Warren Buffett: Get The Debt Ceiling Out Of The Picture | Fortune

this is an anniversary for us Warren it's the fifth anniversary of your first appearing here the first time that he was here in 2008 was an electric moment it was early October Lehman had had failed two weeks before AIG had been taken over by the government the tarp bill had not been passed it was going to be passed before the MPW was over but it had not been passed at that morning and things were not looking good so I did have one preliminary comment to make to Warren and I'll come back to that a little bit later but I then turned to him was and said okay how bad is it out there and he said I went back and look at the video and he said it's bad it's like nothing I've ever seen it's an economic Pearl Harbor in which creditworthy companies cannot get financing we will pull out of it but it's going to take time so I would say we would say looking back that that was the sound of assessment and we will come back to the recovery even so here we are five years later once again in the middle of financial trouble and I'd like to ask you feel and I'd like to say once more Warren how bad is it out there well it's not so bad in the economy it's bad for a great many of our citizens overall though the economy has done very well I mean the it's been a slow recovery but it was a extreme wound that the economy had received like none in my lifetime so it's not not totally surprising that it's taken is a while to come back but ever since the fall of 2009 the recovery has come back steadily it hasn't accelerated but it hasn't flattened out either and that's that's the way it is now and you know even 2% of your growth if the population grows 1% that means in a generation people are living on is 20% better than the generation before that is not bad it be better if it's 3% but right but we have a wonderful economy and and you've seen it heal faster than the other major economies around the world well let's come back to that in just a second let's talk about the debt ceiling problem and let me ask that question again how bad is that well if if it really goes on a few days I mean if we really don't get it resolved in a day or two it's it's absolutely terrible I mean I I've told my children that it takes 20 years to build a reputation and it takes 20 minutes to ruin and Barbie well yeah with particularly some of my kids the hey but we have spent two hundred and thirty seven years since 1776 building a reputation you know as the most wonderful country on Earth and one that's entrusted with having the reserve currency of the world the one whose when they say Full Faith and Credit nobody questions it and that could well that is being put in jeopardy now and it could be it could be destroyed in a little while and a great reputation as I say it's like virginity it can be really can be preserved but it can't be restored and at least that's what my dad told me so it is absolute folly to even think about it and it will be I mean I don't know what the words are to describe it if we actually would default I can't believe it'll be done because it just is so stupid and I think that the whole idea of a of a debt limit is a terrible terrible mistake I mean if you're going to spend more than you take in what are you going to do except raise the debt limit so it becomes this political weapon of mass destruction it really is like a nuclear bomb it's something maybe you can talk about but you can't even dream of using it we we dropped to it atom bombs in 1945 we've done it since now we've been frustrated by all kinds of government we had a war in Vietnam we were you know we did not get a satisfactory resolution to we've had other Wars but we didn't think about we're gonna drop nuclear bombs I mean there there are certain things that just don't should not be used in a civilization and the idea of breaking the government's promises to achieve any other end whether its gun control abortion Obama care whatever it is tying it to that is madness you can argue those other things out but leave get the debt ceiling out of the picture well and here we are two days away from the actual moment at which and do you have a kind of scenario in mind as to how we will get from here to actually solving this problem well I think the way to solve it is just to say the debt ceiling both parties to say that debt ceiling will never be used as a weapon of mass destruction it's off the table we'll argue about all kinds of other things and see how they come out but we are not going to say we're not going to threaten the world and our own citizens with the fact that we aren't going to make good on our promises to achieve some other end it it doesn't make any sense well and seeing the political in Washington can you imagine that happening in the next couple of days I can't imagine that the full thing playing out that way although I wish it would but maybe it will have maybe this has been the demonstration project we needed I mean you know we we didn't know exactly what atomic weapons could do until we did them and and and then it was an important it was an incredible goal obviously at the time but we just thought we didn't want to do that again no matter how serious things got and I hope that comes out of it but I think that what would I think basically it you know you really need the House Republicans just to say oh you know this is a weapon we shouldn't have used and we'll we think Obama cars Obama care is terrible and you know we'll fight it out and we'll beat you in 2014 and the elections improve it and so on but but we will not we will not say that the