2009 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting (Full Version)

[Applause] Good morning! I'm Warren, the hyperkinetic fellow. Here is Charlie, and we're going to go in just a minute to a question and answer section that, at least, a question session that will be a little different than last year. We have a panel, I can't see very well here, over to the right of journalists who will ask questions and alternate with the people in the audience. We'll go back and forth a little.

Checklist here that we'll use as we go back and forth; here we are. We should have a pen here someplace to check things off. But first, even though we'll have the formal meeting later on, I would like to introduce our directors. If they would stand as I announce them, and then remain standing until the end. If you'll just hold your applause until the end, or even later if you wish, I’ll recognize them.

We'll have a meeting later on to elect them, but if you'll stand up— like I say, you can't see very well here with the lights— but there’s me and Charlie to start off, and then Howard Buffett, Susan Decker, Bill Gates, Sandy Gottasman, Charlotte Guyman, Don Keogh, Tom Murphy, Ron Olson, and Walter Scott. Those are the directors of Berkshire Hathaway. [Applause]

Now, we only have one slide, which actually is more than we would usually have. But it does tell you something about what happened last year, and it also acts as a commercial for our Nervous Nelly mattress with the famous night depository feature. Last year, and we got that up on the slide, last year we wrote a ticket on December 19th, and we sold five million of treasury bills. I hope you can see that— we've got the December 19th circled up there.

Those treasury bills came due, or were to come due, on April 29th of this year. So they were going to come due over four months later. The remarkable thing is, and this tells you something about what an extraordinary year it was, is that we sold those five million of treasury bills, which we're going to pay off at five million on April 29th of 2009. In December of 2008, we sold them for five million, five hundred and ninety dollars, and seven cents.

In other words, if the person who bought those from us and paid us five million and ninety dollars instead had bought the Nervous Nelly mattress and had put their money under the mattress, they would have been ninety dollars better off at the end of the year— at the end of four months— than by buying treasury bills. If the U.S. Treasury had just sold five trillion of these, they could have made an easy ninety million dollars. And Tim Geithner could have put the money under a Nervous Nelly mattress, and we all would have been better off.

Negative yields on U.S. treasury bills are really an extraordinary thing. You got less on less for your money from the U.S. Treasury than you got from sticking it under a mattress. I'm not sure you'll see that again in your lifetime, but it's been a very extraordinary year.

We have with us the journalists: we have Carol Loomis of Fortune, we have Becky Quick of CNBC, and we have Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times. They have received questions from shareholders all over the country. Andrew told me that he received a couple hundred just this morning, and they have selected what they think are the all Berkshire Hathaway related questions.

We were having a problem in recent annual meetings with Berkshire— into the realm of what people's children had done in school recently and that sort of thing. So we wanted to bring it back a little bit to Berkshire, so they have selected among the best of the Berkshire related questions that they've received.

We will go from— we will start with Carol Loomis, and we will go then to the audience. We have thirteen sections: twelve in this room, one in an overflow room. We selected the people in each of the audience sections by a raffle system half an hour to an hour ago. We’ll go back and forth, and with that, we'll start it off with Carol.

Um, good morning! I come first because Loomis outranks the others alphabetically, but this gives me a chance to...