Highlights

亮点

[The transcript of Buffett’s lectures is 39 pages.  For those of you who don’t have the time to read the entire transcript, we’ve pulled out some of the highlights – the most interesting things Buffett said and/or the things that we’ve never heard him say anywhere else.]

【巴菲特讲座的文字记录共有39页。对于那些没有时间通读全文的人，我们摘出了部分亮点——即巴菲特说过的最有意思、或者我们此前从未听他提起过的内容。】

投资成功的关键

I found some strange things when I was 20 years old. I went through Moody’s Bank and Finance Manual, about 1,000 pages. I went through it twice. The first time I went through, I saw a company called Western Insurance Security Company in Fort Scott, Kansas. They owned 92%, at that time, of the Western Casualty and Surety Company. Perfectly sound company. I knew people that represented them in Omaha. Earnings per share \$20, stock price \$16. (garbled) ... much more than that. I ran ads in the Fort Scott, Kansas paper to try and buy that stock – it had only 300 or 400 shareholders. It was selling at one times earnings, it had a first class \[management team]...

我20岁时就发现了一些奇怪的事情。我把穆迪《银行与金融手册》从头到尾看了一遍，大约有1000页，我还看了两遍。第一次阅读时，我发现了一家名为堪萨斯州福特斯科特市的Western Insurance Security Company的公司。当时它持有Western Casualty and Surety Company 92%的股份。这是一家完全稳健的公司。我在奥马哈认识一些代表他们的人。每股收益20美元，股价16美元。（杂音）……远不止于此。我在堪萨斯州福特斯科特当地报纸上刊登广告，想买入这只股票——它只有三四百名股东。当时它以一倍市盈率交易，拥有一流的\[管理团队]……

[Tape ends here]

【磁带到此结束】

... Incidentally, I would say that almost everybody I know in Wall Street has had as many good ideas as I have, they just had a lot of \[bad] ideas too. And I’m serious about that. I mean when I bought Western Insurance Security selling at \$16 and earning \$20 per share, I put half my net worth into it. I checked it out first – I went down to the insurance commission and got out the convention statements, I read Best’s, and I did a lot of things first. But, I mean, my dad wasn’t in it, I’d only had one insurance class at Columbia – but it was not beyond my capabilities to do that, and it isn’t beyond your capabilities.

……顺便说一句，我想说的是，在华尔街我认识的几乎所有人都有和我一样多的好主意，他们只不过也有很多\[糟糕的]主意。我是认真的。比如当我以每股16美元买入、而每股赚20美元的Western Insurance Security时，我把自己一半的净资产都投了进去。我事先做过调查——我去了保险监管机构，调出了年会报告，我查阅了《贝斯特年鉴》，还做了很多其他功课。但我的父亲并没有参与，我在哥伦比亚大学也只上过一门保险课——然而做这件事并未超出我的能力范围，也不会超出你们的能力范围。

Now if I had some rare insight about software, or something like that – I would say that, maybe, other people couldn’t do that – or biotechnology, or something. And I’m not saying that every insight that I have is an insight that somebody else could have, but there were all kinds of people that could have understood American Express Company as well as I understood it in ‘62. They may have been...they may have had a different temperament than I did, so that they were paralyzed by fear, or that they wanted the crowd to be with them, or something like that, but I didn’t know anything about credit cards that they didn’t know, or about travelers checks. Those are not hard products to understand. But what I did have was an intense interest and I was willing, when I saw something I wanted to do, to do it. And if I couldn’t see something to do, to not do anything. By far, the most important quality is not how much IQ you’ve got. IQ is not the scarce factor. You need a reasonable amount of intelligence, but the temperament is 90% of it.

如果我对软件之类的领域有某种罕见的洞见——那我会说，也许别人就做不到——比如生物技术。但我并不是说我拥有的每一个洞见别人都可以拥有，不过在1962年，有很多人本可以像我一样理解美国运通公司。他们也许……他们也许与我有着不同的性情，以至于被恐惧麻痹，或者想要随大流，诸如此类；但关于信用卡或旅行支票，我并不比他们了解更多。这些产品并不难理解。但我拥有的是强烈的兴趣，并且当我发现想做的事情时，我愿意去做；而当我找不到可做之事时，就什么也不做。最重要的品质绝不是你的智商有多高。智商并不是稀缺因素。你需要适量的智力，但性格（气质）占了90%。

That’s why Graham is so important. Graham’s book \[The Intelligent Investor] talks about the qualities of temperament you have to bring to the game, and that is the game.

这就是格雷厄姆如此重要的原因。格雷厄姆的书《聪明的投资者》讨论了你在投资游戏中必须具备的性格特质，而那正是游戏本身。

在获准买入股票之前需提交一份说明

You shouldn’t buy a stock, in my view, for any other reason than the fact that you think it’s selling for less than it’s worth, considering all the factors about the business.

在我看来，买入一只股票的唯一理由应当是：在综合考虑该业务所有因素后，你认为其股价低于其内在价值。

I used to tell the stock exchange people that before a person bought 100 shares of General Motors they should have to write out on a \[piece of paper:] “I’m buying 100 shares of General Motors at X” and multiply that by the number of shares “and therefore General Motors is worth more than \$32 billion” or whatever it multiplies out to, “because ... \[fill in the reasons]” And if they couldn’t answer that question, their order wouldn’t be accepted.

我过去常对证券交易所的人说，在某人买入100股通用汽车之前，他应该在一张【纸】上写下：“我以X价格买入100股通用汽车”，再把这价格乘以股数，“因此通用汽车的市值超过320亿美元”，或者算出多少就是多少，“因为……【填写理由】”。如果他们答不上来，这笔订单就不该被接受。

That test should be applied. I should never buy anything unless I can fill out that piece of paper. I may be wrong, but I would know the answer to that. “I’m buying Coca Cola right now, 660 million shares of stock, a little under \$50. The whole company costs me about \$32 billion dollars.” Before you buy 100 shares of stock at \$48 you ought to be able to answer “I’m paying \$32 billion today for the Coca Cola Company because...” \[Banging the podium for emphasis.] If you can’t answer that question, you shouldn’t buy it. If you can answer that question, and you do it a few times, you’ll make a lot of money.

这个测试必须执行。除非我能填好那张纸，否则绝不买任何东西。我可能会出错，但我会知道答案。“我现在买可口可乐，6.6亿股，股价略低于50美元。整家公司花我约320亿美元。”在你以48美元买入100股之前，你应该能回答：“我今天花320亿美元买下可口可乐公司，因为……”【敲讲台强调】如果你回答不了，就不该买。如果你能回答，并且重复几次，你会赚大钱。

衡量优质业务的测试

A couple of fast tests about how good a business is. First question is “how long does the management have to think before they decide to raise prices?” You’re looking at marvelous business when you look in the mirror and say “mirror, mirror on the wall, how much should I charge for Coke this fall?” \[And the mirror replies, “More.”] That’s a great business. When you say, like we used to in the textile business, when you get down on your knees, call in all the priests, rabbis, and everyone else, \[and say] “just another half cent a yard.” Then you get up and they say “We won’t pay it.” It’s just night and day. I mean, if you walk into a drugstore, and you say “I’d like a Hershey bar” and the man says “I don’t have any Hershey bars, but I’ve got this unmarked chocolate bar, and it’s a nickel cheaper than a Hershey bar” you just go across the street and buy a Hershey bar. That is a good business.

判断一门生意优劣有几个快速测试。第一个问题是：“管理层在决定涨价前需要思考多久？”当你照镜子说：“镜子啊镜子，今年秋天我该给可乐定价多少？”【镜子回答：“更高。”】这就是绝佳的生意。而当你像我们过去在纺织业那样，跪下来，召集所有神父、拉比等人，【说】“每码再涨半分钱吧”，然后站起来却被告知“我们不付”，那就是天壤之别。再比如，你走进药店说“我要块好时巧克力”，店员说“我没有好时，但有这种无牌巧克力，比好时便宜五分钱”，你会径直过街去买好时。这才是好生意。

The ability to raise prices – the ability to differentiate yourself in a real way, and a real way means you can charge a different price – that makes a great business.

提价能力——即真正区别于竞争对手、并能因此收取不同价格的能力——造就了伟大的企业。

I’ll try this on the students later: What’s the highest price of a daily newspaper in the United States? \[Pause] \[This is what he said to the students later: Most of you are familiar with it. The highest priced daily newspaper in the United States, with any circulation at all, is the Daily Racing Form. It sells about 150,000 copies a day, and it has for about 50 years, and it’s either \$2.00 or \$2.25 (they keep raising prices) and it’s essential. If you’re heading to the racetrack and you’ve got a choice between betting on your wife’s birthday, and Joe’s Little Green Sheet, and the Daily Racing Form, if you’re a serious racing handicapper, you want The Form. You can charge \$2.00 for The Form, you can charge \$1.50, you can charge \$2.50 and people are going to buy it. It’s like selling needles to addicts, basically. It’s an essential business. It will be an essential business five or 10 years from now. You have to decide whether horse racing will be around five or 10 years from now, and you have to decide whether there’s any way people will get their information about past performances of different horses from different sources. But you’ve only got about two questions to answer, and if you answer them, you know the business will make a lot of money. The Form has huge profit margins, incidentally. Wider than any other newspaper. They charge what they want to basically. It’s an easy to understand business – so easy to understand.]

稍后我要问学生们一个问题：美国售价最高的日报是哪一份？【停顿】【他随后对学生们说：你们大多都知道答案。美国所有有发行量的日报中，售价最高的是《Daily Racing Form》（赛马日报）。它每天销量约15万份，持续了大约50年，售价为2.00或2.25美元（他们不断涨价），而且它是必需品。如果你要去赛马场，在给妻子生日下注、看Joe’s Little Green Sheet和买《Daily Racing Form》之间做选择，如果你是一个严肃的赛马博彩者，你就需要《Form》。你可以把《Form》定价2.00美元、1.50美元或2.50美元，人们都会买。基本上就像向瘾君子卖针。这是一门必需的生意。五年或十年后，它仍将是一门必需的生意。你需要判断赛马运动五年或十年后是否仍在，还要判断人们是否会通过其他渠道获取赛马过往表现的信息。但你只需回答大约两个问题，如果答对了，就知道这门生意会赚很多钱。顺带一提，《Form》的利润率极高，超过任何其他报纸。他们基本想收多少就收多少。这是一门易于理解的生意——非常易于理解。】

There are products like that, and there are products like sheet steel. And they’re night and day.

有些产品就像这样，也有些产品像薄板钢，二者简直天壤之别。

痛苦型 vs. 欣喜型企业：案例一

It does make a difference what kind of a business you get associated with. For that reason I’ve set forth in this little handout Company A and Company E. I’m not going to tell you for the moment what these companies are. I’m going to tell you one thing about the two companies. One of the companies, to the point of where this cuts off, lost its investors more money than virtually any business in the world. The other company made its owner more money than virtually any company in the world. So one of these two companies, Company A and Company E, has made one of its owners one of the five wealthiest people in the world, while the other company made its owners appreciably poorer, probably more so than any other company to that point in time.

你所参与的企业类型确实会产生差异。因此，在这份小讲义里我列出了公司 A 和公司 E。我暂时不会告诉你这两家公司是什么，但先透露一点：其中一家公司在截取到的这一时期里，让投资人亏损的金额几乎位居全球最惨；而另一家公司却让其所有者赚到的钱几乎是全球最多。也就是说，公司 A 与公司 E 之中，有一家使其持有人跻身全球五大富豪之列，而另一家则让其股东显著变穷，很可能在当时比任何其他公司都更惨。

Now I’ll tell you a little bit about these companies (we’re leading up to the question of whether the business makes a difference). Company A had thousands of MBAs working for it. Company E had none. I wanted to get your attention. Company A had all kinds of employee benefit programs, stock options, pensions, the works. Company E never had stock options. Company A had thousands of patents – they probably held more patents than just about any company in the United States. Company E never invented anything. Company A’s product improved dramatically in this period, Company E’s product just sat.

接下来我再稍微补充一点（我们正引出“企业本身是否重要”这个问题）。公司 A 拥有成千上万名 MBA 员工，而公司 E 一个都没有——我这是故意提醒你们注意。公司 A 员工福利齐全，股票期权、养老金样样都有；公司 E 从未发过期权。公司 A 拥有数以千计的专利，可能是全美最会申请专利的企业之一；公司 E 从未发明任何东西。期间公司 A 的产品大幅改进，而公司 E 的产品几乎原地踏步。

So far, based on what I’ve told you, does anybody have any idea of which company was the great success, and why?

到目前为止，凭我说的这些，你们能猜出哪家公司大获成功、又是为什么吗？

If you get to buy one of these two companies, and this is all you know, and you get to ask me one question to decide on which one to buy. If you ask me the right question, you will probably make the right decision about the company’s stock, and one will make you enormously wealthy.

假设你只能在这两家公司里挑一家入手，而且你只知道这些信息；你可以向我提出一个问题来决定买哪家。如果你问对了问题，你大概率能做出正确的投资决定，其中一家公司会让你富得流油。

\[Audience asks questions]

【听众提问】

Both companies make products used every day. They started as necessities, highly useful, nothing esoteric about either one, although company A does have all these patents. There’s more technology involved in company A.

两家公司都生产日常用品。它们一开始都是必需品，非常实用，没有什么高深莫测，尽管公司 A 的专利很多、技术含量更高。

\[How many companies compete with either one?]

【有多少家公司与它们竞争？】

Good question, very good question. In effect, neither company had any competition. And that might differentiate in some cases.

好问题，非常好的问题。实际上，两家公司几乎都没有竞争对手——在某些情况下这可能就是分水岭。

Well, I’ll tell you a little more about it. Company A is known as company A because it was in agony, and Company E, as Company E, because it was in ecstasy. Company A is American Telephone and Telegraph. I’ve omitted eight zeros on the left hand side, and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, at the end of 1979, was selling for \$10 billion less than the shareholders had either put in or left in the business. In other words, if shareholder’s equity was “X” the market value was X minus \$10 billion. So the money that shareholders had put in, or left in, the business had shrunk by \$10 billion in terms of market value.

