80 mph?
That is an enormous understatement. At 94, Buffet has witnessed history and has represented a vision of betterment, a just society, and sound economic stewardship. These things were not and are not hallucinations.
But for many, it seems, the lessons about co-operation, stable economic growth. the sane application of democratic principles, and the rule of law must be learned again.
It's the end of an era bona fides and respect for truth and accountability as the structural integrity of democratic society.
Berkshire was a key player in the rail workers strike of 2022 and Warren didn’t seem to want to give an inch to the working man when given the opportunity to do so.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_...
It was the temporal global exception, not the rule, as the worldwide norm was working people to death for most of history. Companies would gladly give their workers zero benefits if they could get away with it.
Unions sent a couple of the big car makers into bankruptcy. They've sent all kinds of companies into bankruptcy - the idea that anything they are suggesting is good by nature is about the same as suggesting communism is good by nature. Sounds pleasant, doesn't work.
It goes both ways, unfortunately. Industry in general couldn't exist without laborers, and it has a long history of brutal abuse and horrific, dangerous working conditions that killed and maimed many.
I think it's a cultural problem. We aren't far removed from a time when the general business model was to coercively work people to death to extract every penny of value from them, and that mindset hasn't completely been lost. Workers are callously discarded, not at the doorstep of bankruptcy, but at the first hint that profits might not grow as fast as they could.
Communism and Capitalism are actually quite similar in a sense. Neither of them works well in their purest form, both lead to formation of an oligarchy (party elite,billionaires). Most livable countries in the world mix them in form of free market social democracy.
Yet companies have flourished under that model for decades/centuries. Employers and governments have plenty of levers to make sure workers have no choice but to work while being underpaid.
The unions wanted sick leave, because under the current system, employees were scheduled weeks in advance with zero margin. If the employee was sick, they had to ask for PTO which would get denied because of lack of notice and any margin (other employees to cover the job)
It is important for a company to earn a profit. You'll find companies like google and facebook, who are making fat profits.... pay fat salaries to their workers.
And here I was, under the impression that both Google and Facebook paid their moderators as little as possible.
If the company operates in such razor thin margins that it can't provide for sick leave for employees, something is terribly wrong.
> It is important for a company to earn a profit. You'll find companies like google and facebook, who are making fat profits.... pay fat salaries to their workers
And you'll find that most companies pay as little as they can get away with. Google and Meta need to compete to get a limited (until recently) amounts of top talent.
A railway couldn't care less about the employees.
What are some notable examples "workers choosing to improve things"?
Competition has a lot of negative effects as well. Competition by definition has losers. Competition leads to resentment and conflict. Competition forces people to do things they might not want to to survive, because the moment someone is willing to do something to get an edge, everyone is forced to.
As long as there is some link between the quality of work you do and the rewards you get, people will in most cases try their best. Allocation of capital is no different, and in my opinion should not be treated differently. Giving capital allocators ownership/percentage of the work others do is too much, and leads to unnecessary centralization of power.
Even if you could say that people truly choose to give a piece of their paycheck to someone simply for being named the owner, it's not a reason not to consider limiting that right to choose. We limit many things that we consider harmful. This system is producing ever increasing inequality of wealth and power. There are now people so wealthy that they're able to break democracies. This will only get worse and worse.
Someone can decide to start a company tomorrow and keep 100% of the outcome (less taxes) if they want to do that instead - it's trivially easy to be 100% owner of a business - a couple hundred bucks online and you can set the legal entity up in minutes. Now, you then have to provide sufficient value to customers so that they make the choice to part with their hard earned dollars - and that's where it all falls down for many. But it has nothing to do with power or lack of it.
A capitalist system would collapse without workers, so not everyone can be a business owner. Someone needs to actually do the work, capital does nothing on its own. I guess you could imagine a world where everyone is a one man business and a subcontractor in someone else's business, but that wouldn't really change the nature of the relationship. The ones with capital would still be in a position power and take a part of what people with no power produce.
A capitalist system would collapse without workers, without capital, without a decent legal system.
Many people do work as one man businesses. It does change the nature of the relationship because the economy isn't a one way river. There are all manner of feedback looks - you mine copper, I buy your copper, make some electrical component, sell it to the manufacturer of a Komatsu, they make mining trucks, sell it to you. It all goes round and round.
> Get in the real world, not some fantasy land
Get out of a libertrarian's wet dream and look around you, read up a little bit on various companies financials.
Apple's margins are so high because the margins of their suppliers are so low (used to work for one of them) with some used to have suicide nets at their factories. Apple is an exception worldwide when it comes to HW margins, not the norm.
>They can afford to have a little extra employees to cover fucking sick leave.
Shareholders care more about line going up then about the welfare of the workers.
Gotta look more than one layer deep financial statement guy. People who actually read a lot of financial statements have looked at a looooot more than the ones of the names on TV.