United States is not a bigger promised us the millions and millions of citizens and other countries and everything just because we're not getting our way and how about the prospect that it will just be pushed forward to the end of January that seems to be our specialty I mean we've got good at that yeah we we we don't know how to solve proximately sure know how to post portal but and that may be what happens I'll be disappointed if it does but I think all of us will just hate to go through what's ridiculous I mean why do I do it I mean it you know it's it I if you have a problem you face it but and and that ceiling is a problem that we can get rid of it being a problem then we'll have a lot of other problems and we can fight those out on their own turf but it just push it down the road I mean know the people go through Christmas wondering it how's all this going to come out and they'd be a point a supercommittee which turns out to be a mini committee and it just doesn't make any sense well considering the confusion we are in has this affected your decisions about running Mercer in any way not one iota we announced the acquisition this morning it was over in English I was at 3 a.m. I think for a purchase for a 1.1 billion it didn't affect a dollar of the price that we put in it we did not put in a clause that said if if Congress does this or that that this deal hasn't closed for a while that the deal will be offering me I got it doesn't affect anything this country is going to do well over time I want to participate in and I'll participate through owning good businesses and if we get a chance to buy a good business we buy it and I will say this Charlie Munger My partner and I have worked together now for 54 years we've made a lot of decisions on buying businesses we've made a lot of decisions on buying stocks in the conversations that accompany those decisions neither one of us has ever once brought up anything of a macro nature period and it just doesn't make any difference I don't know what's gonna happen next week or next month or next year I know what's going to happen over 10 or 20 years and why concern myself with the things I can't know and don't understand one of the important things are something I think I do understand and what would you say to this audience many of them who are making decisions real-time decisions about what to do how would you assess full speed ahead okay I really didn't expect you the same I mean it's I bought my first stock you know in April of 1942 they after Pearl Harbor we had nothing but bad news for six months the headlines every day were you know that we were having trouble in the Corregidor baton you know you name it and you know the Dow was at about a hundred and you know the news was terrible but I and practically every American I knew they thought we were gonna win the war and and the stock I bought was cheap it got quite a bit cheaper in the next year my but I've been buying stocks ever since right and always being glad in a way that it got cheaper because you can buy at a cheaper price I love a sale you know I mean just try me out mark down the price of fortune and I'll extend my subscription for 20 years do you see it at this moment slowing inning or do you see it just going along at this steady upward pace I can't tell you about the last week but I can tell you at the last month I mean because I get figures on 70 plus companies oh you know in pretty much real-time and the recovery ever since the fall of 2009 has been going up at a modest rate and and people talk about doubles have stopped working at me a double dip they talk about acceleration there's a very real acceleration the the line of ascent is just about like it's been now for four five years almost four four in a fraction years we will we project that our railroad and the week of November 5th I believe will hit or maybe slightly exceed the car loading peak reached before Lehman and but it's taken four or five years to get there so we are seeing we own the second largest real estate brokerage firm they come in so I get the what they call pending transactions even before they complete and and I get the median prices at which the deals are being made on they get them from a lot of markets all over the country and I just got them for September and you know the median price is up and the pendings are up and the country is coming back you can't you can't stop the united states i mean that we get through everything i mean we've got through a civil war like after the Great Depression we got through World War Z the country works why is it that at every perilous moment that people start to say this is the time that it's really not going well I get scared I mean no humans 500 years from now people will panic periodically I mean they they fear is incredibly contagious I mean that when when people got worried about their money market funds in September 2008 you had 30 million Americans with three and a half trillion dollars half of all the bike bank the amount of bank deposits in money market funds a week earlier none of them were worried and within a couple of days everyone that had a money market fund was worried and that was something they didn't expect to be worried about it and they looked at their neighbor and they were worried and at that time in three days 5% of all the money market I mean that was a run on money market funds like you can't believe and I give great credit to the government for taking the actions that they did so fear is spreads instantaneously confidence comes back through the door one at a time I mean that people do not there's nothing