Saturday, June 10, 2017

Lunch With Warren Buffett Goes for $2.7 Million (The Anonymous Bidder Wasn't David Stockman)



The Glide Foundation charity will receive proceeds of  $2,679,001 from this year's high bidder in the auction to have lunch with billionaire investor Warren Buffett.

The bidder remains anonymous at this time. However, I believe it is safe to conclude it wasn't former Office of Management and Budget director under Ronald Reagan, David Stockman.

In his recent book, Trumped! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin... And How to Bring It Back, Stockman writes:
The Oracle of Omaha is no genius and he did not invent anything, even a new unique method of investing in allocating capital. He may have read Graham and Dodd as a youthful punter, but his nominal net worth did not grow from $2.1 billion in 1987 to $73 billion at present by following the old fashioned precepts of value investing.

Instead, he bought the obvious consumer names of the Baby-Boom demographic wave like Coke and Gillette; had a keen facility for grabbing what he believed slower footed investors would also be buying later; appreciated the value of banks and other financial companies (like Goldman Sachs) that suckled on the public teat; and mainly rode the 29- year wave that caused finance to soar from$12 trillion to $93 trillion after Greenspan took the helm at the Fed.

Stated differently under regime of honest money in free market finance no mere insurance company portfolio manager could make 19x in real terms in  29-years. It can't be done purely through the money game

The truth of the matter is that the better part of St. Warren's fortune was manufactured in the Eccles Building.




BTW, The Federal Reserve had a lot to do with the climb in the wealth of the Koch Brothers as I pointed out in 2012: How the Koch Brothers Became Billionaires

  -RW

1 comment:

  1. According to a newspaper called the Onion, government-sourced leaks have named Robert Wenzel as the winning bidder for the Buffet dinner.

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