What's your excuse for them abusing their employees? Why can't they afford to provide sick leave for their employees when not only do they have billions of net profit every year, many other railways around the world in the same type of business manage to do that and be profitable.
Yes, I edited my comment to add more data points when I collected them.
Every quarter you click on, <70% operating ratio, $1.something billion net income.
I don’t know how much sick leave costs them, but they’re not as wealthy as a company as you claim here.
Ones that choose not to treat their workers with basic dignity are badly managed.
They didn't want to give in on same-day sick days (not the same as prescheduled PTO, which they did have) because it kills what they call precision train scheduling, which is basically running trains with the absolute minimum number of people possible. I'm not saying this was right or wrong, just that it's the reason.
Ms. Farmer is the CEO of BNSF Railway[1], she is the one “directly running it”.
Moreover, Berkshire/Buffet is notorious for _not_ micro-managing, for letting its subsidiaires enjoy greater autonomy than they would in an usual conglomerate.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Farmer
Not sarcasm.
> I just don’t buy this argument. By global standards, even the poorest Americans (with obvious exceptions like the homeless) are relatively wealthy. Comparison is the theft of joy.
Define wealth. The cheapest option for many foods in other countries is often not only much cheaper, but also of much higher quality than the cheapest option for the same type of item in the US (bread, rice, etc..) in fact their cheap version could easily be pass for the US premium grocery version.
If living standards are falling, grocery prices have increased, rents have gone up, wages have stagnated, what does the price of eggs in China have to do with my assessment of the local conditions.
https://ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/Charts/...
I don’t buy this anymore. The evidence is for a simpler hypothesis: 20 to 30% of Americans are stupid. They vote against their own economic interests, which doesn’t make sense if wealth is the problem. My personal hypothesis is lead exposure. But further empowering that segment with wealth strikes me as counterproductive.
There there's a lot more that motivates voters besides economics.
My hypothesis is that it is simply broad spectrum culture war. Mass communication and global human mobility have simply raised the stakes or control over social Commons. The same time due to related factors, there is low agreement on shared social rules, vales, and priorities.
In the sense that good fences make good neighbors, there is no clear fence today.
There is no trust in institutional norms to provide protection, so every battle for power seems existential.
I find it hard to argue with this. Real politik and the rule of the jungle have always been in effect. It is just less dramatic when there is consensus on the rules and limitations.
Learn to read the signs instead of calling people stupid for not agreeing with you, and then following it up with an attempt to force their alignment.
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No, they aren't. It's dubious that even the widening relative gap between the working class and the capitalist class plays a major role, though that at least has the virtue of being a real condition and not a fantasy.
In America, at least, workers think tomorrow will be worse than today and they are resorting to populism to try and reverse the trend.
Ironically, it’s often the opposite party that actually pushes for policies that would materially benefit the working class. The real fallacy is equating the current wave of so-called “populism” with a genuine effort to improve conditions for workers. In practice, what’s being called “populism” is frequently just another vehicle for entrenched elites to consolidate power, not a movement to empower ordinary people.
Except on immigration.
Such as?
Democrats passed ACA, which made insurance even possible to purchase if you weren’t offered it by employer, and the annual out of pocket maximum, ban on pre existing conditions as a criteria for calculating premiums, and ACA premium credits made it more attainable than it was before ACA.
Build Back Better bill a couple years ago would have made paid leave policies nationwide and provided more assistance with childcare.
> Democrats passed ACA, which made insurance even possible to purchase if you weren’t offered it by employer, and the annual out of pocket maximum, ban on pre existing conditions as a criteria for calculating premiums, and ACA premium credits made it more attainable than it was before ACA.
Have you actually ever purchased a plan from the website? The last time I checked, the costs were the same as if I had a plan on my own. Also you could get policies prior to ACA, but were subject to health exams and non-coverage of preexisting conditions. In fact, one could argue that all ACA accomplished of benefit was forcing coverage of preexisting conditions. But let's also not forget the fine, which was applied to people who did not have health insurance under the assumption that it was a choice. In reality, people don't have health insurance if they can't afford it which made the penalty functionally a tax on the poor.
You speak of ACA like everybody will agree with you. A decade later I'm still mad at Obama and want my $4k back.
Aka giving people access to healthcare.
Health insurance is not real insurance, it’s a facade where we pretend premiums are not taxes.
99% of people could never afford the healthcare they get, they would just die. Which is fine, but there is no situation where healthcare + low taxes (wealth redistribution) exists.
So it’s high taxes + healthcare, but with a flattening and top heavy population age histogram, even that doesn’t work.
The worst is when old people only get healthcare (Medicare, which is all there was before ACA). A country is doomed if it’s just sacrificing the future to eke out a few years its oldest.