that such a thing as mass resumption of confidence but there is a fear just takes over and that will happen again and what is your rule about investing well you'd want to be you want to be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy right and I've got plenty of greed so I'm just waiting for the fell fearful bargain because I shouldn't this real-life fact what company did you buy that announced the buying today well we bought a company from another company in England it's called Cornelia and it makes it makes equipment which dispenses and cools wonderful beverages like Coca Cola well we may put we may even put a little dispenser we've got a dispenser in the office but well now have an improvement and this goes into what company within virtually this goes into Marvin Marvin Marvin itself owns probably a hundred and thirty companies it's a huge conglomerate itself we bought it from the Pritzker family were just completing the purchase of one hundred percent and it's an important business for Berkshire we have five what I call the powerhouse five and those five companies will Marvin's want them in aggregate they learn well over ten billion dollars pre-tax this year yeah I think so okay subject to women well I said that five years ago before I got into the matter of how bad it was in that crisis I had made one point to the audience and I have and I never had any reason to change it and that point was that among all the business executives I knew and I have known it a lot over the years that Warren is the most unbiased about gender and ethnicity ethnicity any of that I have ever seen he just simply has no bias about gender he does have a bias a strong one about competence intelligence and character but those three things are are the only ones that he thinks about and he simply thinks about and no others now having said that repeated that very good thing about him I'm about to turn into a tough report okay okay the point is and this is what I want to bring up and I first before I do bring it up Warren wrote an article for Fortune ran this spring called Warren Buffett is bullish dot-dot-dot on women and if any of you miss it you must go back and get it as a matter of fact you can even get it in my book called tap dancing to work which we are just putting out in the paperback version and I have an opportunity there writing an introduction for this article to editorialize a little a bit and so here's what that introduction says it says that despite these strong feelings you have about the confidence of women and their ability to completely support and build the the economy that you were very slow in getting on the policy change policy train of putting women on your board right yes actually I didn't want to put anybody on the board but they're good when you looked around you didn't exactly a jump to put women on the board and the first woman Charlotte diamond who's here she went on and I meant to look up the date and now I forgot what it was a 2000 it would be strong Johnny had 10 to 12 years ago something yeah it's quite a while ago yeah and and then a majority of the people in the last ten years have been women no that's very true and Merrill and Merrill Whitmore why so there are three out of a board that has how many twelve and why do you think but there are five over eighty and they're all bad so believe me you got demographics working for you you think that you were a little bit slow in doing this well be perfectly on a who knows exactly about I will tell you why it they were so generous I really didn't we didn't want to put anybody on the board till the rule started coming in about having you know independent directors and all that I mean the the board was not a big deal at Berkshire at all you know I I have a friend that used to like to own a hundred percent of him any company that he had because he liked to look in the mirror and say all my shareholders love me and I've always nice ring to it I like to look in the mirror and say enough of my shareholders love man for a long time it was treated almost as bright of business it came out of berkshire hathaway came out of a partnership iran which iran all by myself i mean that was the only general partner so it sort of had that history and and so Charlie and I I mean we had a board because we were required to have a board but the board did not do much in the past and then certain legal requirements got added over time and and and frankly you know I love the idea that of the of the directors that are 60 and under half of them are women now and and they'll be more tapered okay now I'm going to turn to questions from the audience and if they're not crystal clear I'm a for both the audience's benefit and Warren's because he gets he goes to Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting and the first thing he always says pointing to Charlie Munger sitting by me said Charlie can't see and I can't hear so that's why we work together I mean I can't remember his name anymore he can't remember mine but we we need each other okay I'm going to be looking for questions it's always difficult up here to see much who has their hand up who has a mic in their hand point me where I should be pointing there's a line over there how about back there okay hi general question about your thoughts you said you bought your first sock in 1942 I think right around that time sometime after World War two I think prior to that the Sterling was the was the world currency then it switched to the u.s. dollar not too long after that at the time any other country very similar to markets today you have to be able to cover your debt