主题： Politics and Current Events

Credit is like oxygen. When either is abundant, its presence goes unnoticed. When either is missing, that’s all that is noticed. Even a short absence of credit can bring a company to its knees. We were in the bar drinking. I’m not sure that we want to go all the way back in, but we ought to get over the hangover. Well, there’ll be [another financial crisis] sometime, but no, I don’t worry about it in the least … because I conduct myself so that if there’s another crisis I’ll still be around, Berkshire will be in good shape. We will not be spending 25 percent of GDP and raising 15 percent of GDP 10 years from now. We’ll get there somehow. But … everybody in the country is trying to figure out how to have somebody else pay for it. But some of them are better equipped to fight that fight than others and they’re the people with money that care and that hire lobbyists.

We raised the debt ceiling seven times during the Bush administration and now in this administration, they’re using it as a hostage. You really don’t have any business playing Russian roulette to get your way in some other matter. We should be more grown up than that.

I think what happened with Simpson-Bowles was an absolute tragedy. I mean, here are two extremely high-grade people, they have somewhat different ideas about government. But they’re smart, they’re decent, they’ve got good senses of humor, too. They’re good at working with people. They work like the devil for 10 months or something like that. They compromise, they bring in people as far apart as Durbin and Coburn to get them to sign on, and then they’re totally ignored. I think that’s a travesty.

The important thing on government debt is how much is owed externally…. The national debt is largely held internally, but the game is changing as we run a trade deficit. So the trade deficit is a threat, essentially, to living as well as we live now. We are, essentially, selling off a little piece of the farm every day, as we run a trade deficit in order to finance our own consumption. We’ve got a very big rich farm, so we can sell a little piece of that farm for a long time without hardly noticing it.… We are giving the rest of the world claim checks on us. That has consequences over time.

Inflation, someone said many years ago, is an invisible tax that only one man in a million really understands. It is a tax on people that have had faith in their currency, the governments issued it. The best investment against inflation is to improve your own earning power, your own talent. Very few people maximize their talent. If you increase your talent, they can’t tax it or they can’t take it away from you.

Every time I get worried about inflation I think about how 94 percent of that dollar bill from when I was born isn’t worth anything, yet I seem to have done pretty well, so it can’t destroy everything.

I’m very suspicious when people say, you know, “This will create jobs,” and “If I open a hamburger stand, it’ll create jobs.” There’s a lot of rhetoric that gets a little loose. If you’re really seriously hurting the environment [to create 20,000 jobs], you can have those 20,000 people start building me a tomb.

People were watching a movie and they thought the movie had a happy ending and all of a sudden the events on the screen started telling them something different. And different people in the audience picked it up maybe [at] different hours, different days, different weeks. But at some point the bubble popped.

The American people, including banks, Congress, the administration, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the media—they all subscribed to the idea that residential housing could not collapse.… It was a collective delusion, that once adopted, spread through all kinds of institutions and instruments of finance so that the interdependence of these items, once the delusion became exposed, once it became apparent that the emperor had no clothes, swept through the economy with the impact and the speed of a tsunami.

When it really became apparent that, you know, that this was something like we’d never seen was in September 2008. That’s when I said on CNBC, “This is an economic Pearl Harbor.” … I meant that I hadn’t seen it three months earlier because I didn’t see a Pearl Harbor three months earlier.