They also have significantly higher unemployment rates.
> Build Back Better bill a couple years ago
This bill was named after policy advanced by people who want to turn the general population into a class of permanent renters.
How about if I let you do that:
> In America, at least, workers think tomorrow will be worse than today and they are resorting to populism to try and reverse the trend.
See, belief about likely future conditions is a very different hypothesis than factually-existing current conditions, and a better one. To the extent that, IMO, its at least part of the actual explanation.
No, perception and reality are different things.
> Its a line trending down
Perception? Sure. Reality? No, it factually wasn't prior to the events that it is being invoked to explain.
Which is why perception of decline is a much more defensible hypothesis as to the cause than actual decline.
I’ve noticed you refuse to put forward your own reasons, why is that?
This description could apply to the French Revolution, Tsarist Russia, the fall of the Weimar Republic, and the Colombian Civil War. Why do you think it is dubious?
They stood clearly and simply for good moral judgment, fair systems and looked at the bigger picture to carry most people forward. They also based all their decision in facts, truth and science. They learn't their trades (economics & politics) over time and weren't afraid to adapt as times changed.
Their slow and steady presence did more for equality and fairness than many others. We will need to find these values again after the current times have played out.
I am not inclined to give her a free pass on that.
> preserving status quo
That sounds like the same thing to me?
The bigger picture of getting germany dependent on russian gas while screwing eu allies.
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.
What? She shut down nuclear power plants to ramp up coal and Russian dependence.
Idolizing people is rarely helpful.
Germany has a population of 84 million people. 10,000 should not be able to dictate a policy decision of this magnitude, regardless of how loud they are.
> Nuclear is complicated (and mostly fear driven)
The politics of nuclear are complicated, the science (more engineering) of nuclear are complicated, the imperative is clear and simple. You are correct that it's mostly fear driven, but stoked by "green" advocacy organizations and/or manipulated by people with a stake in the continued use of fossil fuels (and largely the latter funding the former).
True leadership would stand up to both of these pressures, making people understand that the voice of 10,000 (or even 100,000) people can not dictate policy alone and educating people on the reality of nuclear power, while also fixing some of the real issues with nuclear power (an aging power plant fleet and an inability economically build better replacements).
Merkel totally flopped on energy policy.
In a democratic system it is simply difficult to maintain such extremely unpopular positions. Governments which do so don't last long. Merkel flip-flopped and maintained her Chancellorship.
Oddly enough? Schröder was in a coalition with the green party that had emerged from the anti-nuclear movement two decades before.
But unfortunately I think Merkels legacy will be "Wandel durch handel".
Trying to pacify Russia and Putin through increasing trade. Did not work.
There will always be people that dislike change, but it may ultimately be better to start integrating them earlier rather than later. If you make it through the bad times (e.g. now), at the other end is the outcome you desire.
The refugee crisis didn't appear to have a significant impact (positive or negative) on the labor market based on a recent study by the IZA and ZEW [0] - "Our estimates suggest that those migrants have not displaced native workers but have themselves struggled to find gainful employment. We find moderate increases in crime, and our analysis further indicates that while at the macro level increased migration was accompanied by increased support for anti-immigrant parties, exposure to asylum seekers at the micro level had a small negative effect." [0]
There are systemic issues with the German economy that aren't related to immigration. A lot of the current malaise can be attributed to the economic slowdowns in Russia (with the Russian Invasion of Ukraine) [1] and China (due to Zero COVID and the subsequent indigenization) [2], due to how tied German industry was with both markets [3].
[0] - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecca.12420
[1] - https://dgap.org/en/research/publications/no-more-illusions-...
[2] - https://ecfr.eu/article/the-end-of-germanys-china-illusion/?...
[3] - https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2024/130/arti...
How many of those unchecked are women? What's the point of having borders then? Or law enforcement putting criminals in jails, when they could be out there propping up the economy. As long as your illegal activities are putting money into the state coffers, you should be allowed to continue unchecked, screw the laws.
Yeah sure, they might cause some trouble for the lower and middle class living amongst them, but think of the economic gains for the top 1%! Their real estate and stock portfolios have never looked so good. And if people vocally disagree with this you call them fascist and put them in jail for threatening your "democracy".
How does Poland's economy manage to grow faster than Germany's without illegal immigration? Maybe they can send some researchers there to find out.
They are having babies.
Do you research things before you say them? A quick google search shows Polish fertility rate (1,26) is lower than Germany(1,46).
Please point out one case in which he wasn’t firmly on the side of capital over societal advancement. As far as I can tell he is deeply invested in oil and keeps shilling Coca Cola (and that’s probably only the surface).
How exactly did he "represented a vision of betterment, a just society, and sound economic stewardship"?
> But for many, it seems, the lessons about co-operation, stable economic growth. the sane application of democratic principles, and the rule of law must be learned again.
