Charlie Rose Interviews Warren Buffett on The Economy, Philanthropy, Goldman Sachs, Burlington Northern, and much more (videos)
Charlie Rose spoke with Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett in New York last Friday. Buffett was in town with his friend Bill Gates for a meeting with Columbia Business School the previous day.
Watch an excerpt of the televised interview (don't miss another clip labeled "Web Exclusive").
Watch past Charlie Rose interviews with Warren Buffett.
Michael Corkery of The Wall Street Journal provides the following takeaways from Buffett's latest conversation with Rose:
“I am not for shooting them….but…I want to make it painful for them.”
That is Warren Buffet speaking about how he would like to punish Wall Street executives for their missteps that led to the financial crisis. Buffet told interviewer Charlie Rose that not just executives, but the banks’ directors should be subject to severe curbs on compensation, such as clawbacks and limits on payouts for up to five years after they leave a firm. [...]
On the economic stimulus:
“There should have been more infrastructure in there, and they hung a Christmas tree on it — as I said, it’s sort of like mixing a tablet of Viagra with candy. I mean, it would have been better to leave out the candy and have the full Viagra.”
On leverage and greed:
“….Being greedy can be fun for awhile, you know. Leverage can be fun when it works. Leverage is one of those things that works 99 times out of 100, and when it doesn’t, you know, it’s all over.”
On being “wired” to make money:
“A prosperous country should not just be prosperous for the people like me who are wired a particular way at birth — no credit to me — but I happen to know something about capital allocation and that wasn’t — you know, instead I could have been wired, you know, so I was — I don’t know; a great ukulele player. But there’s no money in that.
On redistributing wealth:
…The market system is not perfect in any kind of distribution of wealth, and taxation is a way you get to the excesses of what the market system produces and where you take care of the people that get the short straws. In a country as prosperous as we are, nobody should get a really short straw.
On breaking up the big banks:
“In 1998, though, it was a firm Long Term Capital Management that actually threatened the system and they had 200 employees in Sanford, Connecticut, and nobody had ever heard of them. So it isn’t just sheer size. It’s creation of huge leverage positions.…If you’ve got a $2 trillion bank, you know, you’ve got to do a lot of things, and I’ll let you do a lot of things, but — I don’t want them at the racetrack; let’s put it that way.”