yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

2009 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting (Full Version)


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Processing might take a few minutes. Refresh later.

[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...

More Articles

View All
Safari Live - Day 118 | National Geographic
Good afternoon and welcome to the sunset safari! Off to a great start already! We did in fact have a butterfly sitting on a piece of grass. It was a cabbage white, but of course it flew away just before we went live. Naturally, my name is Taylor McCurdy a…
What Happens To You If You Never Go Outside?
You’ve heard your whole life that going outside is good for you, but is it really? I mean, don’t get me wrong; there are some definite healthy effects to going outside. Like when you’re exposed to direct sunlight, you get some vitamin D, and if you do exe…
10 BAD HABITS THAT DESTROY YOUR CONFIDENCE | STOICISM INSIGHTS
Welcome back to Stoicism Insights, where we delve deep into the wisdom of the Stoic philosophy to uncover timeless truths for modern living. Have you ever wondered why on some days you feel like you can conquer the world, and on others you struggle to mak…
Bill Gates Wasn't Worried About Burnout In 1984 – Here's Why
You see yourself working for somebody else? I never have. Can you see it? I’m used to having a company where the ideas that I have or something that I can easily pursue. So I think it’d be a tough transition. If you had stayed at Harvard a few more years…
Does Pressure Melt Ice?
I’m gonna try to demonstrate something called regelation. Which is where you provide a pressure onto ice and that turns it into water, but after that pressure is removed, it freezes again. So, in order to demonstrate this, I’ve taken apart the high E st…
Long run average total cost curve | APⓇ Microeconomics | Khan Academy
We’ve talked about the idea of average total cost in several videos so far, where it was the sum of your average variable cost and your average fixed cost. But when we’re talking about fixed costs, by definition, that means we’re talking about things in t…