Who are these "many" that need to be taught about those "democratic principles" and the "rule of law". How are these related to Buffett?
> It's the end of an era bona fides and respect for truth and accountability as the structural integrity of democratic society.
What?
The current status of things in US politics is what I assume is being referred to here. Happy to be corrected.
You're splitting. Psychiatrically binarizing things into two possible states - a psychiatric pathology fueled by online propaganda in this context.
He's literally older than chocolate chips!
[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate_chip
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That's more than most people can expect if they even make it to their late 80s.
Frankly I'm astonished at people like Warren Buffet and David Attenborough (a hero of mine).
I asked what her secret is to aging so well. "I don't know, just don't have any health issues, I guess", she said.
Maybe if you can make it that long without encountering Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, arthritis, or various other major issues... then you basically have a decent shot at still being fine and healthy at 94.
My grandmother was extremely active throughout her life. She worked out. She was active at church. She volunteered throughout her 70's and 80's. She was always happy to go out to dinner with anyone that wanted.
Most of my memories of my grandfather (her husband) where him sitting on a recliner watching TV. He rarely left the house.
Their quality of life in the last 15 years of their lives was so different. Grandma died on her feet. She had a heart attack in the middle of the night and that was it. The day before she had been out with friends and had dinner with the family. My grandfather just sort of wasted away. He was weak, frail, and kind of miserable.
All I'm saying is there sure seemed to be a lot more than dodging all of those diseases and issues with those two. My grandmother invested in herself. She worked really hard to maintain that quality of life.
She's my role model as I age.
I really hope I could be productive at 90. Heck, I hope I'm productive at 70.
For the upvoted, seing their magical internet points go up can also feel the same as the notification that they received your heart emoji.
BUT - for the network, having scores be hidden and not displaying a loot of emoji reactions on each post makes a huge difference - it changes the incentives.
You don't get socially rewarded for engagement, because the loot is invisible in the thread (aside from being shown higher on the page). This disincentivizes Reddit-style snark, Twitter-style dunks, etc.
This probably disproportionally tends to attract the kind of people who like discreet positive reinforcement for smart well thought-out comments.
This seems like a good moment to share it.
https://youtu.be/0fMRHpguTPM?si=75lLHzDynMCKhT9H
"Variety and moderation" is probably good enough advice for most people without specific health conditions.
So while the definition of eating well has always changed, I’m not sure it was ever what Buffett reportedly does. And if Buffett’s diet is actually as reported, he is likely an outlier in terms of typical effects of such a diet into old age.
“If I eat 2,700 calories a day, a quarter of that is Coca-Cola. I do it every day.”
https://fortune.com/well/article/warren-buffett-birthday-lon...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/warren-buffetts-upside-down-b...
> “It’s a big mistake, in my view, when you have seven and a half billion people that don’t like you very well, and you got 300 million that are crowing in some way about how well they’ve done - I don’t think it’s right, and I don’t think it’s wise,” Buffett said. “The United States won. I mean, we have become an incredibly important country, starting from nothing 250 years ago. There’s not been anything like it.”
I think it’s saying that the US population is crowing about how well we’ve done, and so we should be able to tax whatever imports we want? But what an odd way to say that if so. How well we’ve done seems completely unrelated to tariffs.
Then the quote caps off with some back-patting about how we’ve only been around 250 years, and that our rise is unprecedented. Again seemingly unrelated to tariffs.
He's commenting on the attitude driving the tariffs.
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.
Japan, S Korea and Hong Kong have next to no natural resources. Great prosperity.
Germany turned to free markets after WW2 and enjoyed the "German Miracle". (Germany has since turned to socialism, with predictable results.) Germany received far, far less Marshall Plan money than Britain and France, who had no miracle.
> but to say it's the only unique thing about America is just wrong
History shows otherwise.
Russia was also not industrialized until after their revolution in ~1920, and suffered horrific losses in the homeland during WW2.
The US emerged from WW2 fully industrialized and nearly unscathed. The US mainland remained untouched throughout both world wars.
The starting positions were far from equal. You attribute too much to free markets.
Minus some balloons from the Japanese I believe?
Russia did not industrialize in the 1920s. They did collectivize agriculture, famine ensued. They turned back to free market farming, famine went away. They turned again to collectivization, and farming collapsed again. Eventually, the Soviets allowed farmers to farm small plots and sell what they could raise. These small free market plots kept the country from starving.
Russia did work hard at industrializing during WW2, but it was propped up by the US, who heavily supplied the Soviets. The US actually built factories in the US, dismantled them, and shipped them to the Soviet Union during the war. US engineers and craftsmen taught them.
When WW2 ended, the Soviets looted everything industrial they could find from the Soviet sector. Whole factories were moved east. Soviet industrial output grew during the war.
