Forty-two months! Thats how long I’ve been eagerly awaiting for Carol Loomis‘ new book ”Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2012: A Fortune Magazine Book” (368 pages, on sale Nov 26th and online amazon.com & indigo.ca). Carol is Fortune magazine senior editor-at-large and a long time (40+ years) close friend of Warren Buffett! I am thrilled to see Carol’s book published and in my hands as it feels like having an insightful person who knows Warren really well to guide me through some important and insightful articles. It will take me some time to read & review the book, please stay tune for my detailed review. Until then, my first impression of the book is it looks awesome!
Long time readers of Warren‘s news and insights will be familiar with some of key articles in this collection and also see many (for me) new articles that are important but less well known. Carol has added many insightful commentaries before the articles to give us context and share with us her views. For example, the article “The Inside Story of Warren Buffet” (April 11, 1988) is Fortune’s first profile of Warren and Carol’s preamble explains what lead her to finally wrote the first profile about Warren after knowing him for 20+ years at that point! And then the afterword for articles like “Buffett Hits $200 million Downdraft” (Nov 17, 1994) reminds readers that Warren actually made money on the USAir investment (which many people may have an impression of it being a money losing investment).
P.S. Now, let me explain my wait of almost forty-two months in this postscript. You see, in April 2009, shareholders of Warren Buffett‘s Berkshire Hathaway NOT physically presented at the annual shareholders’ meeting in Omaha were given opportunities to ask Warren & Charlie remotely in advance via email for the first time. And I jumped at the chance by emailing my question to Carol! Along with my question, I told Carol that,
“I am a big fan of your Fortune articles about Warren and BRK. (I have taken the time to look up some of your older articles and really enjoy reading them.)”
In Carol’s email reply was where I first read of the mention of a possible book (the book that I am finally holding in my hands)! So, yes, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the book since Apr 2009, and that is about forty-two months! :)
P.P.S. Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed there is a stack of five books in the above picture. Can you guess the titles of the Warren related books in the stack? Find out how many you guess correctly by clicking here to see this picture.
“I will go anywhere in the world to open new markets for American products. And I will not stand by when our competitors don’t play by the rules. We’ve brought trade cases against China at nearly twice the rate as the last administration – and it’s made a difference. Over a thousand Americans are working today because we stopped a surge in Chinese tires. But we need to do more. It’s not right when another country lets our movies, music, and software be pirated. It’s not fair when foreign manufacturers have a leg up on ours only because they’re heavily subsidized.
Tonight, I’m announcing the creation of a Trade Enforcement Unit that will be charged with investigating unfair trade practices in countries like China. There will be more inspections to prevent counterfeit or unsafe goods from crossing our borders. And this Congress should make sure that no foreign company has an advantage over American manufacturing when it comes to accessing finance or new markets like Russia.”
Reemployment system
“Jackie Bray is a single mom from North Carolina who was laid off from her job as a mechanic. Then Siemens opened a gas turbine factory in Charlotte, and formed a partnership with Central Piedmont Community College. The company helped the college design courses in laser and robotics training. It paid Jackie’s tuition, then hired her to help operate their plant. Read the rest of this entry »
* “As of today, our housing-related businesses are as bad as they’ve ever been during this period. Everything else you name is up. And our railroad carried 200,000 car loads last week, that’s the highest total in three years. That’s stuff moving around the country, supplying merchants and doing all kinds of things. If you take our five largest businesses, all of them will either set records for earnings or just about set records for earnings this year.”
* “If I can buy dollar bills for 90 cents, I’ll buy them. I want to warn the people that are selling to me that I believe I am buying their dollar bills for 90 cents because they’re our partner. So, I give them notice first. And then if they want to sell me dollar bills cheap — any of you want to do it, I’m here.”
* “And since 1992, the average income of the 400 highest incomes has gone from 40-odd million to 220-odd million, fivefold. During that time, their tax rate as a percentage of taxable income has fallen from 29 percent down to 21 percent. That counts payroll taxes and income taxes.”
* “I’m not supposed to mention it here, but the Forbes 400 just came out. (Laughter.) And the aggregate wealth of the Forbes 400 this year was over $1.5 trillion. That’s up sevenfold in the last 25 years from 200 million roughly 25 years ago. That is not what the American public has experienced. So, the disparity has grown wider and wider in this country.” Read the rest of this entry »
“BUFFETT: I can— I can— I can end the deficit in five minutes.