我再透露多一点。公司 A 被称为 A 是因为它“痛苦”，公司 E 被称为 E 是因为它“欣喜”。公司 A 就是美国电话电报公司（AT\&T）。我把左侧省去了八个零——到 1979 年底，AT\&T 的市值比股东投入或留存于公司的资本少了 100 亿美元。换句话说，若股东权益为 “X”，市值就是 X 减 100 亿美元，也就是股东的钱在市值层面缩水了 100 亿。

Company E, the excellent company, I left off only six zeros. And that happens to be a company called Thompson Newspapers. Thomson Newspapers, which most of you have probably never heard of, actually owns about 5% of the newspapers in the United States. But they’re all small ones. And, as I said, it has no MBAs, no stock options – still doesn’t – and it made its owner, Lord Thompson. He wasn’t Lord Thompson when he started – he started with 1,500 bucks in North Bay, Ontario buying a little radio station but, when he got to be one of the five richest men, he became Lord Thompson.

至于优秀的公司 E，我只省去了六个零——它就是汤姆森报业公司。你们大多数人可能没听过，但它实际拥有全美大约 5% 的报纸，不过都是小报。我刚才说过，它没有 MBA、没有期权——现在仍然没有——却让其所有者汤姆森爵士发了财。他创业时还不是爵士，只是在安大略北湾用 1,500 美元买下一家小电台；等到跻身全球五大富豪后，他才封为爵士。

…The telephone company, with the patents, the MBAs, the stock options, and everything else, had one problem, and that problem is illustrated by those figures on that lower left hand column. And those figures show the plant investment in the telephone business. That’s \$47 billion, starting off with, growing to \$99 billion over an eight or nine year period. More and more and more money had to be tossed in, in order to make these increased earnings, going from \$2.2 billion to \$5.6 billion.

……这家拥有专利、MBA、股票期权等一应俱全的电话公司，存在一个核心问题，左下角那组数字正说明了这一点：电话业务的厂房投资从 470 亿美元一路增至 990 亿美元，耗时八九年。为了把利润从 22 亿美元提高到 56 亿美元，他们不得不不断往里砸钱。

So, they got more money, but you can get more money from a savings account if you keep adding money to it every year. The progress in earnings that the telephone company made was only achievable because they kept on shoving more money into the savings account and the truth was, under the conditions of the ‘70s, they were not getting paid commensurate with the amount of money that they had to shove into the pot, whereas Lord Thompson, once he bought the paper in Council Bluffs, never put another dime in. They just mailed money every year. And as they got more money, he bought more newspapers. And, in fact, he said it was going to say on his tombstone that he bought newspapers in order to make more money in order to buy more newspapers \[and so on].

没错，他们赚到了更多钱，但如果你每年往储蓄账户里追加存款，也能有更多钱。电话公司的利润增长完全依赖于持续追加资本；可在 70 年代的环境下，他们得到的回报并不匹配投入。而汤姆森爵士买下 Council Bluffs 的报纸之后，再也没往里投过一分钱，每年都只是收钱。钱越多，他就买更多报纸。他甚至说，自己的墓志铭会写：“买报纸是为了挣更多钱，以便再去买报纸”，依此循环。

The idea was that, essentially, he raised prices and raised earnings there every year without having to put more capital into the business.

核心在于：他每年都能提价、提升收益，却无需再投入资本。

One is a marvelous, absolutely sensational business, the other one is a terrible business. If you have a choice between going to work for a wonderful business that is not capital intensive, and one that is capital intensive, I suggest that you look at the one that is not capital intensive. I took 25 years to figure that out, incidentally.

一个是非凡、令人惊叹的生意；另一个则糟糕透顶。如果你可以选择去一家资本开销小、回报高的企业或去一家资本密集型企业工作，我建议你选择前者。我可是花了 25 年才悟到这一点。

痛苦型 vs. 欣喜型企业：案例二（伯克希尔的两家公司）

On the next page, I’ve got a couple of other businesses here. Company E is the ecstasy on the left. You can see earnings went up nicely: they went from \$4 million to \$27 million. They only employed assets of \$17 million, so that is really a wonderful business. On \$17 million they earned \$27 million, 150% on invested capital. That is a good business. The one on the right, Company A, the agony, had \$11 or \$12 million tied up, and some years made a few bucks, and in some years lost a few bucks.

接下来的页面上，我又列了两家企业。左边是欣喜的公司 E，利润从 400 万美元成长到 2,700 万美元，只占用了 1,700 万美元资产，真正意义上的好生意——1,700 万赚 2,700 万，投资回报率 150%。右边的痛苦公司 A 却占用了 1,100–1,200 万美元，有些年份赚点小钱，有些年份还亏钱。

Now, here again we might ask ourselves, “What differentiates these companies?” Does anybody have any idea why company E might have done so much better than Company A? Usually somebody says at this point “maybe company E was better managed than company A.” There’s only one problem with that conclusion and that is, Company E and Company A had the same manager – me!

那么，再次让我们自问：“这两家公司究竟差在哪儿？”有人或许会说：“可能是公司 E 的管理层比公司 A 更优秀。”但这种说法有个致命问题：公司 E 和公司 A 的经理是同一个人——就是我！

The company E is our candy business, See’s Candies out in California. I don’t know how many of you come from the west, but it dominates the boxed chocolate business out there and the earnings went from \$4 million to \$27 million, and in the year that just ended they were about \$38 million. In other words, they mail us all the money they make every year and they keep growing, and making more money, and everybody’s very happy.

公司 E 是我们的糖果业务——加州的 See’s Candies。不知道在座有多少人来自美国西部，那边的盒装巧克力几乎被它垄断，利润从 400 万增至 2,700 万，到刚结束的那个年度大约有 3,800 万。也就是说，他们每年都把赚到的全部现金寄给我们，而且收入不断增长，大家都很开心。

Company A was our textile business. That’s a business that took me 22 years to figure out it wasn’t very good. Well, in the textile business, we made over half of the men’s suit linings in the United States. If you wore a men’s suit, chances were that it had a Hathaway lining. And we made them during World War II, when customers couldn’t get their linings from other people. Sears Roebuck voted us “Supplier of the Year.” They were wild about us. The thing was, they wouldn’t give us another half a cent a yard because nobody had ever gone into a men’s clothing store and asked for a pin striped suit with a Hathaway lining. You just don’t see that.

公司 A 则是我们的纺织业务。我花了 22 年才认清它并不好。在纺织业里，我们曾生产了全美超一半的西装里衬。如果你穿男士西装，很可能用的是 Hathaway 里衬。二战期间，其他厂商供不了里衬，我们照样供货。西尔斯百货还授予我们“年度最佳供应商”。他们对我们赞不绝口，但就是不肯多付半分钱一码，因为从来没人走进男装店说：“我要一件带 Hathaway 里衬的细条纹西装。”这根本不会发生。

As a practical matter, if some guy’s going to offer them a lining for 79 cents, \[it makes no difference] who’s going to take them fishing, and supplied them during World War II, and was personal friends with the Chairman of Sears. Because we charged 79½ cents a yard, it was “no dice.”

现实中，如果有人愿以 79 美分供应里衬，就算我们曾在二战期间救急、会带他们钓鱼、还是西尔斯董事长的老朋友，他们也不会买我们 79.5 美分一码的货——说什么都不行。

See’s Candies, on the other hand, made something that people had an emotional attraction to, and a physical attraction you might say. We’re almost to Valentine’s Day, so can you imagine going to your wife or sweetheart, handing her a box of candy and saying “Honey, I took the low bid.”

反过来看 See’s，卖的是让人产生情感依恋、甚至生理依恋的东西。情人节快到了，你能想象对妻子或女友递上一盒糖果时说：“亲爱的，我选了最低价的”吗？

Essentially, every year for 19 years I’ve raised the price of candy on December 26. And 19 years goes by and everyone keeps buying candy. Every ten years I tried to raise the price of linings a fraction of a cent, and they’d throw the linings back at me. Our linings were just as good as our candies. It was much harder to run the linings factory than it was to run the candy company. The problem is, just because a business is lousy doesn’t mean it isn’t difficult.

In the end, I like to think anyway that if Alfred P. Sloan \[the legendary CEO of General Motors during its heyday] came back and tried to run the lining business, it wouldn’t make as much money as a good business. The product was undifferentiated. The candy product is differentiated. (Garbled story of Hershey Bar and Coke versus unbranded but modestly cheaper products).

归根结底，就算让通用汽车鼎盛时期的传奇 CEO 阿尔弗雷德·斯隆回来经营里衬业务，他也不可能赚到好生意那样的钱。里衬这种商品缺乏差异化；糖果则不同。（此处模糊插述“好时巧克力与可口可乐 vs. 无牌但稍微便宜的产品”的故事。）

You really want something where, if they don’t have it in stock, you want to go across the street to get it. Nobody cares what kind of steel goes into a car. Have you ever gone into a car dealership to buy a Cadillac and said “I’d like a Cadillac with steel that came from the South Works of US Steel.” It just doesn’t work that way, so that when General Motors buys they call in all the steel companies and say “here’s the best price we’ve got so far, and you’ve got to decide if you want to beat their price, or have your plant sit idle.”

管理层的重要性：Cap Cities 与 CBS

I put one business in here, CBS versus Cap Cities in 1957, when my friend Tom Murphy took over Cap Cities. They had a little bankrupt UHF station in Albany. They ran it out of a home for retired nuns. And it was very appropriate because they had to pray every day. At that time CBS was the largest advertising medium in the world: \$385 million in revenues whereas Cap Cities had \$900,000 in revenues. Cap Cities made \$37,000 a year and they paid my friend Murph \$12,000 a year. CBS made \$48 million pretax. Cap Cities was selling for \$5 million in the market and priced on the come, while CBS was selling for \$500 million.

我在这里放了一个案例，讲的是 1957 年 CBS 与 Cap Cities 的对比，那一年我的朋友 Tom Murphy 接管了 Cap Cities，当时他们在奥尔巴尼只拥有一家破产的 UHF 电视台，他们把电视台设在一座退休修女院里运营，这也颇为贴切，因为他们每天都得祈祷；那时 CBS 是全球最大的广告媒体，收入 3.85 亿美元，而 Cap Cities 的收入只有 90 万美元；Cap Cities 每年赚 3.7 万美元，付给我朋友 Murph 的年薪是 1.2 万美元；CBS 税前利润 4,800 万美元；Cap Cities 的市值只有 500 万美元，完全是凭前景定价，而 CBS 的市值为 5 亿美元。

Now, if you look at the two companies, Cap Cities has a market value of about \$7 billion and CBS has a market value of about \$2 billion. They were both in the same business, broadcasting. Neither one had, certainly Cap Cities didn’t have, any patents. Cap Cities didn’t have anything that CBS didn’t have. And somehow CBS took a wonderful business that was worth \$500 million, and over about 30 years they managed a little increase – peanuts – while my friend Murphy, with exactly the same business, with one little tiny UHF station in Albany, (bear in mind that CBS had the largest stations in New York City and Chicago) and my friend Murph just killed them. And you say “how can that happen?” And that’s what you ought to study in business school. You ought to study Tom Murphy at Cap Cities. And you also ought to study Bill Paley \[who was the CEO] at CBS.

如今再看这两家公司，Cap Cities 的市值约 70 亿美元，而 CBS 的市值约 20 亿美元；他们都在同一行——广播业，谁都没有专利，至少 Cap Cities 没有；Cap Cities 没有的东西，CBS 也都有，可不知怎么的，CBS 把一家当初价值 5 亿美元的优秀企业在 30 年里只发展出一点点增值——连零头都算不上，而我朋友 Murphy 靠着一座位于奥尔巴尼的小小 UHF 站（记住 CBS 当时在纽约和芝加哥拥有最大的电视台）却干掉了 CBS；你会问“这怎么可能？”这正是商学院该研究的，你应该研究 Cap Cities 的 Tom Murphy，也该研究 CBS 的 Bill Paley【当时的 CEO】。

We have a saying around Berkshire that “all we ever want to know is where we’re going to die, so we’ll never go there.” And CBS is what you don’t want. It’s as important not to do what CBS did, and it is important to do what Cap Cities did. Cap Cities did a lot of things right, but if CBS had done the same things right, Cap Cities would have never come close.

They had all the IQ at CBS that they had at Cap Cities. They had 50 times as many people, and they were all coming to work early and going home late. They had all kinds of strategic planners, they had management consultants. They had more than I can say. Yet they lost. They lost to a guy that started out with a leaky rowboat, at the same time the other guy left in the QE II. By the time they got into New York, the guy in the rowboat brought in more cargo than the QE II did. There’s a real story in that. And you can understand broadcasting, so it’s really worth studying what two people in the same field did, and why one succeeded so much and one failed.

CBS 拥有的智商与 Cap Cities 无异，人员却是后者的 50 倍，大家都早来晚走，坐拥无数战略规划师与管理顾问，应有尽有，但他们输掉了；他们输给了一个划着漏水小船的人，而 CBS 好像乘着豪华邮轮 QE II 出发，可等两人都抵达纽约时，小船带来的货物比 QE II 还多，这里大有文章可做；广播业并不难懂，值得好好研究同一领域两个人为何一个大获成功、一个却失败。

I couldn’t resist kicking in the last page: the only public offering Cap Cities ever made, back in 1957 which raised, as you can see, \$300,000. And this was when they were going to buy the station in Raleigh/Durham. The only public offering of stock the company’s every made (aside: they sold us a block of stock when they bought ABC). And if you look very carefully you’ll see that the underwriting commission – they took two firms to get this sold – the total underwriting commission was \$6,500 bucks.

我忍不住补充最后一页：Cap Cities 唯一一次上市募股是在 1957 年，那次他们筹了 30 万美元，用来收购罗利／达勒姆的电视台；这是公司历史上唯一的公开募股（顺便说一句，他们收购 ABC 时也向我们卖过一大块股票）；如果你仔细看招股书，就会发现承销佣金——两家券商联手才卖掉——总共只有 6,500 美元。

“盲目模仿同行”的危险

The last thing I want to show you, before we get onto your questions, is an ad that was run June 16, 1969, for 1,000,000 shares of American Motors. This is a reproduction from the Wall Street Journal of that day. Now does anybody notice anything unusual about that ad?

