BackA billionaire named Buffett
A billionaire named Buffett
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Warren E. Buffett has two cardinal rules of investing. Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget Rule No. 1.
Well, a lot of old rules got trashed when the financial crisis struck—even for the Oracle of Omaha.
And yet few people on or off Wall Street have capitalized on this crisis as deftly as Buffett. After counselling Washington to rescue the nation’s financial industry and publicly urging Americans to buy stocks as the markets reeled, in he swooped. Buffett positioned himself to profit from the market mayhem—as well as all those taxpayer-financed bailouts—and thus secure his legacy as one of the greatest investors of all time.
When so many others were running scared last autumn, Buffett invested billions in Goldman Sachs—and got a far better deal than Washington. He then staked billions more on General Electric Co. While taxpayers never bailed out Buffett, they did bail out some of his stock picks. Goldman, American Express, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, US Bancorp—all of them got public bailouts that ultimately benefited private shareholders such as Buffett.
If Buffett picked well—and, so far, it looks as if he did—his payoff could be enormous. But now, only a year after the crisis struck, he seems to be worrying that the broader stock market might falter again. After boldly buying when so many were selling assets, his conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., is pulling back, buying fewer stocks while investing in corporate and government debt. And Buffett is warning that the economy, though on the mend, remains deeply troubled.
Still, Buffett hardly sounded shell-shocked in the wake of what he once called the financial equivalent of Pearl Harbour. (An estimated net worth of $37 billion would be a balm to anyone’s psyche.)
“It has been an incredibly interesting period in the last year and a half. Just the drama," Buffett said. “Watching the movie has been fun, and occasionally participating has been fun too, though not in what it has done to people’s lives."
Investors big and small hang on Buffett’s pronouncements, and with good reason: if you had invested $1,000 in the stock of Berkshire in 1965, you would have amassed millions of dollars by 2007.
Despite that formidable record, the financial crisis dealt him a stinging blow. While he has not changed his value-oriented approach to investing—he says he likes to buy quality merchandise, whether socks or stocks, at bargain prices—Buffettologists wonder what will define the final chapters of his celebrated career.
For the moment, Buffett seems to be retrenching a bit. Like so many people, he was blindsided by the blow-up in the housing market and the recession that followed, which hammered his holdings of financial and consumer-related companies. He readily concedes he made his share of mistakes. Among his blunders: investing in an energy company around the time oil prices peaked, and in two Irish banks even as that country’s financial system trembled.
Buffett declined to predict the short-run course of the stock market. But corporate data from Berkshire shows his company was selling more stocks than it was buying by the end of the second quarter, according to Bloomberg News. Its spending on stocks fell to the lowest level in more than five years, although the company is still deftly picking up shares in some companies and buying corporate and government debt.
Among the stocks Buffett has been selling lately is Moody’s, the granddaddy of the much-maligned credit ratings industry. Berkshire, Moody’s largest shareholder, said last week that it had reduced its stake by 2%.
The shift in Berkshire’s investments suggests Buffett is starting to worry, said Alice Schroeder, the author of The Snowball, a biography of Buffett.
But Schroeder said Buffett was also growing anxious about how he would be remembered. He wants to remain relevant in the twilight of his career, she said, and is taking a more prominent role on the public stage. That shift means ordinary investors are getting a chance to hear more of his sage advice, but it also carries some risk.
“Before, he always made sure to dole out the wisdom with an eyedropper," Schroeder said. In the past, Buffett “said it was a mistake to believe that if you are an expert in one area that people will listen to you in others," she said.
Whatever his recent missteps, many people, from President Obama down, listen to what Buffett has to say. He is important in his own right as a billionaire businessman but also because millions of ordinary investors follow his homespun aphorisms, copy his investing strategies and await his pronouncements on the markets.
Buffett refused to be drawn out on where stocks are headed, but he warned about the dangers of investing with borrowed money, or leverage, which proved disastrous when the crisis hit.
As for regrets, he has a few. His timing was bad, he concedes. He should have sold stocks sooner, before the markets tumbled. Then he served up a Buffettism that any investor might heed.
Asked if anything was keeping him awake at night, he said there was not. “If it’s going to keep me awake at night," Buffett said, “I am not going to go there."
©2009/The New York Times
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