BECKY: How? BUFFETT: You just pass a law that says that any time there’s a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election. Yeah. Yeah. Now you’ve got the incentives in the right place, right? So it’s capable of being done. And they’re trying to use the incentive now we’re going to blow your brains out, America, you know, in terms of your— of your— in terms of your debt worthiness over time, and that’s being used as a threat. A more effective threat would be just to say if you guys can’t get it done, we’ll get some other guys to get it down. And incidentally, we had— we had Simpson-Bowles, you know, almost eight or 10 months ago.
BECKY: Right. [...]“
“BUFFETT: Oh, I would— well, you certainly change it on capital gains and dividends. I mean, if you take the 400 richest Americans and the 400 people who paid the greatest income tax— the Treasury’s been putting those figures out for 15 years or so. If you go back 15 years, the average income of the 400 top people— the 400 top people’s around 45 million. They paid about 27 percent. Now it grew, the most recent figures, to 350 million. That is incredible. And that’s nothing like’s happened to the rest of the world. The tax then was 16.6. So while they’ve gotten ungodly richer, the rate has come down 11 points. Now, that is a big tilt in the world. And I would go after the very rich. [...]“
“BUFFETT: I would say this. I would say this. The capital gains rate at 15 percent, the— if you buy a future, S&P future in Chicago and it goes up 10 seconds later, you resell it, it’s 60 percent long-term capital gain and 40 percent short-term gain. Now, I’m not sure, you know, how anybody can come up with the logic of that.”
Check out NYT DealBook Live-Blogging of the Meeting. Highly recommended. I’ve excerpted a few sections related to David Sokol that is important to read (with emphasis added),
“12:50 p.m. Buffett’s message on compliance: Trust me
DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asks: Given what’s happened, why doesn’t Berkshire institute stricter controls for employees’ trades?
Buffett’s answer hinges on trust. The company lays out what he says are clear rules about what is and isn’t permitted. Berkshire isn’t an investment advisory firm, and it isn’t a mutual fund, he says, suggesting that it’s not obligated to have a big compliance department.
He also cites the expansiveness of Berkshire — some 260,000 employees — and how subsidiaries handle most of the issues with their workers.
To Buffett, his view appears to boil down to this. People determined to break the rules will do so, regardless of compliance policies. How can the company stop someone from trading in his cousin’s name?
“If there’s anything we can do in the rules that will make it even more explicit that rules are not made to be danced around … we want to make sure we do it,” he says.
Munger adds that having a big compliance department doesn’t necessarily preclude problems. Wall Street banks have armies of compliance officers and still suffer huge numbers of scandals. (His exact words were “the most scandals.”) [note: True but this means another scandal can happen.] Read the rest of this entry »
“Mr. Sokol’s answer to Berkshire Hathaway’s CFO, Mr. Hamburg, concerning the investment bankers similarly fell short of the degree of candor required of a corporate fiduciary, and suggests his answer to Mr. Buffett’s earlier inquiry noted above was intended to deceive.“
“However, upon several readings of this release, there do not appear to be *any* new significant facts that were unknown to Berkshire on March 30th when its initial press release was issued. These facts are only *new* to those of us who are reading the audit committee report ”
“The problem isn’t the about-face. It is the missing explanation for why Berkshire went so easy on Sokol in the first place. Whatever the detailed reasons, ultimately it boils down to Berkshire’s reliance on Buffett’s personal judgment about his managers and his ability to delegate to them to the point of abdication. When this one-man infrastructure makes a mistake, it’s hard to admit that Buffett is at fault. Changes in the way the company is managed are personal, not corporate. Under the circumstances, the temptation is high to blame everything on a single rogue employee. That doesn’t excuse Sokol’s behavior, but the failure of oversight needs to be acknowledged and corrected. [...]Read the rest of this entry »
I think it is very important for someone like Alice to speak up and hold Warren accountable while his mind is still very sharp. I think Warren has set up some bad precedence for the next CEO. (Or may be this mess will paradoxically serve as what NOT to do?)
“What were they thinking? How could Warren Buffett excuse David Sokol’s trading in Lubrizol Corp. (LZ) stock while Sokol was pitching the company to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A) as an acquisition candidate?