在回答你们的提问前，我想给大家看最后一件东西：1969 年 6 月 16 日刊登的一则广告，发行 100 万股 American Motors 股票，这是当天《华尔街日报》的复印件；有人注意到广告有什么反常之处吗？

\[Guesses from audience.]

【听众猜测】

Everybody in that ad has disappeared. There are 37 investment bankers that sold that issue, plus American Motors, and they are all gone. Maybe that’s why they call them tombstone ads. Now the average business of the New York Stock exchange in 1969 was 11 million shares. Average volume now is fifteen times as large. Now here’s an industry whose volume has grown 15 to 1 in 20 years. Marvelous growth in the financial world. And here are 37 out of 37, and those are some of the biggest names on Wall Street, and some of them had been around the longest, and 37 out of 37 have disappeared. And that’s why I say you ought to think about \[the long-term durability of a business?] because these people obviously didn’t.

广告里的所有公司都消失了；当年承销该发行的 37 家投行加上 American Motors 本身，如今统统不见了，也许这就是“墓碑广告”之名的由来；1969 年纽约证交所日均成交量 1,100 万股，而现在是当年的 15 倍；20 年里行业交易量 15 倍增长，可那 37 家华尔街大名鼎鼎、历史悠久的公司却 37 家全军覆没；这就是我常说的，你得思考企业的长期存续力——显然他们没这么想。

These were run by people with high IQs, by people that worked ungodly hard. They were people that had an intense interest in success. They worked long hours. They all thought they were going to be leaders on Wall Street at some point, and they all went around, incidentally, giving advice to other companies about how to run their business. That’s sort of interesting.

这些公司都由高智商、极度勤奋的人经营，他们渴望成功、工作时间超长，都自认终有一天会成为华尔街领袖，而且到处给别的企业出谋划策，教人怎样经营，这倒挺有意思。

You go to Wall Street today, and there’s some company the guy hadn’t heard of two weeks before and he’s trying to sell you. He will lay out this computer run of the next 10 years, yet he doesn’t have the faintest idea of what his own business is going to earn next week!

如今去华尔街，你会遇到某人推销一家他两周前还没听过的公司，他会拿出电脑打印的未来十年预测，可他连自己公司下周赚多少钱都全然不知！

Here are a group of 37. And the question is, how can you get a result like that? That is not a result that you get by chance. How can people who are bright, who work hard, who have their own money in the business – these are not a bunch of absentee owners – how can they get such a bad result? And I suggest that’s a good thing to think about before you get a job and go out into the world.

眼前这 37 家的结果并非偶然；聪明、勤奋、用自家资本经营——绝非甩手掌柜——怎么会落得如此下场？我建议各位在走向职场前好好思考这个问题。

I would say that if you had to pick one thing that did it more than anything else, it’s the mindless imitation of one’s peers that produced this result. Whatever the other guy did, the other 36 were like a bunch of lemmings in terms of following. That’s what’s gotten all the big banks in trouble for the past 15 years. Every time somebody big does something dumb, other people can hardly wait to copy it. If you do nothing else when you get out of here, do things only when they make sense to you. You ought to be able to write “I am going to work for General Motors because ... “I am buying 100 shares of Coca Coals stock because...” And if you can’t write an intelligent answer to those questions, don’t do it.

I proposed this to the stock exchange some years ago: that everybody be able to write out “I am buying 100 shares of Coca Cola Company, market value \$32 billion, because ....” and they wouldn’t take your order until you filled that thing out.

几年前我向交易所建议：每个人下单前都得写一句“我买入可口可乐 100 股，市值 320 亿美元，因为……”填好才能下单。

I find this very useful when I write my annual report. I learn while I think when I write it out. Some of the things I think I think, I find don’t make any sense when I start tying to write them down and explain them to people. You ought to be able to explain why you’re taking the job you’re taking, why you’re making the investment you’re making, or whatever it may be. And if it can’t stand applying pencil to paper, you’d better think it through some more.

People in that ad did a lot of things that could not have stood that test. Some major bankers in the United States did a lot of things that could not meet that test. One of the bankers in the United States, who’s in plenty of trouble now, bragged a few years ago he never made a loan. And, from the way things are starting to look, he’s never going to collect on one either.

那则广告里的公司干了许多经不起这项检验的事；美国一些大银行家也干了不少；其中一位如今麻烦缠身的银行家几年前还吹嘘自己从不放贷，而眼下看来，他也永远收不回贷款了。

You should not be running one the major banks in the United States without having made loans. I mean, you learn about human nature, if nothing else, when you make loans.

经营美国大银行而从不放贷是不合适的；放贷最起码能让你了解人性。

杠杆的危险

The question is whether LBOs and junk bonds and so on have hurt the country in some fundamental way in terms of its competitiveness vis-à-vis the world. I wouldn’t go that far, but I think on balance it’s been a huge minus on the financial scene. Extreme leverage has been, generally speaking, a net minus. The analogy has been made (and there’s just enough truth to it to get you in trouble) that in buying some company with enormous amounts of debt, that it’s somewhat like driving a car down the road and placing a dagger on the steering wheel pointed at your heart. If you do that, you will be a better driver – that I can assure you. You will drive with unusual care. You also, someday, will hit a small pothole, or a piece of ice, and you will end up gasping. You will have fewer accidents, but when they come along, they’ll be fatal. Essentially, that’s what some of corporate America did in the last 10 years. And it was motivated by huge fees. And it was motivated by greed.

问题在于，杠杆收购、垃圾债等是否从根本上损害了美国对世界的竞争力；我倒不至于这么悲观，但整体而言对金融体系是一大负面；极端杠杆总体上是净负；有人打了个比方（恰好有点道理，却足以让你出事）：用巨额债务收购公司就像驾车时在方向盘装把尖刀直指心脏；这会让你成为更好的司机——我保证你会异常小心驾驶，但总有一天会碰到小坑或冰面，然后一命呜呼；事故会更少，可一旦发生就是致命；过去十年，美国部分企业就是这么干的，动机是巨额费用和贪婪。

The most extreme case I saw was a television station. About three years ago, a television station in Tampa sold for an amount where, when they had to borrow the money, the interest amounted to more than the total sales of the station. If everybody donated their labor, if they donated their programming, if they donated their utilities, they still wouldn’t have enough to pay the interest. They went crazy. And you can buy those bonds at 15 cents on the dollar. Charlie Keating’s enterprise \[Lincoln Savings and Loan Association in California, which became the nation’s largest thrift failure] had a bunch of them too. There’s a lot of crazy stuff that went on in the last five or six years. The fees on that deal, they paid \$365 million for the station, they borrowed \$385 million and you can guess where the extra money went. It went into the pockets of the people who put the deal together.

我见过最离谱的是一家电视台：三年前，坦帕一座电视台交易价高到，他们为此借的钱光利息就超过电视台全部销售额；即使所有员工、节目、电费都免费，也付不起利息；他们疯了；如今那些债券可按 15 美分兑付；Charlie Keating 的企业【加州林肯储贷，史上最大储贷倒闭案】也持有不少；过去五六年发生了很多疯狂事情；那笔交易支付 3.65 亿美元买台，借了 3.85 亿美元，你猜多出的钱去哪了？全进撮合这笔交易的人口袋。

Donald Trump and the Perils of Leverage

唐纳德·特朗普与杠杆之险

Where did Donald Trump go wrong? The big problem with Donald Trump was he never went right. He basically overpaid for properties, but he got people to lend him the money. He was terrific at borrowing money. If you look at his assets, and what he paid for them, and what he borrowed to get them, there was never any real equity there. He owes, perhaps, \$3.5 billion now, and, if you had to pick a figure as to the value of the assets, it might be more like \$2.5 billion. He’s a billion in the hole, which is a lot better than being \$100 in the hole because if you’re \$100 in the hole, they come and take the TV set. If you’re a billion in the hole, they say “hang in there Donald.”

唐纳德·特朗普错在哪？问题在于他从没做对过；他基本上为资产付出过高价格，却能找到人借钱给他，他非常擅长借钱；如果你看他的资产、购价和融资额，几乎不存在真正的股权；他目前可能欠 35 亿美元，而他的资产价值若硬要估或许只有 25 亿美元；他倒欠10 亿美元；这比欠 100 美元要好得多——欠 100 美元他们会来搬走电视机，欠 10 亿美元他们反倒说“坚持住，唐纳德”。

It’s interesting why smart people go astray. That’s one of the most interesting things in business. I’ve seen all sorts of people with terrific IQs that end up flopping in Wall Street or business because they beat themselves. They have 500 horsepower engines, and get 50 horsepower out of them. Or, worse than that, they have their foot on the brake and the accelerator at the same time. They really manage to screw themselves up.

聪明人为何误入歧途很有趣，这是商界最有意思的现象之一；我见过高智商之辈在华尔街或商界折戟，只因自毁前程；他们拥有 500 马力引擎，却只发挥出 50 马力，甚至更糟——一脚踩刹车一脚踩油门，硬把自己整垮。

… I would suggest that the big successes I’ve met had a fair amount of Ben Franklin in them. And Donald Trump did not.

……我发现那些大成功者身上多少都有些本杰明·富兰克林式特质，而唐纳德·特朗普则没有。

Life Tends to Snap You at Your Weakest Link

人生总会在你最薄弱的环节折断

One of the things you will find, which is interesting and people don’t think of it enough, with most businesses and with most individuals, life tends to snap you at your weakest link. So it isn’t the strongest link you’re looking for among the individuals in the room. It isn’t even the average strength of the chain. It’s the weakest link that causes the problem.

有件事很有意思却常被忽视：对大多数企业与个人而言，人生往往在最薄弱环节处断裂；你不需要找出屋里最强的环节，甚至也不是看整条链的平均强度，真正引发问题的是最弱环节。

It may be alcohol, it may be gambling, it may be a lot of things, it may be nothing, which is terrific. But it is a real weakest link problem.

可能是酒精、可能是赌博、可能是许多其他因素，也可能什么弱点都没有，那就太好了；但“最弱环节”确实存在。

When I look at our managers, I’m not trying to look at the guy who wakes up at night and says “E = MC 2” or something. I am looking for people that function very, very well. And that means not having any weak links. The two biggest weak links in my experience: I’ve seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage – leverage being borrowed money. Donald Trump failed because of leverage. He simply got infatuated with how much money he could borrow, and he did not give enough thought to how much money he could pay back.

审视我们的经理人时，我并不寻找凌晨醒来喊出“E=MC²”的天才，我要找的是运转极佳、没有弱环的人；根据经验，最常见的两大弱环是酒和杠杆——杠杆即借钱；唐纳德·特朗普的失败源于杠杆，他沉迷于自己能借多少，却没充分考虑能还多少。

Keys to Avoiding Trouble and Leading a Happy Life

避免麻烦并拥有幸福人生的关键

You really don’t need leverage in this world much. If you’re smart, you’re going to make a lot of money without borrowing. I’ve never borrowed a significant amount of money in my life. Never. Never will. I’ve got no interest in it. The other reason is I never thought I would be way happier when I had 2X instead of X. You ought to have a good time all the time as you go along. If you say “I’m taking this job – I don’t really like this job but in three years it will lead to this,” forget it. Find one you like right now.

现实里你根本不需要太多杠杆；如果足够聪明，你无需借钱也能赚大钱；我一生从未借过大量资金，也永远不会借，我对此毫无兴趣；再者，我从不认为把财富从 X 提升到 2X 会让我快乐得多；你应该一直享受当下；如果你说“我不喜欢这份工作，但三年后会有好机会”，那就算了，马上找一份你喜欢的。

Full Transcripts

完整讲稿

Lecture to Faculty

致学院教职员工的演讲

Thank you. When you asked me what I did, in this year’s annual report I tried to describe what I do...

谢谢各位。当你们问我平时在做什么时，我在今年的年度报告里尝试过描述自己的工作内容……

【讲述了“小丑比默”的故事；以下摘自 1990 年伯克希尔哈撒韦年度致股东信：】

Much of the extra value that exists in our businesses has been created by the managers now running them. Charlie and I feel free to brag about this group because we had nothing to do with developing the skills they possess: These superstars just came that way. Our job is merely to identify talented managers and provide an environment in which they can do their stuff. Having done it, they send their cash to headquarters and we face our only other task: the intelligent deployment of these funds.

我们旗下企业所蕴含的额外价值，大多是现任经理人创造的。查理和我之所以可以肆无忌惮地夸耀这支队伍，是因为他们所具备的才能并非我们培养——这些明星天生如此。我们的工作只是识别出这些人才，并为他们提供施展才华的环境。完成这一点后，他们把现金寄回总部，我们剩下的唯一任务就是：如何聪明地运用这些资金。

My own role in operations may best be illustrated by a small tale concerning my granddaughter, Emily, and her fourth birthday party last fall. Attending were other children, adoring relatives, and Beemer the Clown, a local entertainer who includes magic tricks in his act.

我的经营角色，可以通过一个小故事来说明：去年秋天，我的外孙女艾米丽过四岁生日。参加派对的有小伙伴、亲友，还有当地杂耍艺人“小丑比默”，他表演魔术。

Beginning these, Beemer asked Emily to help him by waving a “magic wand” over “the box of wonders.” Green handkerchiefs went into the box, Emily waved the wand, and Beemer removed blue ones. Loose handkerchiefs went in and, upon a magisterial wave by Emily, emerged knotted. After four such transformations, each more amazing than its predecessor, Emily was unable to contain herself. Her face aglow, she exulted: “Gee, I’m really good at this.”

比默让艾米丽挥动“魔杖”为“奇迹盒”施法。绿手帕放进去，艾米丽一挥，变成蓝手帕取出；散开的手帕放进去，她再挥，出来时已打结。连续四次，次次更神奇。最后艾米丽再也按捺不住，满脸兴奋地说：“哇，我真厉害！”

And that sums up my contribution to the performance of Berkshire’s business magicians

这正是我对伯克希尔“魔术师们”业绩的贡献写照

* the Blumkins, the Friedman family, Mike Goldberg, the Heldmans, Chuck Huggins, Stan Lipsey and Ralph Schey. They deserve your applause.]

