(Reuters) -Warren Buffett presided over his 60th Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting on Saturday, giving views on everything from trade to investment opportunities for the conglomerate.
Here are some quotes from Buffett:
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 involving 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].
(Reporting by Jon Stempel, Carolina Mandl, Suzanne McGee, Megan Davies; Editing by Diane Craft)
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