you have to be able to you know have enough in order to to borrow against at that time the the Sterling and now we're looking at a situation with the the amount of debt ceiling I think what's different between now and ever before is there is the risk of it the devaluation or the issue of the US dollar not being the world currency what's your views do you see that happening because there's an awful lot of fear and discussion about it I unless we do something incredibly foolish I don't think we will the dollar will be the world's currency for a long long long long time the we came out of World War two actually with a higher debt to GDP than we have now and we all of our debt is printed in our own currency I mean that's the key and then the question is do you abuse that in some way so that the currency declines in value at a rapid rate well interestingly enough I was born in 1930 the dollar from 1930 is worth about six cents today so I've lived during a period where the dollars lost 94% of its value in terms of purchasing power and yet at the same time in real terms the GDP of the country per capita is gone up 6 for 1 so we've been six for one just think that one person's lifetime we went centuries in the world where the gains were and nothing in a century or a few percent and six for one in one person's lifetime at the same time our currency has decreased you know the by well went from $1 to six cents and and that 94% and that despite all of that we are the world's reserve currency and people are willing to lend us the money lend us money for nothing virtually currently in in large sums and I I do not see that changing unless we do something incredibly foolish now we have to stabilize that the debt as a percentage of GDP which means we can have debt increase by two to three percent a year of GDP grows two to three percent a year and I think that's a very realistic possibility we can't keep having debt grow at a faster rate than GDP although there's it can go on for a long time and it has no hunting for a long time our country you know that the people think it's falling apart I think that's not remotely the case I was just on a program this morning with Sara Blakely and then and Fred Smith I mean here are two people you know that it took something very common you know the Postal Service and airplanes or something and they saw needs and they filled them and and they're thinking of new things to do tomorrow I mean the secret sauce in America you know is basically you know the people in this room and the fact that you're all trying to make your life better tomorrow and you'll come up with ways to do it so the country works and it may get gummed up somewhat by Washington sometimes but it won't get ruined another question and and I should have mentioned this before would you state who you are before asking the question so hard to see I have one here okay Mary Erdos JP Morgan Asset Management right over on here right right okay good morning so as we went through the introductions this morning there were a whole host of women who were talking about either taking their companies public and actually a few of them taking their companies private and I thought if we just hear from you on your thoughts and the pros and cons of the public versus private company Carolyn I belong to a group that started in 1968 called the gram where we meet and and one time we had a session with two enormous ly successful people on the panel arrives I assigned the topic and one of them said he'd give up half his net worth to be private again and and the other one you know gave exactly the reverse answer I started out feeling like I wanted to be private I'd run a pride run a private partnership and I just enjoyed it that way you know I like looking in the mirror making decisions and not getting any negative votes and it was a lot of fun when I we just we distributed a bunch of Berkshire shares as part of winding up the partnership and it already was a public company it became more public then and over time I found it actually more fun to run a public company but it's become a podium and it's it's where I couldn't I can play out my ideas and explain why I do things and have a lot of fun and Carol I was might letter to make them more readable and and it's it's a teaching mechanism even I would say generally speaking that well when people come to me with wonderful businesses and they do and they talk about selling them to me my first advice is don't sell them I mean wonderful businesses they're too rare and if you've got one in your family keep it unless something forces you to sell it so I would say stay private unless you have a need to go public in terms of financing or in terms of solving the problems of ownership within a family that's going in different directions or something but you can always you can always go public and unless there's a compelling reason to do it which is usually fundraising I don't I don't see the reason to do it and going private you can do it but that creates a lot more problems you really have now you're you're faced with buying out your partners unilaterally and you know Michael Dell just went through that that's not something I would want to do so I I would stay private and then if you really get the urge to cash in I've got an 800 number and just for to interrupt here with the question how about the flurry of activists that we see out there these days what what message would you have for people trying to deal with them well III believe basically that I'm running Berkshire for the people that are going to stay in and not the ones that want to get out I mean