*布卢姆金家族、弗里德曼家族、迈克·戈德伯格、赫尔德曼夫妇、查克·哈金斯、斯坦·利普西以及拉尔夫·谢伊，他们才应得到掌声。】

We’ve never had a meeting of our managers. The fellow that runs the candy company we bought 19 years ago \[See’s Candies], last year came to Omaha because he and his wife wanted to see what the annual meeting was like, but he’d never come to Omaha \[before that]. We’ve never had a meeting with his board. We moved the company’s headquarters from Los Angeles to San Francisco because his wife liked living in San Francisco better than Los Angeles. We adapt our operations to the people that run our businesses.

我们从未召集过经理人会议。19 年前收购的糖果公司（See’s Candies）负责人，去年第一次来奥马哈，只因他和妻子想看看年度股东大会是什么样；此前他从未到访。我们也从未与其董事会开过会。当年把公司总部从洛杉矶搬到旧金山，只因为他妻子更喜欢旧金山。我们让业务随经理人而适应。

We’ve got a uniform company in Cincinnati, Fechheimers. Does about \$100 million. Bought it about five years ago. A fellow read the annual report where I list what I’m looking for. I run an ad in the annual report (I believe in advertising) and this fellow walked in and said “I fit those parameters, and the business does” and we made a deal with him. I’ve never visited Cincinnati. I’ve not seen that plant. It may be a \[hoax] – for all I know, he makes up these little reports every five (garbled). But he sends me cash, and I like that.

我们在辛辛那提有家做制服的 Fechheimers，年营收约 1 亿美元，五年前收购。一位读到我在年度报告里列的收购标准，因而上门自荐，说他和他的公司都符合条件，于是成交。我从未去过辛辛那提，也没见过那座工厂，或许一切都是骗局——鬼知道他是否每五年就伪造一次报告（录音模糊）。不过他定期把现金寄来，我很喜欢。

So it’s a very peculiar operation. I bought a business eight years ago from an 89-year-old woman who started with \$500, never put in another dime, and it was making about \$12 million before taxes (about \$18 million now). She doesn’t know what accruals are, she doesn’t know any of that sort of thing. She got mad at her grandsons, who work at the company, a few years ago, so she quit and went into competition with us. This taught me that the next time I buy a business from an 89-year-old woman, I’m getting a non-compete agreement. This woman now runs another successful business.

所以我们运营方式相当独特。八年前我从一位 89 岁老太太手中买下一家公司。她当初拿 500 美元起家，再没追加过一分钱，但企业税前利润已有 1,200 万美元（如今约 1,800 万）。她不懂权责发生制之类概念。几年前，她因孙子在公司工作闹别扭，干脆辞职出来与我们竞争。这让我明白，下次从 89 岁老太太手里收购公司，一定要签竞业禁止。这位老太太现在又开了家成功的新公司。

She’s a marvelous woman. She walked out of Russia. She landed in Seattle with a tag around her neck. She couldn’t speak a word of English. Fort Dodge, Iowa was where her relatives were. She got to Fort Dodge about 1920 or 1919, and they didn’t have a penny. She brought over seven siblings, as well as her mother and father, and that took her eight or 10 years, sending \$50 bucks at a time. She made it selling used clothing. She started this company in 1937 with \$500. She was boycotted by most of the suppliers, the main carpet companies in town. They took her into court on violation of fair trade laws. When she got before the judge, Judge Chase, she said “Judge, I paid \$3 a yard for this. Brandeis (a carpet store) paid \$3 too. They sell it for \$6.99. I sell it for \$3.99. Tell me how much you want me to rob people. If you tell me to rob them \$1 a yard, I’ll charge them \$4.99.” The newspaper picks up all this and the judge comes in and buys \$1,400 worth of carpet. She beat them in court four times and every time she killed them.

她是一位了不起的女性。当年步行离开俄国，脖子上挂着标签抵达西雅图，一句英语不会说。她亲戚在爱荷华州福特道奇，她于 1919 或 1920 年赶到那里，一贫如洗。随后她先后把七个兄弟姐妹及父母接到美国，花了八到十年，每次寄 50 美元过去。她靠卖旧衣服发迹。1937 年用 500 美元创办这家公司。当地大多数地毯供货商联合抵制她，告她违反“公平贸易法”上法庭。面对查斯法官，她说：“法官大人，这布我每码进价 3 美元，Brandeis 地毯店同样 3 美元进货，他们卖 6.99，我卖 3.99。您告诉我该抢顾客多少钱？若您说抢 1 美元，我就卖4.99。”报纸报道后，法官亲自来店里买了 1,400 美元的地毯。她四度打赢官司，次次大获全胜。

This company is now the largest home furnishings store, by a factor of 2 to 1, over any home furnishings store in the United States. It does \$160 million from one location. That one store makes about \$18 million pretax. It has a 500,000 square foot warehouse (garbled).

现在，这家公司成为全美最大的家居零售商，规模领先第二名两倍，单店营收 1.6 亿美元，税前利润约 1,800 万美元，拥有一座 50 万平方英尺的仓库（录音模糊）。

That woman, who got an honorary degree from NYU business school about five or six years ago (garbled). You cannot beat her record. If you tell her this room is 38 by 16, she will tell you how many square yards it is, just like that. And she’s 97. She’ll tell you how many yards it is at \$5.99, the extension, and she’ll have the sales tax, and she’ll knock off something if you’re a nice fresh face. And that’s it. She can do it all as fast as I’ve said that. She sold me the business in 30 seconds. She talked to me and told me how much she’d wanted. She’d never had an audit. I didn’t need an audit. Her word was better than the Bank of England.

这位老太太五六年前获得纽约大学商学院荣誉学位（录音模糊）。她的业绩无可匹敌。告诉她这间房 38×16 英尺，她立刻算出多少平方码。今年她 97 岁，能立即按 5.99 美元/码给你算价，再加销售税，还会看你面相抹点零头。速度就像我说话这么快。她用 30 秒把公司卖给我，直接说出要价，没做过审计。我也不需要审计，她的信誉胜过英格兰银行。

We make all our deals that way. Our total legal and accounting fees on that deal, which was a \$60 million deal, we had to file a 10Q with the SEC, we had to file a Hart-Scott-Rodino filing, our total legal and accounting fee came to \$1,400 bucks. All on one page. There’s a mark where her name is. It says “Mrs. B on behalf of herself and her children.” She only owned 20% of the business. She made her mark, and the deal was cut.

我们所有交易都是这么谈成。那笔 6,000 万美元的交易，需向 SEC 提交 10Q，还要做 Hart-Scott-Rodino 申报，律师费加会计费总共 1,400 美元。一张纸就搞定。她在名字位置画了个记号：“Mrs. B on behalf of herself and her children.”，因为她只持有 20% 股权。签完字，交易就成了。

All our deals are done like that. We’ve made all our deals, essentially, on the first contact. We never get warranties, we never get anything.

我们的交易全都如此，一次接触就敲定，从不要求担保，也不追求其他条款。

These people are rich, and we have to figure out if they’re the kind of people to keep working after they’ve sold out. We have to decide if they’re working because they love the business, or because they love money. And, if they love money, they’re not of any use to us because I can’t give them enough money after they’ve got all the money \[from selling us] their business.

They’ve got to love the business. I would say that if we do anything very well at Berkshire, it’s spotting the kind of people that, after they are very rich, will work even harder. We get no budgets from them. We have one board of directors meeting a year, which follows the shareholders meeting. No one has to come in. All they have to do is run the businesses. And we’ve got a bunch of those now.

他们必须热爱事业。我敢说伯克希尔做得最好的，就是识别那类即使十分富裕仍更拼命工作的人。我们不向他们要预算，每年只有一次董事会会议，紧接股东会后举行，无需他们到场。他们只需把业务经营好。而现在我们拥有不少这样的人。

They mail me the money – that’s the second part of their job. And it’s my job to allocate capital. They can do whatever makes sense in the candy business, or the newspaper business, but they don’t have to go out and do a bunch of foolish things. We like businesses that generate cash. Sometimes we have something to do with it, sometimes we don’t. We prefer to buy businesses with it but if we can’t buy businesses with it, we buy pieces of businesses called stocks.

他们把钱寄给我——这是他们工作的第二部分。我的工作是配置资本。他们在糖果业、报业该做什么就做什么，无需去做愚蠢之事。我们喜欢能产生现金的业务。现金有时有用武之地，有时则否。我们更愿用它买企业；若买不到，就买企业的“片段”，即股票。

Our biggest holdings: we own 7% of the Coca Cola Company, worth about \$2 billion. Your Chairman here \[referring to the President of Coca Cola, Don Keough, who was also Chairman of Notre Dame’s board] used to live across the street from me in Omaha 30 years ago when he was a salesman for Butternut Coffee. He had six kids, making \$200 bucks a week, and starving to death. He was telling at lunch how he went into his boss one day, and told him about the six kids, about the parochial school, paying him \$200 bucks a week and “it just ain’t easy pal”, and while he was doing this his boss, Paul Gallagher \[the owner of Butternut Coffee], reached into his desk and pulled out a scissors and starting cutting strands off his fraying shirt. He walked away. Fortunately, things have improved some.

我们最大的一笔投资是持有可口可乐公司 7% 股权，价值约 20 亿美元。你们的主席（指时任可口可乐总裁 Don Keough，同为圣母大学董事长）30 年前在奥马哈与我住对街，当时他是 Butternut Coffee 的推销员。周薪 200 美元，要养六个孩子，日子捉襟见肘。午餐时他讲述自己曾去见老板 Paul Gallagher，抱怨 200 元周薪养六娃、供私立学校困难重重，期间老板从抽屉里掏剪刀，剪掉他衬衫磨破的线头，然后走开。幸好后来境况好多了。

We have 7% of Coke. There are 660 million eight ounce servings of Coca Cola products being served around the world today, so in effect, we’ve got a 45 million soft drink business with our 7%. We think of businesses that way. I say to myself “just increase the price a penny and that’s another \$450,000 a day for Berkshire.” I mean, it’s a nice sort of thing. When I go to bed at night I figure that by the time I wake up 200 million Cokes will have been consumed. We’ve got some Gillette too, and every night I think about two billion plus men’s hair growing and four billion women’s legs with hair. It goes all night when I sleep.

我们持有 7% 的可口可乐，相当于全球每天 6.6 亿杯八盎司可乐中的 4,500 万杯生意。我就这样思考生意。我常想：“若每杯涨价一分钱，伯克希尔每天就多赚 45 万美元。”这感觉不错。晚上睡觉时，我想着醒来前已经有 2 亿杯可乐被喝掉；我们还持有吉列股份，每晚我都会想全球 20 多亿男士的胡须和 40 亿女士腿上的毛正在生长——我睡着时，生意也在运转。

So we buy businesses I can understand, whether all of them or small parts of them. We never buy anything that I don’t think I can understand. I may be wrong about whether I understand it or not, but we’ve never owned a share of a technology company. There’s all kinds of businesses I don’t understand. I don’t worry about that. Why should I (garbled). You mentioned Cities Service Preferred, I didn’t understand that very well when I bought it. Ever since I met Ben Graham, I was 19, I read his book when I was 18, it made nothing but sense to me. Buy pieces of businesses you can understand when they’re offered to you for quite a bit less than they’re worth. That’s all there is to it. That’s what we try to do with 100% of the business, 7% of the business, or whatever. My partner Charlie Munger and I have been together for about 15 years, and that’s all we do. And we’ll never do anything else.

因此，我们只买自己能理解的生意，无论是整家公司还是部分股权。对不懂的东西绝不碰。我可能会误判自己是否真正理解，但我们从未买过科技股。有很多行业我不懂，我并不在意。你提到 Cities Service 优先股，我买时也没太看懂。自从我 18 岁读到本·格雷厄姆的书、19 岁拜识他以来，他的理念完全说得通：当好生意以远低于价值的价格摆在面前，就买下这“生意的一部分”。仅此而已。我们买 100% 的企业、7% 的股份，或其他比例，都是如此。我和搭档查理·芒格合作约 15 年了，只干这件事，并且永远如此。

Mrs. B is that way. I couldn’t have given her \$200 million worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock when I bought the business because she doesn’t understand stock. She understands cash. She understands furniture. She understands real estate. She doesn’t understand stocks, so she doesn’t have anything to do with them. If you deal with Mrs. B in what I would call her circle of competence... She is going to buy 5,000 end tables this afternoon (if the price is right). She is going to buy 20 different carpets in odd lots, and everything else like that \[snaps fingers] because she understands carpet. She wouldn’t buy 100 shares of General Motors if it was at 50 cents a share.

I would say that the most important thing in business, and investments, which I regard as the same thing, from our standpoint, is being able to accurately define your circle of competence. It isn’t a question of having the biggest circle of competence. I’ve got friends who are competent in a whole lot bigger area than I am, but they stray outside of it.

我认为，无论经营企业还是投资（在我看来二者无异），最重要的是准确界定自己的能力圈。关键不在于圈子大小。我有些朋友能力圈远比我大，但他们常跑到圈外去。

In that book Father, Son & Co. \[subtitle: My Life at IBM and Beyond] you may have read, that Tom Watson Junior recently wrote, he quoted his father as saying “I’m no genius. I’m smart in spots but I stay around those spots.” And that’s all there is to it in investments – and business. I always tell the students in business school they’d be better off when they got out of business school to have a punch card with 20 punches on it. And every time they made an investment decision they used up one of those punches, because they aren’t going to get 20 great ideas in their lifetime. They’re going to get five, or three, or seven, and you can get rich off five, or three, or seven. But what you can’t get rich doing is trying to get one every day. The very fact that you have, in effect, an unlimited punch card, because that’s the way the system works, you can change your mind every hour or every minute in this business, and it’s kind of cheap and easy to do because we have markets with a lot of liquidity – you can’t do that if you own farms or \[real estate] – and that very availability, that huge liquidity which people prize so much is, for most people, a curse, because it tends to make them want to do more things than they can intelligently do.

