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Warren Buffett and the Crisis: 'Brilliant Moves Interspersed with Some Surprising Errors'

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

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By: Alex Crippen
Executive Producer

Marion Ettlinger
Alice Schroeder, author of Bantam Dell's The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
This is the continuation of an excerpt from THE CRISIS: The decline of Berkshire Hathaway's stock from Triple-A status, by Alice Schroeder:

Thus, during the financial crisis, Buffett made a series of characteristic brilliant moves interspersed with some surprising errors. Above all, he stood pat on existing investments while adding cleverly structured new deals, deals that for the most part were not available to ordinary investors. These opportunities came to Berkshire because of its ready cash and underlying financial strength, and because of Buffett’s willingness to rent his well-earned reputation and provide quick, trustworthy handshake dealmaking.

The actions he had taken with deals struck in 2008 and 2009, in accordance with his saying “Cash combined with courage in a crisis is priceless,” would enrich Berkshire shareholders for many years to come. At the same time, the crisis—which admittedly had so many episodes of heart-stopping disintegration into near economic collapse that in some ways it eclipsed the events leading to the Great Depression—left Berkshire a weaker company financially. It undercut Buffett’s reputation as a nearly infallible manager, and cost the company its top financial rating.

The 2009 shareholder meeting would prove to be both a celebration of Berkshire’s success and a chance for Buffett to defend himself. He had changed the meeting format so that half the questions would concern Berkshire and would be submitted through a panel of journalists: Carol Loomis, Becky Quick of CNBC, and Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times. A torrent of five thousand questions poured in, many of them tough-minded queries from people who wanted answers but who had not, in the past, been willing to wait hours for a position at the microphone while others asked Buffett about his personal relationship with Jesus Christ and what books he and Munger had read lately.

The new format and the unsteady economy attracted what was said to be a record thirty-five thousand people in attendance despite Berkshire’s stock price, which hovered at $90,000 per share. Buffett, who never said anything spontaneous, always seemed to have an answer prepared for every question that could be anticipated. The main difference in 2009 was that shareholders were asking truly challenging questions, rather than flattering him with their gratitude for being able to stand in his presence and receive his wisdom. At his most impressive he rattled off statistics and explained economics with a clarity that people were not hearing from anyone else. But his answers on other questions were more awkward. Buffett liked to deal with confrontation indirectly. Put on the spot, he behaved as he did in private, avoiding direct answers to some questions and meting out unpleasant information through hints and sometimes by omission.

Challenged on his decision not to sell financial stocks in the spring of 2008, he said he only sold when a company’s competitive advantage disappeared, he lost faith in management, or he needed cash. He was cutting a fine distinction in trying to separate his criteria for selling stocks when companies’ circumstances were changing materially all the time, versus selling whole businesses, which happened only when they became economically unviable or had persistent labor problems. With newspapers folding in cities all over the United States, he also went so far as to raise the possibility of eventually shuttering the Buffalo News, but said that as long as the News made a little money and had no labor problems, he and Munger would “keep it going.”

Buffett was questioned sharply about why he did not sell Moody’s when its business model was fundamentally compromised after the rating agencies were implicated in causing the financial crisis. He said he thought the odds were that Moody’s was still a good business, and that he did not think conflict of interest—rating agencies are paid by the entities they rate—was “the major cause” of the problem. (Another conflict of interest, not mentioned, was Berkshire’s twenty-percent ownership of Moody’s when Moody’s rated Berkshire.) Many in the audience had spent years listening to Charlie Munger’s often repeated saying, “whose bread I eat, his song I sing,” and understood that Buffett was rationalizing as he always did in pursuit of a profit or when he felt backed into a corner—or both.

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When Buffett was asked how the four investment managers he had chosen as possible replacements performed during the 2008 market crash, and whether they were still on the list of candidates, he said they “didn’t cover themselves with glory,” then commented that neither did most investment managers during this period. Buffett did not respond to how these managers did relative to the market or to their relevant benchmarks. He left a vague impression that the list of candidates might change, over time.

