In the long run managements stressing accounting appearance over economic substance usually achieve little of either.

If you know how to value businesses, it's crazy to own 50 stocks or 40 stocks or 30 stocks, probably because there aren't that many wonderful businesses understandable to a single human being in all likelihood. To forego buying more of some super-wonderful business and instead put your money into #30 or #35 on your list of attractiveness just strikes Charlie and me as madness.

It's the deleveraging that's going on right now that has caused the credit crisis.

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

You can't stand to see your neighbor getting rich. You know you're smarter than he is and he's doing these things and he's getting rich.

We have provided capital here with a couple of institutions recently. The Federal government did that in the '30s for the RFC and I think there could well be a proper role for government in that.

And people really behaved in a fraudulent way or something, we'll go back and find the culprits later on. But that really isn't the problem we have. I mean that's where it came from, though. We leveraged up and if you have a 20 percent fall in value of a $20 trillion asset, that's $4 trillion. And when $4 trillion lands - losses land in the wrong part of this economy, it can gum up the whole place.