《父与子》（副标题：我的 IBM 生涯及其延伸）这本书里，汤姆·沃森二世引用父亲的话：“我不是天才。我只在某些点上聪明，但我只待在那些点。”投资与经营皆如此。我常告诉商学院学生，最好毕业时手里拿张打孔卡，上面只有 20 个孔。每做一次投资决策就打掉一个孔，因为一生不会有 20 个绝妙点子，顶多五个、三个或七个，而发财足矣；若每天都想弄一个点子，则毫无机会。投资市场本质上给了你无限打孔卡——因为流动性巨大，随时可买卖，让人容易频繁操作；可这种流动性对多数人是诅咒，让他们做出超出智力范围的动作。

If we can do one intelligent thing a year we are ecstatic. You can negotiate us down to one every two or three years without working very hard. That’s all you need. You need very few good ideas in your lifetime. You have to be willing to have the discipline to say, “I’m not going to do something I don’t understand.” Why should I do something I don’t understand? That’s why I find it an advantage to be in Omaha instead of New York. I worked in New York for a few years, and people were coming up to me on the corner and whispering in my ear all the time. I was getting excited all the time. I was a wonderful customer for the brokers.

我们每年能做成一件明智之举就欣喜若狂。你想让我们两三年才做一件，只要稍微谈谈就行。人生只需极少好点子。必须自律地说：“我不做不懂的事。”为什么要做不懂的？这就是我待在奥马哈而非纽约的好处。我曾在纽约工作几年，总有人在街角凑到耳边跟我低语，搞得我随时兴奋，是经纪人眼中的大客户。

Let’s talk about what you’re interested in.

现在谈谈你们感兴趣的话题吧。

\[Comment from audience]

【听众评论】

That’s a problem. It helps to have the efficient market out there. It’s very nice to have people out there saying, “none of this does any good.” It’s a real advantage to have. I don’t think it’s as strong now, but you really had the revealed truths, for a decade or so, saying it didn’t do any good to think. Investments presumably means businesses too. And once you say investments are all priced efficiently, you presumably have to go on and say businesses are priced efficiently, and you’re just throwing darts all the time. If this group were a bunch of chess players, or a bunch of bridge players, and they were all convinced that it did not pay to think about what to do, you’d have an enormous advantage. We’ve had tens of thousands of students in business schools taught that it’s \[a waste of time to think].

确实是个问题。有“有效市场”理论在外头帮忙，当有人宣称“思考毫无用处”时，对我们来说简直是优势。如今这种论调没那么强，但曾经十来年间被奉为真理：思考无用。若投资全被视作定价有效，就意味着企业本身也被定价有效，你做的一切都像掷飞镖。如果这群人都是棋手或桥牌高手，却坚信无需思考策略，那你就占了大便宜。商学院数以万计学生被教导“不值得思考”。

You mentioned the five-sigma event; actually it was Bill Sharpe out at Stanford many years ago. My friend Charlie says that “as the record gets longer it’s easier to add a sigma than it is to reevaluate the theory.” Which is sort of true. I think it was Ken Galbraith that said “Economists are most economical about ideas. They make the ones they learn in school last a lifetime.”

你提到“五西格玛事件”；其实多年前斯坦福的比尔·夏普也说过。我朋友查理说：“数据记录越长，增加一个西格玛比重新评估理论更容易。”确有几分道理。肯·加尔布雷思也说过：“经济学家在思想上最节省，一生沿用在学校学到的那点东西。”

\[Tape flipped here]

【录音此处翻面】

The market generally is pretty efficient. You take the 30 stocks in the Dow and a bunch of very smart minds all looking at them and having the same information and most of the time, not all of the time, they’ll be priced efficiently. So what? You only have to be right a few times. Sometimes it’s very strange things. Sometimes it’s panic (garbled).

市场总体相当有效。道指 30 只股票有一大群聪明人关注，信息相同，绝大多数时候价格有效。那又怎样？你只需偶尔正确几次。有时是非常反常的情形，有时是恐慌（录音模糊）。

In ‘74 you could have bought the Washington Post when the whole company was valued at \$80 million. Now at that time the company was debt free, it owned the Washington Post newspaper, it owned Newsweek, it owned the CBS stations in Washington D.C. and Jacksonville, Florida, the ABC station in Miami, the CBS station in Hartford/New Haven, a half interest in 800,000 acres of timberland in Canada, plus a 200,000-ton-a-year mill up there, a third of the International Herald Tribune, and probably some other things I forgot. If you asked any one of thousands of investment analysts or media specialists about how much those properties were worth, they would have said, if they added them up, they would have come up with \$400, \$500, \$600 million.

1974 年，你可以在 8,000 万美元估值时买下整个《华盛顿邮报》公司。当时公司无债务，拥有《华盛顿邮报》报纸，《新闻周刊》，华盛顿特区及佛州杰克逊维尔的 CBS 电视台，迈阿密的 ABC 电视台，康州哈特福德/纽黑文的 CBS 电视台，加拿大 80 万英亩林地半数股权及年产 20 万吨的纸浆厂，《国际先驱论坛报》三分之一股权，还有我忘了的其它资产。若询问成千上万名投研分析师或媒体专家，他们加总后会给出 4-6 亿美元估值。

Bob Woodward one time said to me “tell me how to make some money” back in the ‘70s, before he’d made some money himself on a movie and a book. I said “Bob, it’s very simple. Assign yourself the right story. The problem is you’re letting Bradley assign you all the stories. You go out and interview Jeb Magruder.” I said “Assign yourself a story. The story is: what is the Washington Post Company worth? If Bradley gave you that story to go out and report on, you’d go out and come back in two weeks, and you’d write a story that would make perfectly good sense. You’d find out what a television station sells for, you’d find out what a newspaper sells for, you’d evaluate temperament.” I said “You are perfectly capable of writing that story. It’s much easier than finding out what Bill Casey is thinking about on his deathbed. All you’ve got to do is assign yourself that story.”

70 年代，鲍勃·伍德沃德曾问我“教我怎么赚钱吧”——那时他靠电影和书尚未赚大钱。我说：“鲍勃，很简单，给自己派对的题材。问题是你总让布拉德利（邮报主编）分派故事，你去采访贾布·马格鲁德。我说：给自己派个选题：‘华盛顿邮报公司价值多少？’要是布拉德利派你去做，你两周就回来，写篇合情合理的报道。你会查电视台价格、报纸价格、评估管理层性格。你完全能写好这故事，比去探查比尔·凯西临终所想容易多了。你要做的只是把这题目交给自己。”

“Now, if you come back, and the value you assign the company is \$400 million, and the company is selling for \$400 million in the market, you still have a story but it doesn’t do you any good financially. But if you come back and say it’s \$400 million and it’s selling for \$80 million, that screams at you. Either you are saying that the people that are running it are so incompetent that they’re going to blow the \$400 million, or you’re saying that they’re crooked and that they’re operating Bob Vesco style. Or, you’ve got a screaming buy when you can buy dollar bills for 20 cents. And, of course, that \$400 million, within eight or 10 years, with essentially the same assets, \[is now worth] \$3 or \$4 billion.”

“如果你算出公司值 4 亿，而市场价也 4 亿，那只是个故事，对投资没帮助；但若你算值 4 亿而市场价 8,000 万，这就呼之欲出：要么管理层无能会把 4 亿挥霍殆尽，要么他们奸诈如鲍勃·韦斯科；否则就是 2 毛钱买 1 美元的大好机会。果然，八到十年后，同样资产价值从 4 亿涨到 30-40 亿美元。”

That is not a complicated story. We bought in 1974, from not more than 10 sellers, what was then 9% of the Washington Post Company, based on that valuation. And they were people like Scudder Stevens, and bank trust departments. And if you asked any of the people selling us the stock what the business was worth, they would have come up with an answer of \$400 million. And, incidentally, if it had gone down to \$60 or \$40 million, the beta would have been higher of course, and it would have therefore been \[viewed as] a riskier asset. There is no risk in buying the stock at \$80 million. If it sells for \$400 \[million] steadily, there’s much more risk than if it goes from \$400 million to \$80 million.

这并不复杂。1974 年，我们按该估值从不足十个卖家手中买下邮报公司 9% 股权，包括 Scudder Stevens 等机构及银行信托部。若问这些卖家公司值多少，他们都会答 4 亿美元。顺带说一句，如果股价跌到 6,000 万或 4,000 万，β 值当然更高，因此被视为更“高风险”资产。而以 8,000 万买入并无风险；若股价长期 4 亿反而风险更大。

But that’s all there is to business. But now you say “I don’t know how to evaluate the Washington Post.” It isn’t that hard to evaluate the Washington Post. You can look and see what newspapers and television stations sell for. If your fix is \$400 and it’s selling for \$390, so what? You can’t \[invest safely with such a small margin of safety]. If your range is \$300 to \$500 and it’s selling for \$80 you don’t need to be more accurate than that. It’s a business where that happens.

经营生意就这么简单。或许你说：“我不会评估华盛顿邮报。”其实并不难，查查同行报纸和电视台的售价即可。如果你估值 4 亿但市价 3.9 亿，那也没意义；若估值区间 3-5 亿而市价 8,000 万，你无需更精准。这种机会会出现。

At the time we bought Coca Cola just two years ago, \[we ended up buying] 7% of the company. We paid a billion dollars, so we were paying \$14 billion, essentially, for the whole thing. You can sit down in five minutes – I mean, everybody here understands Coca Cola. If Philip Morris were to buy Coca Cola that day, they would have paid \$30 billion. And they wouldn’t have sold it for that. And you wouldn’t have sold it for that. The company’s actually repurchasing stock at the time. So, in effect, they’re buying for you. They’re buying out your partners, at 50 cents on the dollar or less, which is a magnificent sort of business, and there are no morals to it. It’s an easy business. There’s no doubt about it.

两年前我们买入可口可乐 7% 股权时，花了 10 亿美元，相当于整家公司估值 140 亿美元。任何人花五分钟都能了解可口可乐。如果当时菲利普莫里斯去收购可乐，价格必是 300 亿美元，他们也不会 300 亿卖给你，你也不会 300 亿卖给别人。当时可乐还在回购股份，等于替我们买入，用 5 折甚至更低的价格收购你的合伙人股权。这是门绝佳生意，与道德无关，极为简单，毫无疑问。

I don’t know a thing now that I didn’t know at 19 when I read that book. For eight year prior to that I was a chartist. I loved all that stuff. I had charts coming out my ears. Then, all of a sudden a fellow explains to me that you don’t need all that, just buy something for less than it’s worth.

我现在懂的并不比 19 岁读那本书时更多。在那之前八年，我是个图表派，沉迷各种图，一大堆图表。但忽然有人告诉我，根本不需要那些，只要用低于价值的价格买进即可。

\[Question from audience]

【听众提问】

The world, generally, is treated much more favorably in relation to buying businesses than we are because we’re restricted now to buying big businesses, or pieces of big businesses. And that is a big disadvantage. As Charlie says “there could be worse things.”

在收购企业方面，外界条件总体比我们更有利，因为我们如今只能买大型企业或其股权，这确是劣势。正如查理所说，“还有更糟的”。

You’ll find this interesting. At market, we’ve probably got \$7 or \$8 billion in equities. In 1970, Berkshire had about \$15 million in equities. We owned more securities then than we own now. We do not have it solved by buying more things. Every now and then we find something. In our annual report this year \[we disclosed that] we made two large purchases. Each one was \$300 or \$400 million. Every now and then you’ll get an opportunity. And when they come, they come for 15 minutes \[I think that’s what he said]. Some days it’s raining gold. Not very often, but when it is, you’ve got to be out there. And that will happen periodically. It’ll happen, but you can’t make it happen. In the meantime, you let the cash pile up if that’s what happens.

有件事你们会觉得有趣。市场价值来看，我们持有 70-80 亿美元股票。1970 年伯克希尔股票投资仅 1,500 万，却持有的证券比现在多。并非买得越多越好。偶尔我们会遇到机会。今年年报披露，我们做了两笔大额投资，每笔 3-4 亿美元。机会偶尔出现，一旦出现只有 15 分钟窗口。有时候天降黄金，不常见，但真下金雨时得把桶端出去。这会周期性发生，只是你无法人为制造。在此之前，让现金堆着也无妨。

【听众问有多少投资想法来自他人推介】

Practically none. The Wall Street Journal is my deal source. There are 1,700 or 1,800 of America’s companies that I’m generally familiar with – a good many of them. And every day they move around the prices of them. So here’s a business broker’s office if you want to call it that. And sometimes they change them pretty dramatically, like October 19th of ‘87. But they change them dramatically. And that is a great start. Any business that I buy will be measured against the yardstick of that business brokers office in Section C of the Wall Street Journal.

几乎没有。我的“项目来源”就是《华尔街日报》。美国约 1,700-1,800 家公司我大致熟悉，报纸每天更新它们的价格，相当于一个“生意经纪所”。有时价格剧烈变动，比如 1987 年 10 月 19 日。这就是绝佳起点。我买任何企业都要以《华尔街日报》C 版的“经纪所”报价为标尺。

In terms of deals, our standards are such that very few are going to meet it. We are much more likely to find one from an owner, who owns the business himself, who wants to sell it to someone like us, and if they want to sell to someone like us, we’re the only one like us. I can promise them, a) since I control Berkshire, the only one who can double cross them or lie to them is me. If they start with the XYZ company, XYZ can be taken over tomorrow, the directors can get a new strategic \[plan] tomorrow, they can have McKinsey come in and tell them to do something different tomorrow. And no one can really make them a promise there like I can make them a promise. I can tell them exactly what will and won’t happen when I make a deal, and to some people that is very important.

