If we start deciding, based on guesses or emotions, whether we will or won't participate in a business where we should have some long run edge, we're in trouble.
An investor should ordinarily hold a small piece of an outstanding business with the same tenacity that an owner would exhibit if he owned all of that business.
I've argued with the senators and congressmen I've talked to. You don't want to be too little too late. If you buy them at the right price, you may be buying two trillion of face value.
We intend to continue our practice of working only with people whom we like and admire. This policy not only maximizes our chances for good results, it also ensures us an extraordinarily good time.
We have usually made our best purchases when apprehensions about some macro event were at a peak. Fear is the foe of the faddist, but the friend of the fundamentalist.
We've seen what can be accomplished when we use 50% of our human capacity. If you visualize what 100% can do, you'll join me as an unbridled optimist about America's future.
Would your reply possibly be this? Well, it all depends on what my tax rate will be on the gain you're saying we're going to make. If the taxes are too high, I would rather leave the money in my savings account, earning a quarter of 1 percent. Only in Grover Norquist's imagination does such a response exist.
If some institution wants to sell you a billion dollars worth of mortgages, they might have to sell 100 million in the market, and then you'll buy the other 900 million on the same terms. Now, the very fact that this has been authorized or will be authorized, I hope, will firm up the market to some degree. And that's fine. But you don't want to have artificial prices being paid.
But 300 million Americans, their lending institutions, their government, their media, all believed that house prices were going to go up consistently. And that got billed into a $20 trillion residential home market. Lending was done based on it, and everybody did a lot of foolish things.
You've got the right - you've got a wonderful person with Sheila Bair, most of the viewers have never heard of Sheila Bair. [She] has taken eight percent of the deposits in the United States and seamlessly moved those over to sound institutions which in turn have gotten more capital, ended up, it's been a magnificent job.She'll never get a golden parachute or any severance pay or anything. She's done a great job. We've got some great public servants. We have I think the right people in there to get the job done, and then they need more tools.