British industry was also untouched, because the German bomber fleet did not have the range to cover much of Britain, and because Hitler stupidly decided to bomb houses instead of factories. Britain had a pretty anemic recovery from the war - despite getting far more Marshall Plan money than Germany.
Japan did not have a free market before the war, and not much of an industrial economy. Curtis LeMay had a hard time finding industrial targets to bomb, as Japanese industry was characterized as "a drill press in every home". Japan turned to free markets after the war, and we know what happened next. Recall that Japan was burned into ash in WW2. They went from utter defeat to economic superpower, despite not having any natural resources, in just 30 years.
How much more of an "unequal" starting point could there possibly be?
The only common characteristic of prosperity is free markets. And the more free market an economy is, the more prosperous it is. Over and over. It goes back to the middle ages.
The other common characteristic is when countries turn towards socialism, things just get worse and worse for them.
These minus nukes and missiles plus battleships is pre-WWII Japan.
This may be helpful if you're curious why so many countries that choose free market instead of Communism after WWII are still not industrialized today.
Simple, obvious contradiction: can every country enjoy the benefits of issuing the de facto reserve currency for the world? Just by having free markets?
The US has been incredibly privileged. I’d argue that was earned in some ways and lucky in others. But it’s undeniably true.
Free markets are a choice the US made. Any country can choose to have a free market, and some have. The reserve currency thing has nothing to do with it.
What would you say is the economic impact on a country of controlling a global reserve currency?
This is less unique than the dollar being the dominant reserve currency and dominant currency for settling international trade.
You appear to be putting the cart before the horse.
The dollar isn't dominant in international trade because the domestic market is free, like the above user was referencing. The dollar has been the dominant reserve currency and currency for international trade since it overtook the pound for both of those functions in the mid 20th century, which didn't coincide with the US having a free market.
Also, I wasn't make any causal relationship in my comment, like you seem to be implying. The fact that USD is the dominant reserve currency and dominant trade currency is unquestionably more unique than having free markets, considering that the US is truly completely unique in both of these regards, while it is not nearly as unique in having a free market.
The little "thing" or status of having reserve currency has allowed the US to enjoy lower international borrowing costs than anywhere else in the world. This has immensely benefited the US, in facilitating ease of borrowing with relatively low interest rates and by facilitating lower exchange rate risk in borrowing than any other nation.
And those were not based on free market choices, as the UK would have been just as much free, but it was a devastated economy in a small country.
Is that unique to America? I'm in EU, I thought we had free markets too.
> The more free market a country is, the more it prospers.
Some countries, including the US, reached prosperity by protecting their markets.
Afaik the EU is regulated much more heavily in that area than the US, like here in Australia.
It makes sense to me that some amount of the US’ economic advantage comes from their ability to more efficiently match employees with the work currently demanded by the market.
Significantly less free than in the US, and correspondingly less prosperity.
> Some countries, including the US, reached prosperity by protecting their markets.
Not true. If it was true, N Korea would be massively prosperous.
Which measures of freedom became restricted in the EU following the GFC that led to the prosperity of the EU diverging from the US?
Free markets are chaotic, and are constantly reallocating resources from less efficient uses to more efficient uses.
Regulations that impede that make for lower prosperity.
How does your theory account for this?
Protecting markets is done with tariffs. Are you sure you want to assert that tariffs are good for the economy?
The unique thing was that they then created another, less broadly shared, kind of prosperity by eliminating those protections and offshoring those industries, and focusing instead on dollar diplomacy.
The dollar becoming the reserve currency has given America a lot of power, however. It certainly is a factor in the way America is able to run a trade deficit and yet still benefit.
During WW2, the US was the most powerful economy in the world. It fought WW2 in both hemispheres (which required two navies), and supplied all the allies.
Japan was well aware they could never win a sustained war with the US, and hoped that the attack on Pearl Harbor would get them a negotiated settlement. Hitler, in probably the stupidest miscalculation in history, declared war on the US.
And the existence proof for that assertion is which country, exactly? Lots of nations lack regulation of some form or another, many of them are "freer" than the US. The US isn't entirely "free" of trade barriers either (c.f. tariffpocalype).
Basically this sounds like a no-true-scotsman in the making. No, it's not that simple.
Socialism, on the other hand, makes things worse the closer one gets to "true" socialism.
Poverty in the US continued going down until 1968, when it began edging up again. 1968 was the advent of the "Great Society" programs.
Poverty rates are significantly lower in the industrial world outside the US, even (especially!) in the "socialist" countries you seem to liken to LBJ policies. Seems like the same data you're referring to above cuts directly and strongly against this point.
> 1968 was the advent of the "Great Society" programs.
1968 was when Nixon was elected.
