[At 74, Buffett says he is in excellent health and has no plans to retire. Nor has he named a successor. But if he did leave the company, what would happen to it? Buffett is universally viewed as the key to Berkshire's fine performance.] He's obviously a very bright man, ... He looks at things very rationally. He doesn't like to get his emotions involved.
The S&P 500 is still less than 70 percent of the entire market, so in order to diversify your holdings you have to hold some mid-cap and small stocks. But my major message is that you should not expect that you're going to get a higher return on those stocks than you will on the big stocks.
Relative to the $7 trillion mutual fund industry, it's very little money, maybe one or two percent in returns.
The market is taking any minor shred of optimistic evidence and putting it into the price. People are worried that they are going to miss out on the bottom.
[Neither, however, should they expect Buffett's advancing age to have much effect on the share price.] Everyone knows he's not going to live forever, ... That's built into the price.... The market is thinking, maybe he's got five to 10 years.... If we knew that Buffett was going to live forever, maybe the stock would be 10% higher.
I was looking back on when Nixon resigned and actually the market held up very well around those days. It began to tank actually after Ford came in as president and the economic news began to dim.
I think that certainly this preoccupies us today, but I think the economic factors are overriding when considering the direction of the market.
This is a major, major act of war and act of terrorism that will have widespread economic consequences.
Gen Re is an important part of Berkshire. I think Warren would be the first to admit that he didn't know all the problems of Gen Re when he bought it [in 1998].... There clearly is no ethical issue involving him.
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