Stock market today: S&P 500 slips as Trump’s tariff salvo sours sentiment
(Reuters) -Warren Buffett announced he would pass the reins as CEO to Vice Chairman Greg Abel, as he presided over his 60th Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRKa) shareholder meeting on Saturday, giving views on everything from trade to investment opportunities for the conglomerate.
The meeting comes against a backdrop of a rollercoaster start to the year from markets which have reacted to uncertainty over trade policies as the Trump administration imposes tariffs.
Buffett said during the meeting he was concerned about the U.S. deficit and thought the United States faced problems that need to be solved, including bureaucracy. He said that the country should be looking to trade with the rest of the world. Still, he thinks this is the best place in the world to be and sees opportunities to invest.
At the end of the meeting, he announced his plans to step aside.
Here are some quotes from Buffett:
ABOUT ABEL TAKING OVER:
"Tomorrow we’re having a board meeting of Berkshire and we have 11 directors. Two of the directors, who are my children, Howie and Susie, know of what I’m going to talk about. The rest of them, this will come as news to. I think the time has arrived where Greg should become the chief executive officer of the company at year end and ... that is my recommendation. Let them have the time to think about what questions or what structures or anything they want. ... I think they’ll be unanimously in favor of it. That would mean that at year end, Greg would be the chief executive officer of Berkshire and I would still hang around and conceivably be useful in a few cases but the final word would be what Greg said, in operations, in capital deployment, whatever it might be."
"Greg would have the tickets."
ON TRADE:
"Balanced trade is good for the world... Trade can be an act of war... In the United States, we should be looking to trade with the rest of the world. We want a prosperous world."
ON U.S. EXCEPTIONALISM
"The luckiest day in my life is the day I was born, you know, ’cause I was born in the United States."
"I was just lucky... We’ve gone through all kinds of things ... If I were being born today, you know, I would just keep negotiating in the womb until (they) said you can be in the United States. We’re all pretty lucky."
"The United States has changed since I was born in 1930. We’ve gone through all kinds of things, and we’ve gone through great recessions, we’ve gone through World Wars. We’ve gone through the development of an atomic bomb that we never dreamt of (at the) time I was born. So I would not get discouraged."
ON OPPORTUNITIES:
"We came pretty close to spending $10 billion not that long ago. We’d spend $100 billion. The one problem with the investment business is that things don’t come along in an orderly fashion and they never will. We’re running a business which is very, very, very opportunistic."
ON SECURITIES INVESTING VS REAL ESTATE:
"In the United States, there’s so much more opportunity that presents itself in the security market, than... in real estate. And in real estate you’re dealing with ... usually ... a single owner or a family that owns maybe a large property. They’ve had [it for] a long time, maybe they’ve borrowed too much ... money against it. Maybe the population trends are against them. But to them, it’s an enormous decision... For a guy of 94, it’s not the most interesting thing to get involved in something where the negotiations could take years."
ON CURRENCIES:
"Obviously we wouldn’t want to be owning anything that we thought was in a currency that was really going to hell."
"There could be... Things happen in the United States that... make us want to own a lot of other currencies. I suppose if we made some very large investment [in a] European country... there might be a situation where we would do a lot of financing in their currency."
UNITED STATES FISCAL POLICY:
"Fiscal policy is what scares me in the United States."
ON THE STOCK MARKET’S RECENT MOVES
"This period has been... It’s really nothing. This is not a very dramatic bear market or anything of the sort.
"If you get frightened by markets that decline and get excited when stock markets go up... People have emotions, but you’ve got to check them at the door when you invest."
ON MAKING MONEY:
"You only have to get rich once. I mean, you don’t... want to do anything that risks [that].
ON OPPORTUNITIES FOR BERKSHIRE WITH ENERGY POLICY:
"The country, for example, needs improvement, rethinking redirection... it’s a problem, something akin to the Interstate Highway System where [each state] has their own way of thinking about things.
"There are certain really major investment situations where we have capital like nobody else has in the private system. We have particular know-how.. In the whole generation and transmission arena.
"We are not in the business of trying (to) solve unsolvable problems.
"It is important that the United States have an intelligent energy policy, just as it was important during World War Two that we learned how to make ships instead of cars extremely fast. And we figured out the answer. We combined private enterprise with... the power of... government."
ON BERKSHIRE’S FUTURE OPPORTUNITY:
"Berkshire will increase its earning power over time as we retain money. We are doing things, making decisions every day... We will build the earnings power, but it won’t be coming in an even stream."
"We will make our best deals when people are the most pessimistic."
ON CAPITALISM:
"Capitalism in the United States has succeeded like nothing you’ve ever seen, but it has what it is, is a combination of this magnificent cathedral, which is produced on the economy like nothing... the world’s ever seen. And then it’s got this massive casino attached."
ASKED ABOUT DOGE:
"I think that bureaucracy is something that is amazingly prominent and contagious... and big corporations... overwhelmingly, most of them look like they could be run better."
ABOUT THE U.S. DEFICIT
"We’re operating at a fiscal deficit now that is unsustainable over a very long period of time. We don’t know whether that means two years or 20 years ... because there’s never been a country like the United States, but you know, this is something can’t go on forever. We are doing something that is unsustainable and it has the aspect to it that it gets uncontrollable to a certain point.
"I wouldn’t want the job trying to correct what’s going on.
It’s a job I don’t want, but it’s a job I think should be done, and Congress does not seem good at doing it. We’ve got a lot of problems always as a country, but this is one we bring on ourselves... If you picked a way to screw it up, it would involve the currency... That’s happened [in] a lot of places.