> During the 19th century, the US elevated scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class and beyond. The newly wealthy "aristocracy" sprang from the poor
I don't grasp the relevance of these 19th century events to today. How does it address the fact that today, for most of the population, US outcomes are worse than many peer countries?
Who are you quoting with "aristocracy" and did they really come from poor people or from the middle class?
If you like, name a wealthy American who came from royalty. I can't think of any.
Fun fact: the Titanic was not built to transport rich people to the US. Quite the contrary, the bulk of it was for poor people immigrating to the US. The first class section was for status and marketing. The money came from the rest of the human cargo.
You can play the opposite game too: name a wealthy American who did not come from a multigenerational-upper-middle-class background (i.e. someone who's parents and grandparents were all well above median income).
Of the big names, the only one I can think of is Bezos (his adoptive father was an engineer, but a first generation immigrant with no established wealth). Everyone else, all of them AFAICT, came from backgrounds where they never had to worry about money or support through the early parts of their careers.
That said, I agree that the economy of such a society has a better chance of succeeding, but it's at the cost of suffering of lots of people. Actually both extremes are bad - socialism has its problems, but so does the unchecked capitalism.
Digital services not being taxed/tariffed when exported whereas physical goods are, is purely a historical artifact. The US has managed to get the whole world addicted to their doomscrolling dopamine algorithms, raking in trillions of dollars. If these were physical goods, this would've been entirely different.
The heroine dealer of the world. So far they've been allowed this position, which is incredibly privileged. And now that the EU sometimes takes a (paltry) step towards slightly taxing the drugs, the dealer screams and kicks, "it's unfair! They're targeting just me!".
Not sure is this is what OP meant, but it's a huge advantage that the current administration seems bent on getting rid of
Japan and South Korea both had huge land reforms effectively killing the landlord class and redistributing farms to families.
They then forced businesses to export while maintaining high tariffs and once that was all in place they relaxed the tarifs and opened up the markets.
Countries that took the free market approach include Indonesia and Cambodia.
As long as the trend of capitalist market+power consolidation is considered to be 'less free market', I think I'd agree with you.
- Sincerely, an otherwise raging leftie
He’s saying tariffs are making 7.5 billion people dislike us even more, and that jeopardizes our unique position in the world.
That number in his quote is referring to the entire rest of the world.
Net capital inflows into the U.S. = U.S. trade deficit. The balance of payments is simply: Sales of assets – Purchases of assets = Purchases of goods – Sales of goods
If you balance the trade, it means foreigners must stop investing into the US.
What's the issue, if me, an Italian, own land in Indiana or North Cali?
1) The foreign entity is investing where Americans aren't.
2) There is a very huge risk for the foreign entity to own such an operation because of political changes. By law or decree the US or the state can always nationalize these lands.
Thus, ultimately, I see no issue there.
2. I think this represents a misunderstanding of the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law. The Constitution provides no power for the federal government to acquire land without just compensation, which courts have regularly held to mean fair market value. Put another way: The feds can likely devise a path for buying your land, but can't outright nationalize it. Changing that is not a matter of presidential decree or even a law by Congress; it would require an amendment to the Constitution itself, which is an extraordinarily heavy political and policy lift.
Proportionately, perhaps, but that doesn't mean by value of assets owned. It just means the aggregate value of assets in the US will be less.
You think zero sum like accountant or land owner.
They money coming is invested for opportunities. There will be less opportunities for startups, less VC money. Less affordable loans for corporations to expand and invest.
Like what is the sound logic here?
As an Italian I would love more foreign ownership of Italian businesses, that would not only bring capital but more scrutiny.
Capital investments are like credit card spending, feels good for a while, but ultimately outwards-capital value should always exceed inwards-capital value (that's why somebody makes an investment).
Sometimes everybody is better off (the ideal founder story with VC investment) but all too often the investment money is stolen or misused (but the debt remains for the country to repay).
The 1MDB investments didn't help Malaysia:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/7/28/timeline-how-malays...On other hand the economy overall and stock market especially have enormously increased due to outside investments. As injection of money in later one directly pushes valuations up. And the borrowing is only possible when someone loans money...
If we agree that that's a bad thing, then it stands to reason that there's a certain point where foreign ownership becomes a bad thing.
I think China has done an excellent job of bringing in foreign investment while keeping those foreign investors from running amok.
Which to be clear will be largely domestic oligarchs and other whales since the vast majority of domestic citizens in the US don't have enough capital to own any significant amount of assets, US or otherwise.
Speaking to the middle class, home ownership (traditionally one of the most reliable sources of wealth for the middle class) would increase.
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
In reality people in Thriftville invest money in Squanderville and that money grows new sectors other than manufacturing while the share of manufacturing as GDP declines everywhere.
https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/growing.pdf
Though he makes the distinction between "import certificates" and Trump's version of tariffs.