Buffett and Sokol both say that nothing “unlawful” was going on (Sokol even went so far as to tell CNBC he did nothing inappropriate). Their explanation is that, because a deal with Lubrizol hadn’t actually been struck and wasn’t likely when Sokol bought his shares, it was all right for Sokol to profit from his knowledge of a possible deal.
On Wall Street, we call this kind of trading front-running, and everybody knows that it is wrong. People get fired for doing it. [...]
Lottery Tickets
In substance, when Sokol pitched the deal to Buffett, he was holding stock in Lubrizol that had the equivalent of free lottery tickets attached. These 96,400 lottery tickets gave Sokol unfair odds — odds far better than in the kind of lottery the general public gets to play. Read the rest of this entry »
Paradoxically, the most damaging bit may be the second last paragraph, “I have held back nothing in this statement. Therefore, if questioned about this matter in the future, I will simply refer the questioner back to this release.” To me, this is in full prep mode to fight with lawyers (SEC lawyers, et al). A totally silence after issuing such an “unusual” statement is asking for serious headline news trouble! (see more excerpt at the end) I hope I am wrong here.
“Finally, Dave brought the idea for purchasing Lubrizol to me on eitherJanuary 14 or 15. Initially, I was unimpressed, but after his report of a January 25talk with its CEO, James Hambrick, I quickly warmed to the idea. Though the offer to purchase was entirely my decision, supported by Berkshire’s Board on March 13, it would not have occurred without Dave’s early efforts. Read the rest of this entry »
The following are links to videos and transcripts of Warren Buffett having some fun on CNBC and, in a sense, putting up a big free TV ad to attract profitable businesses to sell to him.
“Money will always flow toward opportunity, and there is an abundance of that in America. Commentators today often talk of “great uncertainty.” But think back, for example, to December 6, 1941, October 18, 1987 and September 10, 2001. No matter how serene today may be, tomorrow is always uncertain.“
“It goes without saying that historically, capital management has long been the single greatest creator of value at Berkshire. The company has been built from a series of capital transactions and asset/liability matching and capital allocation decisions over many years. Therefore it is not really surprising to see Buffett acknowledge this as the third pillar. Yet one could almost see Buffett salivating as he wrote that Berkshire is now generating $1 billion of free cash flow a month, a threshold it crossed this year. That’s an astounding figure. Wal-Mart, the world’s largest company, does not even come close to generating cash flows like this.
Buffett was speaking of free cash flows. In another part of the letter, he wrote about how happy he to be committing enormous amounts of capital to regulated businesses like BNSF and utilities. This is *not* coming out of the $1 billion! Berkshire will either be making acquisitions or buying securities to the tune of $1 billion or more a month for the foreseeable future. By way of comparison, the cash expended for the enormous BNSF acquisition took Berkshire about 16 months to accumulate (at today’s run rate). Imagine Berkshire buying the equivalent of more than two BNSFs every three years.”
The following are links and excerpts of a very insightful 6 part interview series of Alice Schroeder, author of Warren Buffett’s biography “The Snowball“, by Miguel Barbosa (Simoleon Sense). It is long, detailed and highly recommended. [HT Alice]
Simoleon Sense Interviews Warren Buffett’s Biographer, Alice Schroeder
Alice: [...] At the time my former boss and mentor, Denny Beresford, was Chairman of the FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board, the standard-setter for U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles). He knew I was considering leaving Ernst & Young and suggested that I come work for the FASB. I took that job thinking that it would be intellectually challenging, analytical, and involve plenty of speaking and writing.
At the FASB,I was assigned, essentially by being next in line as the most recent arrival there, to a dreaded project, which was to oversee the issuance of some of the most important new accounting regulations for U.S. insurers in 20 or so years.
Nobody on the staff wanted to work on these. The insurance industry had been fighting ferociously for more than a decade to keep them from getting passed, and with a lot of success. [...]
I got assigned to this project by chance, but I fell in love with the industry within a couple of weeks.
The main topic was SFAS 113, Accounting and Reporting for Reinsurance of Short-Duration and Long-Duration Contracts; I also went on to complete EITF 93-6, Accounting for Multiple-Year Retrospectively Rated Contracts; and, EITF 93-14, Accounting for Multiple-Year Retrospectively Rated Insurance Contracts by Insurance Enterprises and Other Enterprises.