you know that's I you give you give you try to have a decent market and everything for people that want to go but basically I am I'm concerned with the people who want to stay in and of course most of the activists want to rattle the cage and and get management to do something that will give a spurt to the stock which may not be in the long-term interests of the company so I I i I've seen cases I've seen plenty of cases where management's are doing things where they deserve a little shaking up but I do think that the more in running a business we don't make quarterly estimates ever I you know I don't care what the company are in this quarter you know I I really care about what we're gonna be than five or ten years from now and and it doesn't make any difference if I ship a lot of stuff in the last day of the quarter and get some extra few pennies this year or something I don't want to be thinking that way I don't manage your sinking that way and I don't want stockholders who expect me to think that way so I I if an activist comes along the Berkshire you know and says we think you ought to do a this and that I'll say fine start your own company and you do it so I think we can the ad that you have a bias against accident someone yeah there plenty of management's to deserve some shaking I don't want to come down and say that all activists are all bad miss you but overwhelmingly I do not believe in running a company to respond to people who want to sell their stock in the next few months question yeah hi I'm melody Hobson so I want to do a follow-up question to the first question about the currency issue a lot of that is coming from rhetoric from China that the global economy should be de-americanized and internationalized as the word that is being used and I was in China last week where Chinese official called called this the three of the Pacific that the last century was the century of the Atlantic which was the US and Western Europe in this century is the century of the Pacific I wonder what you think about China their growing influence them being our largest debt holder etc and what the long-term prospects are for the emerging markets yeah well your friend sounds gonna be more like an ad man than an economist but yeah China is going to be enormous Lee important and they should be I mean it you know it is it and it will be an economic powerhouse but so will the United States be and and what is important is that the two countries largely learn to get to live together I mean there's no we are going to both be super powers and and we've got a lot of common interests and we've got some things we differ on and and that'll always be the case but the thing to remember is overwhelmingly we should figure out how to get along it but the United States will be the superpower of the world for a very very very long time China will be gaining in importance for a very very very long time but they start from a lower base they also have a whole lot more people so that at some point in aggregate that they're going to catch us in GDP in terms of GDP per capita I wouldn't want to bet on that one well and and their political systems would you what would you say about that assuming ours is working correctly yeah yeah it's tough for me to figure out what's happening in this country it'll exist but then well the interesting thing is in 1790 we had a little under 4 million people China had 300 million people they had similar resources they had similar climate they worked just as hard they were just as smart and in the next 200 years you know we got so we had 25 percent of the world's GDP starting these 4 million people and they didn't really go anyplace and then in the last 40 or 50 years they have just galloped forward and so they are starting to unleash human potential in China the same way we've been unleashing human potential since 1776 and I'm all for that we should much prefer to have a prosperous China than the China that has problems I mean you know if you postulate two worlds one in which we're an island of prosperity 315 million people in the rest of the world is sitting there envious of you know that or postulate something where the rest of the world is growing even faster than we are but we're also benefiting I mean just choose which world you want and then think about which world you want the other guy's got some nuclear weapons and happens to be and this if the I mean it it is in our interest that the rest of the world does well and and and in particular shanem question good morning right there okay forever Inuvik with Blackrock first of all I love your enthusiasm and your optimism have you doing any thought to retirement planning and the longevity problem to be doing to help people who are clearly going to live a lot longer yeah I I I'm 83 I'm having more fun to read in my life so it you know the main thing to do is being is to be involved with something you love I mean I tell the students that and something I told you take the job you take if you're already independently rich well that's what I've got and it's the we are going to have a problem in this kind of a problem in terms of turning out more and more stuff I mean that the market system works marvelously in turning out things people want I mean it's just it's it's the Marvel of the world and it'll continue to be I mean you know whether you look about just apples doesn't you know recent years L the market system works on turning out stuff the more specialized it becomes the more people that will leave behind in terms of getting the bounty of that unfortunately and then frankly that's where government has to