就并购而言，我们的标准极高，通过筛选留下的寥寥无几。我们更可能找到某位拥有全部股权、想把公司卖给类似我们的买家，而“类似我们”的只有我们自己。我能向卖家保证：a）因为我掌控伯克希尔，唯一可能对他们失信或说谎的人只有我；若他们找 XYZ 公司，XYZ 明天可能被收购，董事会明天可能改战略，麦肯锡明天可能建议做不同的事。没人能像我这样给出承诺。我能确切告诉他们成交后什么会发生、什么不会，对某些卖家非常重要。

It’s important to me with Berkshire. I’ve got a lot of things in my will about (garbled) is better, and all kinds of things. I care where that goes, the same way I care about anything else I’ve spent my lifetime working on. When I run into somebody like that, we’ve got an advantage. To some extent, they know about us, and I’ll hear about them, but not very many. They’re very few. And they’re usually older when it happens. Sometimes they’ve got other members of the family in the business that are inactive and want to take the money out. We’ve arraigned, in three of our businesses, with younger generations to take 18%, or 15%, or 20% of the equity. We can do a lot of things, in terms of meeting objectives, that some owners may \[appreciate] although most owners \[don’t have complex requirements]. But it is not a question of answering the phone and taking an investment banker’s call.

这对我和伯克希尔都重要。我的遗嘱中包含大量安排（录音模糊）。我关心公司的归宿，正如我关心一生投入的任何事。当遇到类似卖家时，我们具备优势。他们多少了解我们，我也能得知他们消息，但这种机会非常少，而且通常卖家年纪较大。有时家族成员持股却不参与经营，想套现退出。我们已在三家公司中让年轻一代持有 18%、15%、20% 的股权。我们能用多种方式满足卖家的目标，尽管大多数卖家需求并不复杂。但这绝非接投资银行电话就行。

In terms of marketable securities or new offerings, we’ve never bought anything \[that’s been pitched to us by an investment banker or broker]. We don’t pay any attention to investment bankers or brokers. It’s not an efficient use of our time \[to read their] reports. We read hundreds and hundreds of annual reports every year. I own 100 shares of everything. I find this much more reliable than asking to be put on a mailing list.

就公开证券或新发行来说，我们从未买过投资银行或经纪人推销的任何东西。我们对投行、经纪人不屑一顾，看他们的报告效率低下。我们每年阅读数百份年报。我会买每家公司 100 股，这比要求加入邮寄名单更可靠。

I was reading the Gillette report. I noticed that they’d bought in a bunch of stock. I’d known that before. Their net worth was below zero, which doesn’t make a lot of difference, but I thought it might bother them, with the kind of history the company had. So I saw the name of a director that was a friend of mine, Joe Sisco. I called Joe and said “I don’t know the people up there, but if they’re interested in doing something in the way of financing I would be interested and, if they’re not, I’ll never bother them.” Joe called me back in a couple of days, Coleman Mockler and I got together and we put \$600 million in.

我读吉列年报时注意到公司回购了大量股票，我之前已知道。他们净资产当时为负，这不算大事，但考虑到公司历史，我想可能会影响他们。我看到董事席上有位朋友 Joe Sisco，便给他打电话说：“我不认识那边的人，但如果他们想做融资，我有兴趣；若没兴趣，我绝不打扰。”几天后 Joe 回电，我与 Coleman Mockler 碰面，投了 6 亿美元。

We bought Scott Fetzer (World Book, Kirby Vacuum, and all sorts of things). It had been mixed up for about a year and a half, being sort of in play. I’d never met Ralph Schey, never talked to him on the phone, never had any contact with him at all. And I wrote him a letter that said “here’s our annual report. If you’re interested in talking to me we’ll pay cash, our check will clear, it will be a one-page deal. If you’re not interested, I’ll never bother you again, and you’ll never hear again, and throw the letter out.” He called me back, we met in Chicago on a Sunday and we made a deal that night, \[signed the documents the] next week, and that was it.

我们收购 Scott Fetzer（旗下有《世界图书》、科比吸尘器等）。此前公司已被“搅局”一年半。我从未见过 Ralph Schey，也未通电话，更无任何接触。我给他写信：“附上我们的年报，若你愿意谈，我们现金付款，支票保证兑现，合同一页纸；若不愿意，我再不打扰，你可直接扔信。”他回电，我们周日在芝加哥见面，当晚敲定协议，下周签字，交易完成。

【观众提问：吉列的哪一点最吸引您？】

I can understand (garbled) and shaving, the price flexibility, what I call the moat around the business. The most important thing with me in evaluating businesses is figuring out how big the moat is around the business. I want to know how big the capital is on the inside and then I want to know how big the moat is around it. What you love is big capital and a big moat. Obviously. World Book has a real moat. Kirby has a real moat. You can figure that out if you \[studied] the distribution process and everything.

我能理解（录音模糊）和剃须业务、定价弹性，以及我所谓的企业“护城河”。评估企业时，对我而言最重要的是弄清护城河有多宽。我想知道内在的资本规模有多大，然后要知道护城河有多宽。你最想要的就是大资本配大护城河，这显而易见。《世界图书》有真正的护城河，科比吸尘器也有。如果你研究它们的分销流程等，一切都能看出来。

I’ve been in the textile business. We made half of the men’s linings in the United States for 25 years.

我曾从事纺织业，25 年里我们生产了美国一半的男装里衬。

[re: Gillette] It was the kind of business we’d put capital into on the right basis.

【关于吉列】这是那种在合适条件下我们会投入资本的生意。

One of the biggest early things was American Express back in 1962 at the time of the salad oil scam. There was a guy named De Angelis in Bayonne, New Jersey.

早期最大的一笔投资之一是 1962 年的美国运通，当时正值色拉油丑闻。新泽西贝永有个叫德·安杰利斯的人。

American Express had a field warehousing company which was a tiny, tiny, little subsidiary, with \$12 \[million] in capital. The field warehousing company’s job was to certify that inventories really existed. That was their job. They stuck their name on it, and you could take those certificates that said there was a given amount of whatever there was, and you could borrow against these certificates. Tino De Angelis had this tank farm about 15 miles from lower Manhattan. And the American Express field warehousing company authenticated the existence of salad oil in these tanks. And, at one time, they were authenticating the existence of more salad oil than the Department of Agriculture, in its monthly reports, was saying existed in the United States. But they never told us of that discrepancy. Late in 1962, right at the time Kennedy was assassinated, within a day or two, the thing blew. A couple of New York Stock Exchange firms went broke – Ira Haupt, (garbled), maybe one other – because they lent on these phony certificates.

美国运通拥有一家现场仓储公司，这是家非常小的子公司，资本金 1,200 万美元。现场仓储公司的职责是证明库存确实存在。他们把名字盖在凭证上，然后你可以拿这些注明库存数量的凭证去融资。蒂诺·德·安杰利斯在距曼哈顿下城约 15 英里的地方有一片油罐区，美国运通现场仓储公司为油罐里的色拉油出具存货证明。有段时间，他们认证的色拉油数量竟然超过了美国农业部月报所称的全美总量，但他们从未提示这一差异。1962 年末，也就是肯尼迪遇刺前后几天，这一骗局爆发。几家纽交所会员公司破产——Ira Haupt 及（录音模糊）等——因为他们把钱借给了这些伪造凭证。

And American Express, which never even thought of this little field warehousing operation, it was nothing, compared to their money order business, credit card, and travel, all of a sudden, they’ve got this little subsidiary, not the parent company, but the subsidiary, that was on the hook for tens and tens of millions of dollars, and nobody knows how much. And that is the nice thing about fraud (garbled)…

美国运通从未把这家小型现场仓储业务放在心上，与汇票、信用卡和旅行业务相比，它微不足道。可突然之间，这家子公司——不是母公司——却背上数千万美元的巨额负债，且没人说得清究竟多少。而这正是欺诈（录音模糊）的可怕之处……

There was one other little wrinkle which was terribly interesting. American Express was not a corporation. It then was the only major publicly traded security that was a joint stock association. As such, the ownership of the company was assessable. If it turned out that the liabilities were greater than the assets, \[then] the ownership was assessable. So every trust department in the United States panicked. I remember the Continental Bank held over 5% of the company and all of a sudden not only do they see that the trust accounts were going to have stock worth zero, but it could get assessed. The stock just poured out, of course, and the market got slightly inefficient for a short period of time.

还有一个极为有趣的小插曲。美国运通当时并非股份公司，而是联合股份协会，是当时唯一的大型上市证券，因此其股东需要承担追加出资责任。如果公司负债大于资产，股东就要补缴。于是全美各信托部门陷入恐慌。我记得大陆银行持股超过 5%，突然之间，他们不仅看到信托账户中的股票可能变成一文不值，还可能被追缴责任。股票于是倾泻而出，市场短暂失灵。

The American Express Company was a unique company to understand. You could look at that credit card and you knew it was a winner. Diner’s Club had been the first, Carte Blanche had come along, but the American Express Card was killing them. They had raised prices every time. Their retention rate was higher. And finally, they raised prices, and Diner’s Club didn’t go along, and their growth far outstripped Diner’s Club even though they were selling at a higher price. So this was a dynamite asset.

要理解美国运通其实很简单。看看那张信用卡，你就知道它是赢家。Diner’s Club 是第一张卡，Carte Blanche 紧随其后，但美国运通卡把它们远远甩在后面。他们每次都提价，客户保留率却更高。最终，他们再次提价而 Diner’s Club 没跟，结果运通的增长在高价位下依旧大幅超越 Diner’s Club。这是个爆炸性的资产。

The traveler’s check business had 60% of the traveler’s check business in the world while selling their checks at a higher price than the banks, B of A and what was then First National Citibank, which were the two main competitions. So here were two guys, B of A and First National City, undercutting them on price for 60 years and they still had 2/3 of the market. That is a moat around the business. I went out and did a little check to make sure this thing wasn’t affecting them and we bought 5% of the American Express Company for \$20 million, which means the whole company was selling for about \$150 million at that time. The whole American Express Company, synonymous with financial integrity and money substitutes around the world. When they closed the banks, when Roosevelt closed the banks, he exempted American Express Traveler’s Checks, so they substituted as US currency. It was not a business that should have been selling for \$150 million, but everyone was terrified. It was very hard to tell how it would all come out in the end. But, probably, it was going to be between \$60 and \$100 million, and that was a lot more money back then in ‘62 than it is now. I just took the attitude that they’d declared a dividend of \$75 million, sent it out and it got lost. Would that have caused a panic – somebody else gets your dividend but you don’t.

旅行支票业务占全球市场 60%，且运通支票定价高于主要竞争对手——美国银行和当时的第一国民花旗银行。这两家银行 60 年来一直打价格战，却仍敌不过运通 2/3 的市场份额。这就是护城河。我做了些调查，确认事件未影响其基本面，便以 2,000 万美元买下美国运通 5% 股权，相当于整家公司市值仅 1.5 亿美元。美国运通在全球象征金融信誉与货币替代品。罗斯福关闭银行时，还豁免了运通旅行支票，使其充当美国货币。这家公司不该只值 1.5 亿美元，但当时人人恐慌，没人能预测最终损失，或许在 6,000 万至 1 亿美元之间——1962 年的 6,000 万可是巨款。我只是把这看成他们宣布 7,500 万美元股息却寄丢了，会因此恐慌吗？别人拿到股息而你没有。

No one would have argued about the value of American Express. They just didn’t want to own it for a while. That’s what you’re buying periodically. They didn’t want to own the Washington Post in ‘74. All you’ve got to do is find one, two or three businesses like that in a lifetime, load up when you do, and not do anything in between. There will be bigger whales in the ocean and they’ll (garbled). There will be more of those as we go along. It’s harder when you’re working with more money, but there’ll always be something.

没人质疑美国运通的价值，他们只是不想在那段时间持有。这就是你要定期买入的东西。1974 年他们也不想持有《华盛顿邮报》。一生只需找到一两三个这样的企业，重仓买入，其余时间什么都别做。海里还有更大的鲸鱼（录音模糊），未来还会出现更多类似机会。资金越大越难，但总有机会。

\[Question from audience]

【观众提问】

Well, I would say this. If we were working with \$25 million – so we could sort of look at the whole universe of stocks – I would guess that you could find 15 or 20 out of three or four thousand that you would find that were A) selling for substantially less than they’re worth, and B) that the intrinsic value of the business was going to grow at a compound rate which was very satisfactory.

我想说，如果我们只管理 2,500 万美元——足以审视整个股票市场——我猜在三四千家公司里，你可以找到 15 到 20 家：A）股价远低于价值，且 B）业务内在价值将以令人满意的复合速度增长。

You don’t want to buy a dollar bill that’s sitting for 50 cents, and it demands positive capital, and it’s going to be a dollar bill ten years from now. You want a dollar bill that’s going to compound at 12% for \[a long time]. And, you want to be around some competent people. Just the same thing as if you went in and bought a Ford dealership in South Bend. The same exact thought processes goes through you mind if some friend called you tonight and said “I’d like you to go into the Ford dealership” or whatever, is exactly the kind of thought as goes through mind about all the other businesses that are in Standard and Poor’s.

你不想买一张市价 0.5 美元却十年后仍值 1 美元、还需要追加资本的钞票。你要买能长期以 12% 复合增长的那种钞票，并且要有能干的管理层。就像你在南本德收购一家福特经销店一样。如果今晚朋友打电话问你是否要入股福特经销店，你脑子里思考的，与评估标普列表中的其他企业时的思路完全相同。

When I was 20, I went through Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s page by page – twice – because that is it, that’s the universe. The universe is much smaller now, unfortunately.

我 20 岁时，把穆迪和标普手册逐页翻了两遍——因为那就是全部投资宇宙。可惜现在宇宙小多了。

I found some strange things when I was 20 years old. I went through Moody’s Bank and Finance Manual, about 1,000 pages. I went through it twice. The first time I went through, I saw a company called Western Insurance Security Company in Fort Scott, Kansas. They owned 92%, at that time, of the Western Casualty and Surety Company. Perfectly sound company. I knew people that represented them in Omaha. Earnings per share \$20, stock price \$16. (garbled) ... much more than that. I ran ads in the Fort Scott, Kansas paper to try and buy that stock – it had only 300 or 400 shareholders. It was selling at one times earnings, it had a first class \[management team]...