> A common response I’ve seen to this is Warren Buffett repeatedly expressing concern about the trade deficit. Buffett’s main concern has always been that we’re sending pieces of paper abroad that give foreigners claims on US assets. And this is true, but I’d argue it’s been a massive net positive on the whole. First, as a percentage of total ownership, foreign ownership of US securities is actually flat since 2008. So despite 20 years of a persistent current account deficit there hasn’t been a huge change in foreign ownership as a percentage of the total. But the current account deficit also reflects the way many firms in the USA outsource their comparative advantage. And that accrues to US firms (and households) as increases in net worth. This is a big reason why corporate profit margins have expanded so much in the last 30 years. Global competition has made US firms more efficient and that’s accrued to Americans as a huge gain in net worth. So this isn’t a situation where we’re just sending Dollars abroad for no good reason. We’re doing it in large part because that is investment in our businesses that has added value to those very firms and their owners. Could that all reverse? For sure. And weirdly, the thing that would cause it to reverse is ultra protectionist measures thereby reducing demand for US Dollar assets and reducing investment in US firms.
* https://disciplinefunds.com/2025/04/24/three-things-you-gues...
Totally incorrect according to this graph: https://taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/figure1_25.p...
From article: https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/who-owns-us-stock-foreign...
Can you cite a source for what you've written?
Why do you call them "Obama biofuels" when biofuel mandates were passed while Bush was president?
Standards for biofuels appeared in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 [0] (mandating 4 billion gallons of biofuel by 2006, 7.5 billion by 2012) and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 [1], aka the Clean Energy Act of 2007 (mandating 36 billion gallons of biofuel by 2022). Bush signed both laws.
I assume that corn-state representatives were pushing for more biofuels, since farmers want to sell more corn, regardless of how green anything is, or is not. At the time Obama was one of many in congress, both Democrats and Republicans, who voted in favor of these laws.
I would agree with you that biofuel production exacerbated food supply issues leading into the Arab Spring.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Independence_and_Securi...
All this with low risk holding lots of cash. He has not missed anything.
From 2017:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/06/warren-buffett-admits-he-mad...
"Not to diminish the accomplishments of the world's best poker player, but he did lose many hands."
It's east to hear his story and think if you do the same thing, you'd be successful. If you did the same thing in 1970, you might be! And some of his wisdom is generally applicable, but reading his story as a guide for investing today isn't the right approach.
The current tech investing boom is just a blip just like previous tech booms (Auto industry boom, aircraft boom, personal computer boom).
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).
Yeah, looking at the NASDAQ from 1997 is a good reminder of everyone's selection bias. Saying Buffett missed out on the winners (with 20/20 hindsight) is forgetting that he also missed out on a lot of losers.
Here's some of the now lesser known NASDAQ tech stocks that were doing well in 1997:
From: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/tech-stocks-and-nasd...And nobody ever went wrong by buying IBM
https://www.stripe.press/poor-charlies-almanack/cover
”A real estate investment of $24 by the Dutch to buy the island of Manhattan would today be roughly equivalent to $3 trillion. Across 378 years, that’s about a seven percent annual compound rate of return…”
https://www.lostbookofsales.com/notes/poor-charlies-almanack...
> “In terms of managing money, there wasn’t anybody better in the world to talk to for many, many decades than Charlie.”
Buffet gets all the press, but he acknowledges Munger as a huge part, if you listen.
https://business.columbia.edu/cgi-finance/chazen-global-insi...
"For one thing, if (a) you had taken 225 million orangutans distributed roughly as the U.S. population is; if (b) 215 winners were left after 20 days; and if (c) you found that 40 came from a particular zoo in Omaha, you would be pretty sure you were on to something."
Compared to anything in finance I've read up until then, it felt like I just found the right guy.
There are biographies of Buffett. I read one of them years ago. It goes into great detail about the early deals that got him started. I never did quite understand the deal that moved him into the big leagues, the takeover of GEICO insurance.
https://www.amazon.com/Essays-Warren-Buffett-Lessons-Corpora...
What sticks out the most is what a clear thinker he is.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7aFD7bbigjgjUt0L2LWk...
Ps. That's not his ex wife though, it's his son's ex wife
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJzTsTU1xL8
This could motivate the private sector to go back to the Bell Labs model, too.
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.
Then their parents must have been billionaires, generating it with investments. If the inheritors divest from those investments, then they incur enormous income taxes. So it's likely to stay.
> by buying favorable laws and regulations,
Then it's not free market. There is no government system that is immune from buying influence and corruption.
> by anticompetitive practices (we've seen a few in the IT sector), and by other problematic behavior.
Nothing is perfect.
> The conversation would be much more interesting if it was about the nuances.
Perhaps, but nuances do not drive prosperity. It would also be more interesting if you showed me a prosperous socialist economy.