What was certain, whichever candidates were chosen, was that the stock market would eventually recover. More important were Berkshire’s businesses. Most were among the best in their respective industries. Buffett had built a conglomerate of stable businesses that were likely to be profitable for a long time. Still, the events of 2008 had certainly convinced many shareholders that Berkshire was not a company that could be run by a ham sandwich after Buffett was gone.

At the meeting they grilled Buffett about the question of succession with new intensity. The next CEO’s challenges would be keeping Berkshire’s managers happy, managing the company’s franchise and risks, and investing the cash flow the businesses threw off. Buffett insisted that all the candidates were internal.

He said that running a major operating business was the best qualification for the CEO job. He next talked about what he actually did as CEO, which did not involve anything remotely resembling running an operating business (nor had Buffett ever run an operating business; nor could he have, had he been forced to do so). He stated that the operating managers had experience allocating capital—perhaps a necessary rationalization, although nobody truly allocated capital at Berkshire other than Buffett, particularly not in financial services, the heart of the company and the site of Berkshire’s recent woes.

The answer revealed that Buffett was publicly introducing a rationale to pave the way for someone like David Sokol, the presumed front-runner who ran MidAmerican Energy. Buffett was also using a selection process that in some ways mirrored his two disastrous experiences at Coca-Cola, one that could someday put the board in an awkward spot.

To be sure, Buffett had already divided executive authority in a way that many outside candidates would not find comfortable—with his son Howie succeeding him as chairman, and Bill Gates taking on the role of de facto lead board member as representative of Berkshire’s largest future shareholder, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This meant that, for better or worse, Berkshire probably would always be run in an unusual manner by unusual people.

The unusual company that Buffett—or Sokol, or possibly even a committee—would be running was stable and successful, and had, because of the financial crisis, gained relative advantage over its rivals in many of the businesses in which it operated, even though as of spring 2009 its results and financial condition also reflected the weakened economy.

As for the future, Buffett said retailing, especially of luxury products, might not recover for years. Companies like Borsheim’s and NetJets were going to struggle. He said little more about NetJets; the sparsely populated aisles at Borsheim’s on Sunday after the meeting spoke for themselves. On a brighter note, he said that new household formation was the key to recovery of housing related sales, with 1.3 million new households formed in the United States every year.

He spoke optimistically of the long-term future of the U.S. economy, which had survived two world wars, many panics and depressions, the resignation of a president in disgrace, and civil unrest. At various times, he had discussed what he expected to be inevitable inflation and the declining value of the dollar. Yet it was the “unleashed potential” of the human race that caused economies to grow over time, he said; in other words, productivity. The world’s system to increase productivity works naturally and has been working for a long time. Munger waxed enthusiastic over Berkshire’s investment in BYD, a Chinese maker of electric cars. We are about to harness the power of the sun, he said, and use more electric energy to preserve hydrocarbon energy for chemicals that are more important. The main technical problem of mankind is about to be fixed, he opined. Then he and Munger headed off to meet with the international shareholders, and Buffett and Astrid attended another round of parties on Saturday night.

Within days, Buffett would begin planning the 2010 meeting—when he would be almost eighty. He couldn’t believe he would be eighty. Every year he attacked the meeting planning as though this year would be his ultimate statement—his greatest show on earth. In 2009, he had shown off an electric car. He would have to find some way to top that in 2010.

Meanwhile, to his slight chagrin, Borsheim’s had missed out on one sale in 2009. (Every sale mattered to Buffett.) At 3:00 p.m. during the shareholder meeting, “Alex from Boston” asked Buffett what individuals could do to help the economy. Buffett said, first, to spend money, then repeated that new household formation would be helpful to the economy. With that, “Alex from Boston,” who was Buffett’s grandnephew Alex Buffett Rozek, asked his girlfriend Mimi Krueger to marry him. Mimi, stunned to be asked in front of thousands of people, said yes, and Alex gave her his grandmother Doris’s sapphire-and-diamond ring, which Warren had given his sister for her seventy-fifth birthday.

Buffett the showman had always wanted to have a wedding at the Berkshire shareholder meeting, but had never quite managed to pull that off. He would settle for an engagement instead.

Excerpted from The Snowball:: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder Copyright © 2009 by Alice Schroeder. Excerpted by permission of Bantam, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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