Hillary Clinton will be the nation's next president, Warren Buffett predicted on Tuesday.
The 'Oracle of Omaha' told a ballroom full of several hundred businesswomen at Fortune magazine's Most Powerful Women Summit at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel that Clinton will announce a run for the nation's top office 'as late as possible' and he said she'll win. 'I will bet money on that.'
But Buffett, in a wide-ranging discussion with journalist Carol Loomis, cautioned against mixing investing and politics. Here are three of the most interesting points he made:
* The political deadlock in D.C. 'should not affect in any way your business decisions.'
'Charlie Munger and I have been making stock decisions and business decisions one way or another together now for 55 years. The macro doesn't enter into it, nor does political. We have not made decisions differently because one party or the other's in power. We want to not have made decisions based on whether we thought interest rates were going to go up or down or what was going to happen with labor negotiations someplace.
'When we bought the auto dealerships last week' - Van Tuyl Group, with several Orange County dealerships - 'we didn't factor in anything about the Fed, about the deadlock in politics, about what's going on around the world. Those are all important things, but they don't affect whether those dealerships ... will make money in the year 2024, 2034, 2044. And the important thing is whether we get a good business with good management at a sensible price.'
* On whether banks are good businesses and what happened to them in the past few years:
'The banks have always gotten in trouble on the assets side ... what they do is they start copying what their dumb competitors are doing. That happens in every business, but it's particularly virulent in the banking business. If anybody comes to me and says, 'We want to do this because the other guy is doing it,' then I say, go back to square one and come up with a better reason.'
* On home building in the economic recovery:
'It's come back at a pace way less than I would expect. We overbuilt like crazy in 2004, '05, '06. We were building a couple million units. And basically it ties into household formation. And household formation falls off dramatically in a recession at least initially ... people just put plans on hold.
'But that doesn't last long. Hormones kick in and in-laws get tiresome, too. In the end, people will keep behaving as they have since Adam and Eve. You will have household formations in this country ... they will want to have their own homes or apartment units.'
Contact the writer: musheroff@ocregister.com
Posted by Unknown on Tuesday, October 7, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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