But isn't this sidestepped buy the "buy, borrow, die" approach, often criticized?
https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/03/tax-loop...
I'm not an expert on taxation, but this is something people have been complaining about for a long time.
The point is that if you're forced to put your money into industries / r&d etc then you don't have enough money to bribe people / political parties / news outlets etc.
> nothing is perfect
The same could be said about anything, including free market economics. It's meaningless.
> nuances do not drive prosperity
They certainly do. The differences are often in the details.
> Perhaps
That's honest, at least ...
Being rude is not persuasive.
> including free market economics. It's meaningless.
I've explicitly said many times that free markets work even if they're not ideal or perfect.
That seems to be what Buffett is suggesting.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/03/warren-buffett-to-ask-board-...
On one hand, he doesn't sound that great (in terms of subtle overall health markers in his voice) when he talks.
On the other hand, he's 94 and most people (especially men) don't make it into their 90s, so...
It's almost certain that the GP isn't either, and is only parasocially on a first name basis.
I'm sure he's full of good ideas. I think they were just a bit more ambitious than the last 40 years of politicians were willing to stomach or advocate for.
Well I don't think him sitting on billions of dollars at 94 is better from a societal perspective.
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.
Even as T-bills they're doing something.
It’s a weird story. IIRC in the run for president before trumps first term he sent Jared Kushner to find out about trade. Kushner browsed Amazon, looking at book covers, and picked Navarro’s book because he liked the title… and the rest is history
Oh god, you're not:
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/328969-report-ku...
I feel impotent, what is there to be done?
[1] https://www.instagram.com/reel/DINJlumRqed/
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffe...
Don't misunderstand flashy at the only way to be important.
* An investment that makes something possible that otherwise wouldn’t happen. Like the US investing in NASA
* Investment that is not consequential in the big scheme except it makes people money.
Did his insurance investments keep some companies alive?
If the U.S. became a failed state tomorrow, there's a genuine chance that Berkshire businesses would keep on operating and trading with each other, on Berkshire rails. It's like a hive of cockroaches -- businesses which are individually strong, that when woven together are un-killable.
As for saving, he was the guy with a big pile of money in '08 (and other times). Someone you call when your business is dying or you want to retire; he gets the deal, not you. His Bank of America warrant play was a big one from that time.
I didn't finish snowball, but the first half goes over a lot of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snowball%3A_Warren_Buffett...
Some of his biggest investments are in things like candy, soda, beer. Not exactly great for society overall and not really enabling anything other than diabetes.
He was already an massively wealthy in 2008 and just having a huge pile of cash and using it to make more deals is not some great achievement to be celebrated.
Yes he made billions off of his 2011 bofa investment, so good for him and brk but what did this do for anyone else?
If BH didn't exist would it really matter? I don't think so.
If you liked the fact that the Great Recession didn't turn into the Even Greater Depression, he seems to have had quite a bit of influence there behind the scenes as well.
Still, he's given dozens of billions in charity, given important counsel to the government during the 80s and 2008 financial crisis.
During 2008 financial crisis he essentially saved Goldman and General Electric both preventing further escape of capital and an even worse situation for the US and potentially world economy.
In any case, he's a capitalist who likes making money for himself and his shareholders, he ain't a medical researcher or your mayor.
A young investor who thinks the whole portfolio should be in shitcoins because they are going to moon next week won't get a look in and the culture holds.
Take away the figure head and things can creep in a bad direction.
Check out transcription of his speech:
https://videotobe.com/play/youtube/or0rgxnkOfE
Something that's happening in the markets is that nobody owns anything anymore. With the exception of elon and bezos. Most fortune 500s have no owner; they are all on low risk autopilot.
He was also a vehement opponent of foreign military intervention, including military aid:
"Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns. Persuasion and example are the methods taught by the Carpenter of Nazareth, and if we believe in Christianity we should try to advance our ideals by his methods. We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice power politics."
It seems the markets will soon go through a period when Buffet's approach will work best, which makes it an inoportune moment for him to retire. Of course at his age retirement is expected, maybe even inevitable - that's the joke.
Why would you think so?
US equity is still at insanely high valuations, markets are full of denials about it and about the future tariff related uncertainty.
These are things that have happened in the past. Mad financial manipulations? Like what is "mad"? "Comes again the time." How is it different than any other day?
> Pretty clear and funny to me.
You're making up your own interpretation of nonsense then calling it obvious. Good luck with that.
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As a result, extreme results in one or the other are not usually attained by people who do not have extreme prioritization of just one.
It is totally possible that a rare talented unicorn pursuing (and succeeding at) both goals simultaneously is needed for us to achieve radical life extension.
_Yet_.
If you looked at the Wright Brothers aircraft, what real use is there for a vehicle that carries one person, maybe 50lbs of cargo, and moves at 80 mph?