Warren Buffett Watch

Published: Tuesday, 10 Nov 2009 | 9:51 AM ET

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Alice Schroeder's authorized biography of Warren Buffett is now available in a trade paperback edition.

In an "updated and condensed" version of The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, Schroeder adds a new 31-page chapter covering events after the hardcover's publication last year.

She details Buffett's reaction to the credit crisis as it peaked in the fall of 2008, Barack Obama's election as President, and Berkshire Hathaway's loss of its coveted triple-A credit rating.

Schroeder candidly describes how Buffett made a "series of characteristic brilliant moves interspersed with some surprising errors."

His deals "would enrich Berkshire shareholders for many years to come."  The financial crisis, however, "left Berkshire a weaker company financially" and "undercut Buffett’s reputation as a nearly infallible manager."

With thanks to Bantam and Random House, here is an excerpt from THE CRISIS: The decline of Berkshire Hathaway's stock from Triple-A status, by Alice Schroeder:

As the financial crisis evolved, the lame-duck Bush administration and the new Obama administration followed a consistent course under Federal Reserve Chairman Benjamin Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, with the Fed injecting trillions of dollars into the U.S. banking system, trying to forestall deflation—chronic falling prices such as occurred in 1932. The still unfolding crisis revealed its complex brew of causes, including artificially low interest rates, foolish borrowing by businesses and individuals, foolish lending by banks and investors, overreliance by institutions on complex financial instruments, aggressive behavior by derivatives traders, conflicts of interest at the banks being paid as agents to package loans sold to them by originators and resell them to investors, a climate of deregulation, lax oversight and enforcement by regulators, abdication of responsibility by rating agencies, inadequate capitalization of bond insurers, investor indifference—in other words, effects of all the normal dysfunctions that precipitate a bubble.

Of the responsible parties, it was the banks and AIG that earned the public’s greatest ire, while Buffett became the public’s greatest symbol of financial responsibility.

Treasury yields soon reached zero, but the flood of money failed to open the channels of business lending; credit remained virtually nonexistent. Buffett, who was at the time acting as the economy’s greatest cheerleader, lent at interest rates that in some instances bordered on usurious—$150 million of twelve percent notes in Sealed Air; $300 million of Harley-Davidson debt for a fifteen percent interest rate; $300 million of ten-percent contingent convertible senior notes from USG; $250 million of Tiffany bonds at ten percent; and a $2.7 billion, twelve-percent perpetual convertible stake in Swiss Re that would give Berkshire a thirty-percent ownership in the insurance giant.

This latter move baffled insurance industry insiders, including Swiss Re employees. Swiss Re was General Re’s biggest competitor; observers concluded that, on any terms, the investment to prop up Swiss Re made no sense because of its negative long-term strategic consequences to Berkshire—unless Buffett ultimately meant to take over Swiss Re and merge it with General Re. In the past, however, Buffett had made opportunistic insurance investments that worked against Berkshire’s long-term interests. Challenged on this, he would respond, “If we don’t do it, somebody else will.” Thus it was equally likely that there was no strategy whatsoever behind the deal besides extracting some fast cash from the pockets of the Swiss.

• Slideshow: Berkshire Hathaway's Biggest Holdings

Throughout, Buffett became an even more frequent presence on CNBC and other networks. He filled the role of America’s statesman and father figure during the financial crisis, but he had also fallen into the trap of competing for attention instead of trusting that his sterling record would bring it to him. “Dignity, Warren, dignity,” counseled one of his friends—but Buffett had never wanted to be dignified; he had never minded looking silly if it would get people to pay attention to him. He was a performer and a showman, and now he feared the show might end. He would keep on giving as many performances as possible while there was time. And indeed, his profile grew and grew in proportion to how often he appeared on the magic medium of television.

All this was not only personally effective—Buffett was his own best publicist—but also understandable for someone his age, until his marathon performances on CNBC resulted in some serious gaffes: criticizing newly elected President Obama’s performance, giving advice to the White House (the Shoe Button Complex, something that Buffett had heretofore spent a lifetime avoiding), and a claim that he, like everyone else, had thought housing prices could only go up—an absurdity that raised eyebrows.