Their titles are a mouthful, but essentially they all eliminate deceptive accounting practices in which reinsurance contracts were created specifically not to indemnify risk, but to shuffle or smooth earnings around from one accounting period to another – or artificially inflate an insurance company’s reported capital reserve one way or another.
If these rules passed, some companies and segments of the reinsurance industry would be losing their most profitable products, at least on a risk-adjusted basis. Conceptually, these deals were a very effective form of leveraging capital at very low, and even no, risk. They were very similar to the type of securitizations that got Enron in trouble. Not surprisingly, Wall Street also was starting to dabble in the business.
Alice: [...] So what is it like to be an analyst…When I started at Oppie it was very free form. Analysts used their judgment. Over time, as I moved through the different firms, especially Morgan Stanley, more and more requirements arose. There were things you had to write every time you published on a company. The financial models became standardized. Like any other business, the more you standardize something, the more you stamp out creativity. Read the rest of this entry »
““He’s [Todd Combs] got the best chance of being the successor, but if we find the right guy or gal, we’d take that person, too,” he said, adding that the matter hasn’t been decided.
Mr. Buffett also told The Times that Li Lu, a Chinese hedge fund manager considered one of the other top candidates, has decided to stay in his fund.“
“My first question, as I sit there on the couch in his office, is: “What about gold? Is this a classic bubble or what?“
“Look,” he says, with his usual confident laugh. “You could take all the gold that’s ever been mined, and it would fill a cube 67 feet in each direction. For what that’s worth at current gold prices, you could buy all — not some — all of the farmland in the United States. Plus, you could buy 10 Exxon Mobils, plus have $1 trillion of walking-around money. Or you could have a big cube of metal. Which would you take? Which is going to produce more value?“
P.S. Note to Fortune editors: Why don’t you link to those magazine articles from the covers? Isn’t it an obvious great way to sell some more eyeballs and ads?
P.P.S. This one is too funny considering the baby BRK and the the 1 to 50 split of the baby shares!
“When I turned 19, I received my inheritance—proceeds from the sale of a farm, which my father converted into Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) stock. At the time I received them, the shares were worth roughly $90,000. It was understood that I should expect nothing more.
So—what to do with the money? I was a student at Stanford University; there were no strings attached. Fortunately, I’d had the advantage of seeing my older siblings burn through most of their cash; I didn’t want to follow down that path. At the other extreme, I might have done absolutely nothing with that stock—just left it in an account and forgotten about it. If I’d picked that option, my shares would now be worth around $72 million. But I didn’t make that choice, and I don’t regret it for a second. People think I’m either lying or crazy when I say this, but it happens to be true, because I used my nest egg to buy something more valuable than money: I used it to buy time.“
P.S. On a personal note, Ms. Brooksley Born has earned my deep admiration in the last months as I learned the foresight she had and the way she had conducted herself.
Alice Schroeder, the insightful and independent biographer of Warren Buffett’s “The Snowball“, posted three interesting entries in her blog in the last few days.
“The files are full of letters that say, $1 million, $1 million, $1 million, $1 million. Some deviations plus or minus but rarely more than a few million. Mostly it is repetitious — $1 million, $1 million, $1 million, $1 million. After all, these guys are mindful their boss makes $100,000 a year.”
Also check out,
“Low Attendance” (excerpt: “A big-time reporter sought me out last week in desperation because of difficulty getting quality interviews. “Nobody is going to the meeting” this reporter said. Now, obviously a lot of people went to the meeting, 40,000 people or so. But the serious money managers this particular reporter wanted to interview were not going.“)
and
“Huge Mistakes Were Made at NetJets” (excerpt: “Rich talked to Warren nearly every single day — I witnessed it. NetJets was not some rogue operation buying planes at high prices without Warren’s knowledge, understanding, or consent.“).
and
“First of Many” – Some of Alice’s key takeaways from the Berkshire AGM.
RT @emmgryner: OMG just got off the phone w @Cmdr_Hadfield who signed off saying "see ya when I get back to Earth"...and I got chills 6 days ago
RT @WilliamShatner: I watch @Cmdr_Hadfield 's Space Oddity video last night and I have 2 words for him: "SHOW OFF!" I'd even look good floa… 6 days ago
RT @emmgryner: I am going to bed blown away by all the feedback and love re @Cmdr_Hadfield's Space Oddity. So proud to be a part of it. Wow… 6 days ago
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