come in you know we have gone in 1982 the Forbes 400 I had apologized for using a chair Amir but the Forbes 400 had 90 billion of net worth they had two trillion twenty billion this year over twenty times as much all-time record the people in this room overwhelmingly are doing better than they were five years ago the people who will serve us lunch later are not and it the trickle-down has not does not work very well it's still better than being an economy that doesn't go anyplace but but we have solved the problem of more and more goods we have not solved the problem of having a country with $50,000 of GDP per person and having 20 percent of the families 25 million families 60 million people living in households with $21,000 of income or less and you know that's our challenge and that gets into the problem of the Asian and all of that you know the people and their working years have to take care of not only the old of some extent but of course they take care of the young and they sort of tie it with the old of what they produced over life they don't tie it there that way in the young I mean if you have ten children and I mean you still get school places for each one of them and all of that so that will be the challenge I think will be up to that challenge and we certainly got the ingredients to be up to that charge we are wealthy we are a wealthy family and the number of members of the family aren't really sharing in that the way I would hope they wouldn't and you of course have spoken out quite loudly about this problem in your viewpoint about what should be done about taxes yeah and you don't have any change in what you think about that no no I'm man I hesitate breaking it up but even last year my my tax rate counting payroll taxes was the lowest in the in the office of 25 people and and and I have no tax shelters I just just you know thank you lobbyists they've taken care of me I mean my I have I filed a tax return every year since I was 13 and we took the years by decades and compared tax taxes to taxable income and the last decade and believe me it's been my best decade it's been just about the lowest of any decade in terms of my tax rate and it was tougher when I was selling shirts at pennies and a big part of this problem is that people never stop to think about the employment tax the payroll tax is nine hundred billion dollars it's it's thirty percent of our total government expenditures very very roughly and it quits and 100 and I don't know five thousand or something like that so it's regressive basically I mean my payroll tax is a percentage of my total income is zilch you know the payroll tax of most of the people in the office is a percentage you know is now again 15 plus percent and if they've got spouses working you know you can have a household of two hundred thousand of income and they've got 15% payroll taxes right off the bat it's it's gotten pretty extreme if you look at the distribution of taxes over the last since World War two you know the the payroll tax is just consistently going up as a percentage of the total revenues of the government actually and corporate income taxes have gone down dramatically corporate income taxes used to be four percent of GDP they're not one and a half percent of GDP corporate profits are at an all-time record but we hear all the the lobbyists for the corporation telling us how you know with we're not competitive with the rest of the world and everything which is a lot of baloney and put me down as undecided another question right here hi company you entered the municipal bond insurance business at an interesting time and I think subsequently had some second thoughts about it and I would love to know your feelings on that industry now especially given where certain cities and Commonwealth's are yeah we we we did start you're guaranteeing a municipal five years ago or so at the time we were getting premiums of probably over three percent averaging over three percent on ninety four or five percent and in almost all cases we had other municipal bond insurers that came in ahead of us so we were second to pay third to pay fourth to pay sometimes and getting this pretty fat rate and then the rates went down dramatically and for the same risk within a year too we would have probably only been getting a quarter of the premium and you know insurance is attractive at one price and it's not attractive another price so when rates when race leave us you know we leave the business basically and that's what we did if rates were high enough are appropriate in our view as to the risk involved we would insure municipals again I mean we're selective about it but we we just weren't getting paid enough all right can I say say one thing oh I have the mic on on behalf for them for the sake of the Buffett family for Susie for other friends of Warren Buffett is bu FF e TT so if you're tweeting Warren is verified so I just wanted to say thank you unless you're saying anything bad and we should say spelling like that well and I have a history as you well know of the first time I ever mentioned the name Buffett in fortune in 1966 I misspelled it I forgive you so okay over here okay so Warren I'm glad who are you I'm sorry Janice Ellen with chata Kelly an executive search firm so we have such a wealth of talent in this room and I'm really glad that you're bullish on women huge but don't you think we have a corporate governance issue in corporate America you know there are some of these studies about if you have more women in the c-suite more women in the boardroom you have higher performance Credit Suisse Research Institute in