I mean people -- people don't get -- they don't get smarter about things that get as basic as greed and you can't stand to see your neighbor getting rich. You know you're smarter than he is, and he's doing these things, you know, and he's getting rich, and your spouse is getting unhappy with you because you aren't doing -- pretty soon you start doing it. And so you get what I call the natural progression, the three Is. The innovators, the imitators, and the idiots.
Howard Warren BuffettI don't think it would be crazy to have a model or an entity model on the Reconstruction Finance Corp. That goes back to 1932, although it was really implemented in '33 under Jesse Jones, and it invested in mostly banks initially and preferred stock and that sort of thing.
Howard Warren BuffettWhen people talk about cash being king, it's not king if it just sits there and never does anything. There are times when cash buys more than other times, and this is one of the other times when it buys a fair amount more, so we use it.
Howard Warren BuffettYou may be very mad at some guy that walked away with a huge golden parachute, but that really isn't the important thing. I mean, if Pearl Harbor came along, you could have said the planning was wrong by the military ahead of time or maybe the battleships shouldn't have all been in the harbor and all that kind of thing.
Howard Warren BuffettAs long as you have markets, you'll have excesses. People went crazy with tulip bulbs. They went crazy with the South Sea Bubble, they went crazy internet stocks, they went crazy with the uranium stocks back when I was first getting started. I mean, you know, you're not going to change the human animal. And the human animal really doesn't get a lot smarter.
Howard Warren BuffettResolution Trust Company was set up to liquidate a bunch of assets that the government had inherited because the savings and loans went broke. So the savings and loans went broke, the government stepped in, paid off depositors, and now they're left with this mass of assets to sell. We're not talking about selling here, we're talking about buying intelligently. They were selling what they got handed to them by a bunch of savings and loan operators that had in many cases had done some very dumb thing. But their job was to liquidate it. And they liquidated.
Howard Warren Buffett