20 岁那年我翻《穆迪银行与金融手册》，约 1,000 页，我看了两遍。第一次就发现堪萨斯州福特斯科特有家公司叫 Western Insurance Security Company，当时持有 Western Casualty and Surety Company 92% 股权。公司状况非常稳健。我在奥马哈认识几位代表他们的人。每股盈利 20 美元，股价 16 美元，（录音模糊）……远不止这些。我在福特斯科特当地报纸登广告试图收购这只股票——它只有三四百名股东。市盈率仅一倍，拥有一流的管理团队……

\[Tape ends here]

【录音到此结束】

... Incidentally, I would say that almost everybody I know in Wall Street has had as many good ideas as I have, they just had a lot of \[bad] ideas too. And I’m serious about that. I mean when I bought Western Insurance Security selling at \$16 and earning \$20 per share, I put half my net worth into it. I checked it out first – I went down to the insurance commission and got out the convention statements, I read Best’s, and I did a lot of things first. But, I mean, my dad wasn’t in it, I’d only had one insurance class at Columbia – but it was not beyond my capabilities to do that, and it isn’t beyond your capabilities.

……顺便说一句，在华尔街我认识的几乎所有人都有和我一样多的好点子，他们只是也有很多坏点子。我说真的。当我以 16 美元买进、而每股赚 20 美元的 Western Insurance Security 时，我把净资产的一半投了进去。我事先做过调查——去保险监管机构调取年会报告，看了《贝斯特年鉴》，做了许多功课。但我父亲并未参与，我在哥伦比亚也只上过一门保险课——然而做这件事并未超出我的能力，也不会超出你们的能力。

Now if I had some rare insight about software, or something like that – I would say that, maybe, other people couldn’t do that – or biotechnology, or something. And I’m not saying that every insight that I have is an insight that somebody else could have, but there were all kinds of people that could have understood American Express Company as well as I understood it in ‘62. They may have been...they may have had a different temperament than I did, so that they were paralyzed by fear, or that they wanted the crowd to be with them, or something like that, but I didn’t know anything about credit cards that they didn’t know, or about travelers checks. Those are not hard products to understand. But what I did have was an intense interest and I was willing, when I saw something I wanted to do, to do it. And if I couldn’t see something to do, to not do anything. By far, the most important quality is not how much IQ you’ve got. IQ is not the scarce factor. You need a reasonable amount of intelligence, but the temperament is 90% of it.

如果我对软件等领域有某种罕见洞见——那或许别人做不到——比如生物技术。但我并不是说我所有洞见别人都能拥有，然而在 1962 年，很多人本可以像我一样理解美国运通。他们也许与我性格不同，因此被恐惧麻痹，或者想随大流之类；但关于信用卡或旅行支票，我并不比他们懂得更多。这些产品并不难理解。但我拥有的是强烈的兴趣，并且当我看到想做的事情时，我愿意行动；若看不到能做的事，就什么也不做。最重要的品质绝不是智商有多高。智商不是稀缺因素。你需要适度智力，但气质占 90%。

That’s why Graham is so important. Graham’s book \[The Intelligent Investor] talks about the qualities of temperament you have to bring to the game, and that is the game. Now I can (garbled).

这就是格雷厄姆如此重要的原因。格雷厄姆的书《聪明的投资者》阐述了你在投资游戏中必须具备的气质，而这正是投资的核心。（录音模糊）

He may not know anything about a Coca Cola, or something of that sort, but that isn’t what makes you the money. What makes you the money is your attitude going in, your attitude toward stock market fluctuations. There’s two chapters in The Intelligent Investor, chapter 8 and chapter 20, they’re more important than everything that’s been written on investments, in my view, before or since. And there’s no specific technical knowledge in those things. It just tells you what frame of mind to be in when you come to the game. And people just don’t get it.

他也许对可口可乐之类一无所知，但那并不是赚钱的关键。赚钱的关键在于你入场的态度、对股市波动的态度。《聪明的投资者》中第 8 章和第 20 章，在我看来比过去和现在所有投资著作都重要。这两章没有任何专业技术知识，只告诉你进入投资时应有的心态。可人们就是不明白。

But that is not because I’m particularly skillful. And bear in mind that I didn’t have that (garbled). It’s not like I was Mozart and sat down at five or something. I mean I was churning things, I was computing odd lot statistics, I mean I loved all that stuff because I always liked numbers and playing around with them. It was like baseball averages or something. But what I needed was a philosophical bedrock position from which I could then go out and look at businesses, and probe through that filter, and decide whether that’s \[a bargain or not]. And that’s Ben Graham’s contribution. And that’s the game. You don’t have to be that smart. You don’t have to know advanced accounting. It may help if you know something, particularly accounting. But the fact that you don’t know it may restrict your universe some.

但这并不是因为我特别有技巧。记住，我当初并没有那（录音模糊）……我并不是像莫扎特五岁就能作曲。我当时忙着算零股统计，搞各种数据，因为我天生喜欢数字，喜爱摆弄它们，就像算棒球打击率一样。但我需要的是一套哲学基石，让我以此为出发点审视企业，通过这层过滤器判断是否便宜。这就是本·格雷厄姆的贡献，也是投资的真谛。你不必非常聪明，也不必精通高级会计知识。当然懂点会计会有帮助，但不懂只会缩小你的投资范围。

\[Garbled comment from audience]

【观众评论，录音模糊】

It goes back to a debate I was having with Mike Jensen \[a proponent of the efficient market theory who famously wrote in 1978 that “there is no other proposition in economics which has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the Efficient Market Hypothesis”]. \[I rebutted the efficient market hypothesis in] The \[Super]Investors of Graham and Doddsville. It was an address I gave on the 50th anniversary of Security Analysis. Dave Dodd was there – 90 years old, marvelous guy. And in that room were a half a dozen or more of us who had gone on to study or work, or have some association with Ben Graham. We weren’t all five-sigma types, but we’ve always gotten five-sigma, or three-sigma, or something results. So it isn’t because he had carefully culled us out from all over the country, like the Notre Dame football team. We were there just because we kind of stumbled in. And we listened to the guy and then went out and applied it in different ways – totally different ways. I mean, Walter Schloss \[has always] owned hundreds of different stocks. Walter is not a 150 IQ guy. Charlie Munger is. There were all different types of \[people] with a common philosophical bond. They did not learn any little secrets of technique – they did not learn any systems.

这回到我与迈克·詹森的辩论【詹森是有效市场理论的支持者，1978 年曾言“没有任何经济学命题像有效市场假说拥有如此坚实的实证支持”】。《格雷厄姆—多德村的超级投资者》就是我对有效市场假说的反驳，那是我在《证券分析》50 周年纪念会上发表的演讲。戴夫·多德当时也在场——他已 90 岁，是位了不起的人。会场里还有六七位曾与本·格雷厄姆学习、工作或有所关联的人。我们并非都是什么“五西格玛”高手，但总取得五西格玛、三西格玛之类的成果。这并非他像圣母大学足球队那样从全国精挑细选了我们，而是我们恰好闯进了那个圈子。我们听了他的话，并以截然不同的方式加以应用。比如沃尔特·施洛斯一直持有数百只股票。沃尔特不是 150 智商的人，查理·芒格才是。大家类型各异，却拥有共同的哲学纽带。他们并未学任何技巧秘诀，也没学什么系统。

Everybody wants a system. I mean they come to our annual meeting (garbled) the book guy, or the price/earnings, “do I buy them on Monday?” They all want some \[system] that you can run through a computer and simulate it out. I mean I tell ‘em if past performance were the key to it, the Forbes 400 would consist of librarians. Everybody would be looking it up. It doesn’t work that way. They want it to work that way. It would be so nice if it did, but it is not that way. It’s like picking out a basketball team. You look for guys who are seven feet tall, you look for a guy who can stay in school, there are a whole bunch of things. And there are certain things that point you toward getting the best five guys out there on the court. But I can’t give them a formula. I can’t say “here’s a little formula and if you go to Emporia, Kansas and apply this formula without actually seeing the guys play basketball and working with them, you’ll pick up the best basketball team.” You won’t.

人人都想要一个系统。年会上他们来问（录音模糊）是看什么指标、还是市盈率，“我要周一买入吗？”他们都想要个能放进电脑跑一遍就行的系统。我告诉他们，如果过去的业绩是关键，《福布斯》富豪榜就全是图书管理员了，人人都去查数据。事情并非如此，但大家希望如此——如果真能那样当然好，可事实不是。挑篮球队也是一样：你会找身高七英尺、能保持学籍等条件。你有一些标准来选出最好的五个人上场。但我不能给你公式，不能说“这有个小公式，你去堪萨斯州恩波里亚按公式选，不看球员实战，就能组最好球队。”做不到。

\[Garbled question from audience]

【来自观众的含糊提问】

To me, it’s absolutely fascinating that the teaching of investments has really retrogressed from 40 years ago, and I think it’s probably because the teachers are more skillful. They learn all these huge mathematical techniques and (garbled) and they have so much fun manipulating numbers they’re missing something very simple. And I think they have, on balance (aside: I say this at Stanford or Harvard), sent people off with the wrong message. And I get letters from students about it. I don’t see what the reason for having an investment course is unless you teach people how to analyze the value of investments. If people thought there was nothing of utility that you could impart on the subject, except for the fact that there is nothing you can do useful, then I don’t understand... And I know it isn’t true because I’ve seen people teach other people how to make unusual returns over a 30- or 40-year T-Note.

在我看来，令人着迷的是，投资教学较四十年前实际上倒退了，我想这可能是因为教师们“技巧”更高，他们学会了各种庞大的数学技术（录音模糊），在数字游戏中乐此不疲，却忽略了非常简单的东西。我认为总体上（顺便说一句，我在斯坦福或哈佛也这么说）他们给学生传递了错误信息。我收到学生来信谈及此事。我不明白如果一门投资课不教人分析投资价值，那它存在的意义何在。如果人们认为在这个主题上除了“你无能为力”之外没什么可教，那我就不理解……而我知道事实并非如此，因为我见过人们教别人通过三四十年的长债获得非凡回报。

Phil Caret wrote a book on investing in 1924. He’s still alive, he’s a shareholder of Berkshire, he’s 92 or 93 years old. He writes me letters that say “I approve of your no dividend policy because when I get older, then I want to start getting dividends.” But Phil Caret has got a record of 70 years. That is a lot of investments and it is a superior investment record. Not done exactly the same as Graham, but it’s the same general approach. Even Keynes came to that view. He started out as a market timer. But in the ‘30s he \[changed approaches]. \[Keynes later said: “As time goes on, I get more and more convinced that the right method in investment is to put fairly large sums into enterprises which one thinks one knows something about.”]

菲尔·卡瑞特在1924年写过一本投资书。他还健在，是伯克希尔股东，今年92或93岁。他给我写信说：“我赞成你不分红的政策，因为等我更老的时候我想开始拿股息。”菲尔·卡瑞特拥有70年的投资纪录——那是大量投资，也是极佳的纪录。方法与格雷厄姆不完全相同，但属同一大类。甚至凯恩斯最终也认同这一观点。他最初是做市场时机选择的，但到30年代他改变了方法。【凯恩斯后来表示：“随着时间推移，我越来越相信正确的投资方法是把相当大的资金投向自己认为了解的企业。”】

You can’t teach people a formula. You can’t come in at the start of the term, and when they get all through, understand E=MC squared. It’s not like teaching geometry or something.

你没法教人一个公式。开学时灌输公式，学期结束他们就理解了E=MC²——投资并不是教几何那样。

You shouldn’t buy a stock, in my view, for any other reason than the fact that you think it’s selling for less than it’s worth, considering all the factors about the business.

在我看来，买入股票的唯一理由应是：综合所有业务因素后，你认为其售价低于价值。

I used to tell the stock exchange people that before a person bought 100 shares of General Motors they should have to write out on a \[piece of paper:] “I’m buying 100 shares of General Motors at X” and multiply that by the number of shares “and therefore General Motors is worth more than \$32 billion” or whatever it multiplies out to, “because ... \[fill in the reasons]” And if they couldn’t answer that question, their order wouldn’t be accepted.

我过去常对交易所的人说，在某人买入100股通用汽车之前，他应该在一张纸上写下：“我以X价格买入100股通用汽车”，再乘以股数，“因此通用汽车的价值超过320亿美元”，或者算出多少就是多少，“因为……【写明理由】”。如果他回答不了，就不该接受订单。

That test should be applied. I should never buy anything unless I can fill out that piece of paper. I may be wrong, but I would know the answer to that. “I’m buying Coca Cola right now, 660 million shares of stock, a little under \$50. The whole company costs me about \$32 billion dollars.” Before you buy 100 shares of stock at \$48 you ought to be able to answer “I’m paying \$32 billion today for the Coca Cola Company because...” \[Banging the podium for emphasis.] If you can’t answer that question, you shouldn’t buy it. If you can answer that question, and you do it a few times, you’ll make a lot of money.

必须采用这种测试。除非我能填好那张纸，否则绝不买。我可能会出错，但我会知道答案。“我现在买可口可乐，6.6亿股，每股不到50美元，整家公司成本约320亿美元。”在你以48美元买入100股之前，你应能回答：“我今天花320亿美元买下可口可乐，因为……”【敲讲台强调】若答不上，就不该买。若能回答并重复几次，你会赚大钱。

【观众问：“那您买了，您怎么回答？”】

Well, it was only \$14 billion. I would say this: “If you added a penny to price of every Coca Cola sold in the world this year, that would add \$2 billion to pretax earnings.” Now you tell me whether you think there’s a penny, worldwide, of price flexibility per serving of Coke. Well, the answer is “you know there is.”

When they bought the Coca Cola Company, the Candler family bought it from Pembertons back in 1904 or 1906, they paid \$2,000 for the company. If the Pemberton family had reserved a penny a serving royalty a serving, the Coca Cola company would be sending \$2 billion to the Pemberton family every year and you wouldn’t even see the difference in the figures. It’s there.

坎德勒家族1904或1906年从彭伯顿家族手里买下可口可乐，仅花2000美元。如果当初彭伯顿家族为每份可乐保留一分钱的特许权费，可口可乐公司如今每年要向他们支付20亿美元，而报表几乎看不出差异。这潜力就摆在那里。

Now that’s not true when I was selling \[men’s suit] linings \[Berkshire Hathaway’s original business]. I sold men’s suit linings for 20 years. We tried to raise our price a half a cent a yard, and on an 80-cent-a-yard product, people who’d done business with us for 80 years slammed the door in our face. (garbled) ... “but half a cent a yard”... Nobody ever went into a store and said “I’d like to buy a pinstripe suit with a Hathaway lining.” Never. They say “I want a coat” all over the world.