surveying 2,400 companies globally prove that so did McKenzie and other company and other research that's been done but we have nearly 40% of the fortune 500 have zero or one women in the boardroom so how are we going to get this moving in the boardrooms with more women in the c-suite I know you're a big proponent but how is this going to happen yeah well I do like Berkshires are teaching mechanism and you know we'll show that to some extent in time and and have been at Berkshire but listen people and power don't give it up easily you know that's true in religion that's true in the mill it's true every place and and and to some extent there's just that it just doesn't surface much and that's one of the reasons I wrote the wrote the article and then I addressed it specifically to man at the end I think and I said in the argument makes me very bullish on America when I think of how far this country came using half of its talent I mean just think of what the potential is choosing all of its talent and we did just use half of the talent for a long time I mean that and even the even the 19th amendment didn't you know didn't affect change that fast my sisters were born a couple of years each side of me on night in 1930 and they are absolutely as smart as I am and and and and more personable and and and they they did not have the same chances and it wasn't you know my parents love them all he loved them equally the teachers sort of felt they wall rhyme title the same chance but it was just a thousand different ways they were told that you know their job was done very well or you know or have you got a job as a secretary or a nurse or and and all of that talent went to waste and I was lucky because I was only competing against half of the country and I don't think it should say that way and and and it's moved a fair distance but it's got a long way to go to I don't know about you know in Europe there's been some legislation of percentages of women records and I don't know whether that's the best way to go or not but I think Berkshire is going to prove that a lot of women talented women accomplished a whole lot of the shareholders and talk just for a moment about the point you've made that education and you and I benefit personally from the fact that we wouldn't had so few careers open to us I went to public school in them in the in the mid to late 30s Grammar School and and I had nothing but women teachers and they were terrific and of course they should have been terrific because half of the talent of the country was being compressed into these few occupations teachers nurse secretaries and retail clerks and and if you forced all of the men to become accountants you'd have had one hell of a group of accounts but but you'd have wasted all kinds of talent I mean the idea of setting limits as to what talented people can do is just crazy and that was being done in the 30s and it benefited me because I would not have those same teachers would have had jobs that pay better and many of them would have had jobs that didn't pay better and and society would have been better off but in terms of my own personal equation I got the benefit of the fact that wonderfully talented people were just being pushed into this slot that said teacher we have time for one more quick question right here Foundation we admire so much your legacy in philanthropy and your children's Anthropy I'd love to just hear your philosophy around that well my friend Charlie said who gave voice I'm right there they said it won't do me much good where I'm going yeah so you know I've got everything in life I want and you know it uses a very tiny percentage of my resources so I have a some stock certificates that I bought 40 or 50 years ago down at a safe deposit box and they have no utility to me they can't buy anything for me that I need or want I mean I can go down and fondle them occasionally or something of the sort but but other than that they're just pieces of paper they have enormous utility for other people yeah I particularly used wisely they have no utility for me so why in the world should I sit there and let them sit in the box and you know I have never given away a penny that is it affected my life in any way shape or form there's people with this Sunday will drop five dollars into a collection plate and makes the difference between whether they go out for dinner or something or go to a movie I've never done any of that but if you have this incredible surplus and in our Giving Pledge we call these we only call on people with a billion you know and I'm only asking him for half so I I say that my when they turned me down I say you know I'm gonna write a book on how to live on five hundred million because there's apparently a big need for this high I thought I can live on five hundred million so all the rest a lot lessened all the rest is surplus and why not you know if it can provide vaccines or education or whatever it may be or a better life for women I mean why not use it I think we're at the end of this and I hope you'll join with me in thanking Warren for having

Channel: Fortune Magazine

Views: 79,756

Keywords: Fortune Magazine, Wall Street, Business News, News, Finance, Warren Buffett (Billionaire), Market, Stock, Economics, Economy, USA, America, Oracle of Omaha, 2013, Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit 2013, Talk, Interview, Speech, Leadership, Female, Equality, Freedom, Smart, Intelligent, Power, Women, MPW, Washington D.C. (City/Town/Village), Fortune (Magazine)

Id: FSqUYQ-vubM

Length: 43min 48sec (2628 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 16 2013