If you aren't willing to own a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning it for ten minutes. Put together a portfolio of companies whose aggregate earnings march upward over the years, and so also will the portfolio's market value.
When 40 billion of treasury bills are sold like, seven day treasury bills, at a yield of 1/20th of one percent, that means the whole country is basically at the point virtually, or a lot of the country is at the point of putting the money under the mattress.
The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on.
Consciously paying more for a stock than its calculated value - in the hope that it can soon be sold for a still-higher price - should be labelled speculation
Every day that goes by, I mean, if you don't react to Pearl Harbor for a week or two weeks or three weeks, you're behind in the war that you otherwise would have fought.
If you were at Lehman, the same thing happened. If you were at AIG, the shareholders are getting creamed on these things. And those shareholders are not just a bunch of big shots in Wall Street. Those are pension funds, and those are investors all over the country. I wouldn't worry too much about that. Justice won't be perfect on it.
It isn't given to man to be able to run a financial institution where different interest-rate scenarios will prevail on all of that so as to produce kind of smooth, regular earnings from a very large base to start with.
It's going to be tough because the economy is going to be getting worse for a while. And it might fall off a cliff if this doesn't pass. But nobody will ever know that if it does.
You should be unconcerned about short-term price action when you own the securities directly, just as you were unconcerned when you owned them indirectly through BPL. I think about them as businesses, not "stocks", and if the business does all right over the long term, so will the stock.