When Berkshire finally reported its 2008 earnings, the consequences of some of Buffett’s earlier decisions became even clearer. The insurance businesses had suffered large losses from that year’s unusually active hurricane season. “Last year was a bad year for a float business,” Munger would later say at the shareholder meeting, citing GEICO and the energy and utility businesses as bright spots. Although Buffett referred to Berkshire’s “Gibraltar-like” balance sheet, the erosion in its financial strength was unmistakable. Because of Berkshire’s heavy insurance exposure and its concentration in financial stocks such as American Express, Wells Fargo, and U.S. Bancorp, its book value was down by 9.6 percent—only the second decrease in its history (and the largest). Berkshire had recorded $14.6 billion of accounting losses on its derivative contracts. While many of these losses would probably be reversed in the long run, they had a significant impact on the balance sheet. Nearly all of the decline was due to bets on financial assets that were market-dependent.

Even so, the decrease in Berkshire’s book value was insignificant compared to major banks and nonbank lenders, which were technically insolvent or close to it, and receiving hundreds of billions in government aid. Buffett had steered Berkshire to a stellar performance, by that measure. All the work of many years had culminated in this moment: Berkshire standing alone after other businesses crumbled around it.

You would not know this by reading some of the commentary on Buffett. One of his challenges at this late stage of his long career was that he tended to be measured by some observers and journalists against a standard of perfection, as if he had to be infallible to be any good at all.  Bloggers and financial writers went wild writing about Buffett’s derivatives exposure. Buffett went on the counterattack. That year’s shareholder letter contained a lengthy explanation of his reasoning for selling the equity-index puts. Yet by some calculations, under various scenarios Berkshire could indeed lose billions at the expiration dates of these contracts, which were not as well priced as Buffett had apparently thought when he entered into them. Ultimately, the concentration of financial assets and their effect on Berkshire’s value was significant enough that first Fitch Ratings, then Moody’s, downgraded the credit ratings of Berkshire and its subsidiaries (such as National Indemnity and MidAmerican) by one notch, from AAA or the equivalent.

The top rating had given Berkshire a lower cost of funding and significant advantages in its insurance business, which made it attractive to sellers of businesses. Buffett had displayed quiet satisfaction when Berkshire’s two largest insurance competitors lost their triple-A ratings, and had at times said privately that the one thing he would never do was jeopardize Berkshire’s triple-A, which he considered one of its most precious assets. In his shareholder letters, he liked to comment that Berkshire was one of only “seven,” or whatever the dwindling number was, of the remaining triple-A companies. He considered it unlikely that this rating, once lost, would be reinstated.

Now Berkshire had suffered that blow, which it probably could have avoided by raising (expensive) equity capital, something Buffett chose not to do. At the 2009 shareholder meeting, he downplayed the consequences. He said the derivatives did not impinge on capital and that a triple-A rating only conveyed “bragging rights.” “We’re still a triple-A in my mind,” he said. It was actually possible that Berkshire—in its uniqueness—could get the rating reinstated, but if so, it would be expensive even if Berkshire did not have to raise capital: It would have to reduce its exposures to insurance and equity market risk as a percentage of book value. Buffett probably would choose not to pay that price because its benefit was limited; no other financial institution remained with a triple-A rating.

Thus, the real meaning of the downgrade, in a larger context, was that the crisis had unveiled the true risk inherent in the global financial system—and the rating agencies had responded by increasing the capital threshold for a triple-A rating to a level that meant even the soundest institution found it financially unattractive to qualify.

Buffett also revealed at the 2009 shareholder meeting that to reduce Berkshire’s derivative risk, he had renegotiated two of the equity-index put contracts, shortening the terms by eight years in order to lower the price at which Berkshire would have to pay out losses. By then, the values of Wells Fargo, U.S. Bancorp, and American Express had begun to recover, but Wells and U.S. Bancorp had cut their dividends, which would also affect Berkshire’s future earnings. Buffett predicted that Wells Fargo would not have to issue stock, a prediction that was almost immediately contradicted when Wells Fargo did just that. He scored better a few weeks later when Berkshire’s SEC filings revealed that he had been buying American Express while the stock was on its back.

[CNBC.com NOTE: After we posted this excerpt from Schroeder's new Snowball chapter, Warren Buffett contacted CNBC to say the statement about buying American Express stock is "wrong" and he hadn't bought any "in years."]

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