但在我卖男装里衬那时就行不通。我卖了20年里衬。我们试图把每码0.80美元的产品提价半分钱，和我们合作80年的客户都把门砰地关上。（录音模糊）……“就半分钱一码啊”……没人会走进店里说“我想要一件带Hathaway里衬的细条纹西装。”从没有。全球顾客只说“我要件外套”。

Now in this country, Pepsi is, unfortunately, more or less coexistent with Coke. This is their weakest market. They make more in Japan, with less than half the people and way less per capita usage than they make in the United States. Around the world a guy says “I’ll sell you an unmarked cola a penny cheaper” ... it isn’t going to happen. That is the fastest test.

在美国，可口可乐不幸与百事并存，这是它们最弱的市场。在人口不到美国一半、人均消费更低的日本，可口可乐赚得反而更多。全球其他地方若有人说“我卖你无牌可乐便宜一分钱”……根本行不通。这是最快的检验方法。

A couple of fast tests about how good a business is. First question is “how long does the management have to think before they decide to raise prices?” You’re looking at marvelous business when you look in the mirror and say “mirror, mirror on the wall, how much should I charge for Coke this fall?” \[And the mirror replies, “More.”] That’s a great business. When you say, like we used to in the textile business, when you get down on your knees, call in all the priests, rabbis, and everyone else, \[and say] “just another half cent a yard.” Then you get up and they say “We won’t pay it.” It’s just night and day. I mean, if you walk into a drugstore, and you say “I’d like a Hershey bar” and the man says “I don’t have any Hershey bars, but I’ve got this unmarked chocolate bar, and it’s a nickel cheaper than a Hershey bar” you just go across the street and buy a Hershey bar. That is a good business.

衡量好生意的快速测试有两个。第一问：“管理层决定涨价前需要思考多久？”若你对镜自问：“镜子啊镜子，今年秋天可乐该卖多少钱？”【镜子答：“更高。”】那就是绝佳生意。而若像我们纺织业那样，跪倒祈求所有神父、拉比帮忙，“每码只涨半分钱吧”，起身却被回绝——天差地别。再比如，你走进药店说“我要块好时巧克力”，店员说“我这里无牌巧克力便宜五分钱”，你会过街去买好时。这才是好生意。

The ability to raise prices – the ability to differentiate yourself in a real way, and a real way means you can charge a different price – that makes a great business.

I’ll try this on the students later: What’s the highest price of a daily newspaper in the United States? \[Pause] The highest priced daily newspaper in the United States is the Daily Racing Form. 150,000 copies a day, \$2.25 a copy, they go up in 25 cent intervals, and it doesn’t affect circulation at all. Why? There is no substitute. If you go to the track, assuming you’re a forms player, you don’t want “Joe’s Little Green Sheet”, you want The Form. And it doesn’t make any difference what it costs! There is no substitute. And that’s why they’ve got a 65% pretax margin. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out.

待会我会考考学生：全美单价最高的日报是哪家？【停顿】答案是《Daily Racing Form》（赛马日报）。日销15万份，每份2.25美元，每次涨价25美分，发行量丝毫不受影响。为什么？因为无可替代。如果你去赛马场并依靠资料下注，你不会买“乔的小绿纸”，你只要《Form》。价格多少都无所谓！没有替代品。这就是他们税前利润率65%的原因，这并不需要天才才能看出。

There are products like that, and there are products like sheet steel. And they’re night and day.

有的产品就像这样，也有产品像薄板钢，二者天壤之别。

\[From Audience: You said you only had to have a couple of good ideas, we at Notre Dame had a good one in having you here.]  \[Applause]

【观众：您说一生只需几个好点子，我们圣母大学的好点子就是邀请您来。】【掌声】

Lecture to MBA Students

给MBA学生的演讲

I’ll talk for a few minutes on some of the things that relate to this handout I’ve got, so if everybody has one, or looks with their neighbor, we’ll get the (garbled) about how to make a lot of money in stocks as we go along.

我先讲几分钟，内容与手头这份资料相关，大家都拿到了吧？没有就跟邻座合看。接下来我们会逐步（录音模糊）介绍如何靠股票赚大钱。

Eddie Cantor had a problem with Goldman Sachs in the late ‘20s. \[Cantor was a popular entertainer who lost his fortune in the crash.] He did not do very well in something he bought from them, so he worked them into his routine when he performed, and he told (garbled).

埃迪·坎特在20年代末和高盛有段轶事。【坎特是一位因股灾破产的著名艺人】他从高盛买的投资亏了，于是把高盛写进表演段子里，对观众讲述（录音模糊）。

You know Wall Street is a place that people drive to in Rolls Royces to get advice from people who ride to work on the subway.

你知道，华尔街就是这样一个地方：人们坐着劳斯莱斯去那儿，向乘地铁上班的人寻求建议。

I’d like to talk to you for just a few minutes about what I regard as the most important thing in investments and also in terms of your career. Because in your career what train you get on makes a lot of difference. Because frequently, perhaps generally, when people get out of business school, they don’t give enough thought to exactly what sort of train they’re going to get on. And it makes a tremendous difference whether you get involved in a prosperous company, one that’s going to really do well. On balance, you want to go with a company whose stock is going to be a good investment over the years because there’s going to be much more opportunity, there’s going to be more money made, you’re going to (garbled). And if you get involved with some of the businesses I’ve been involved with like trading stamps (garbled).

我想就投资和职业生涯中最重要的事情谈几分钟。因为在你们的职业生涯里，选择坐上哪班列车差别巨大。通常商学院毕业生对自己将要登上的列车考虑不够。而加入一家繁荣发展的公司、长期表现优异，与加入另一种公司截然不同。总体而言，你应选择其股票多年来都将是一笔好投资的公司，因为机会更多、赚得也更多，你会（录音模糊）。如果你加入了我曾涉足的一些衰退行业，如交易印花（录音模糊）……

\[Buffett is warning students to stay away from declining businesses such as Blue Chip Stamps, though this was in fact a highly successful investment.  In the book Damn Right!, Janet Lowe wrote: “During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Munger, Guerin and Buffett gradually acquired a controlling interest in Blue Chip Stamps. This small company issued trading stamps, which merchants distributed. Customers collected and redeemed the stamps for merchandise. The investors saw untapped potential in the company’s float account – the difference between stamps issued and stamps redeemed. Using this pool of capital, Blue Chip’s controlling investors acquired several other companies: Wesco Financial, See’s Candies and The Buffalo Evening News.”]

【巴菲特在提醒学生远离衰退行业，如Blue Chip Stamps，尽管这实际上是一笔极成功的投资。詹妮特·洛在《Damn Right!》中写道：“60年代末至70年代初，芒格、格林和巴菲特逐步收购Blue Chip Stamps控股权……利用其浮存金先后收购Wesco Financial、See’s Candies和《布法罗晚报》。】

It does make a difference what kind of a business you get associated with. For that reason I’ve set forth in this little handout Company A and Company E. I’m not going to tell you for the moment what these companies are. I’m going to tell you one thing about the two companies. One of the companies, to the point of where this cuts off, lost its investors more money than virtually any business in the world. The other company made its owner more money than virtually any company in the world. So one of these two companies, Company A and Company E, has made one of its owners one of the five wealthiest people in the world, while the other company made its owners appreciably poorer, probably more so than any other company to that point in time.

你所进入的行业确实不同。我在讲义中列出了公司A和公司E。我暂不透露它们身份，只告诉大家：其中一家几乎让投资人赔的钱比全球任何企业都多；另一家却让其所有者赚的钱几乎比全球任何企业都多。也就是说，两家公司中，有一家让其所有者跻身全球五大富豪，另一家则让股东显著变穷，很可能在当时比任何企业都惨。

Now I’ll tell you a little bit about these companies (we’re leading up to the question of whether the business makes a difference). Company A had thousands of MBAs working for it. Company E had none. I wanted to get your attention. Company A had all kinds of employee benefit programs, stock options, pensions, the works. Company E never had stock options. Company A had thousands of patents – they probably held more patents than just about any company in the United States. Company E never invented anything. Company A’s product improved dramatically in this period, Company E’s product just sat.

接着再透露一些信息（这将引出“行业是否重要”的问题）。公司A拥有数千名MBA；公司E一个都没有——我要吸引你们注意。公司A福利计划、期权、养老金一应俱全；公司E从未发过期权。公司A拥有数千项专利，可能多过全美任何企业；公司E从未发明任何东西。期间公司A产品大幅改进，而公司E的产品几乎原地踏步。

So far, based on what I’ve told you, does anybody have any idea of which company was the great success, and why?

到目前为止，凭我说的这些，谁猜得到哪家公司更成功，以及原因？

If you get to buy one of these two companies, and this is all you know, and you get to ask me one question to decide on which one to buy. If you ask me the right question, you will probably make the right decision about the company’s stock, and one will make you enormously wealthy.

假设你只能在两家公司里选一家投资，只知道这些信息，而且可向我提出一个问题以决定买哪家。如果你问对了问题，你大概率会做出正确的投资决定，从而大富。

\[Audience asks questions]

【听众提问】

Both companies make products used every day. They started as necessities, highly useful, nothing esoteric about either one, although company A does have all these patents. There’s more technology involved in company A.

两家公司都生产日常用品，都是从必需品起家，非常实用，没有什么高深莫测，尽管公司A有很多专利，技术含量更高。

\[How many companies compete with either one?]

【与它们竞争的公司数量？】

Good question, very good question. In effect, neither company had any competition. And that might differentiate in some cases.

好问题，非常好。实际上，两家公司几乎都没有竞争对手——这可能决定成败。

Well, I’ll tell you a little more about it. Company A is known as company A because it was in agony, and Company E, as Company E, because it was in ecstasy. Company A is American Telephone and Telegraph. I’ve omitted eight zeros on the left hand side, and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, at the end of 1979, was selling for \$10 billion less than the shareholders had either put in or left in the business. In other words, if shareholder’s equity was “X” the market value was X minus \$10 billion. So the money that shareholders had put in, or left in, the business had shrunk by \$10 billion in terms of market value.

那我再多透露点。公司A之所以叫A是因为它“痛苦”（Agony），公司E之所以叫E是因为它“欣喜”（Ecstasy）。公司A就是美国电话电报公司（AT\&T）。我省去左侧八个零——到1979年底，AT\&T市值比股东投入或留存的资本少100亿美元。换言之，若股东权益为X，市值就是X减100亿美元，股东的钱在市值层面缩水了100亿美元。

Company E, the excellent company, I left off only six zeros. And that happens to be a company called Thompson Newspapers. Thomson Newspapers, which most of you have probably never heard of, actually owns about 5% of the newspapers in the United States. But they’re all small ones. And, as I said, it has no MBAs, no stock options – still doesn’t – and it made its owner, Lord Thompson. He wasn’t Lord Thompson when he started – he started with 1,500 bucks in North Bay, Ontario buying a little radio station but, when he got to be one of the five richest men, he became Lord Thompson. I met him one time in England as a matter of fact, in 1972, and went up to see him. He’d never heard of me, but he was a very important guy. (I’d heard of him!)

至于优秀的公司E，我只省去六个零——它是汤姆森报业公司。很多人可能没听过，但它拥有全美约5%的报纸，不过都是小报。如前所述，公司没有MBA、没有期权，现在依旧没有，却让其所有者汤姆森爵士致富。他创业时还不是爵士，只在安大略北湾用1500美元买下一家小电台；后来跻身全球五大富豪后才封为爵士。1972年我在英国见过他一次。我去拜访，他压根不知道我是谁，但他很重要（而我认识他！）。

I said, “Lord Thompson, you own the newspaper in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Council Bluffs is right across the river from Omaha, where I live, four or five miles from my house. I said, “Lord Thompson, You own the Council Bluffs \[Daily Nonpareil?]. I don’t suppose you’d ever think of selling it?” He said “I wouldn’t think of it.”

我说：“汤姆森爵士，您拥有爱荷华Council Bluffs的报纸。那地方就在我住的奥马哈河对岸，离我家四五英里。爵士，您拥有Council Bluffs的《Daily Nonpareil》吧？您会考虑卖吗？”他说：“想都不会想。”

I said “Lord Thompson, you’ve bought this paper in Council Bluffs, and you’ve never seen the paper, never seen the town, but I do notice that every year you raise prices.” (garbled) He’s got the only way to talk to people – his was the only “megaphone” for merchants to announce commercial news in Council Bluffs. He said “I figured that out before you did.”

我说：“爵士，您买下Council Bluffs这家报纸，从未看过报纸也没去过那座城，但我注意到您每年都涨价。”（录音模糊）他拥有当地唯一商家发布广告信息的“扩音器”。他说：“这点我比你早想明白。”

I said, “If you ever raise prices to the point where it’s counterproductive (garbled).”

我说：“如果哪天您把价格提得适得其反……（录音模糊）”

Then \[I said] “I’ve got only one other question: How do you figure out how much to charge people? You look like a man of awesome commercial instincts – you started with a \$1,500 radio station, now you’re worth \$4 or \$5 billion dollars.”

接着我说：“我还有一个问题：您怎么定价？您商业直觉惊人——1500美元起家，如今身价40至50亿美元。”

He said “Well, that’s another good question. I just tell my US managers to try and make 45% pretax and figure that’s not gouging.” And as I got to the elevator, he said “If you ever hear of a newspaper you don’t want to buy, call me. Collect.”

他说：“那也是好问题。我只告诉美国经理们力争45%的税前利润，我觉得这算不上敲竹杠。”我走到电梯口时，他又说：“如果你有听说哪家报纸你不想买，给我打电话，长途到付。”

I rode down and that was two years of business school. I mean, try to make 45% and call me collect if you ever find a paper you don’t want to buy.

我乘电梯下来，这番经历顶得上两年商学院课程。意思就是：努力赚45%税前利润；若遇到自己都不想买的报纸，就给他打长途电话到付。

The telephone company, with the patents, the MBAs, the stock options, and everything else, had one problem, and that problem is illustrated by those figures on that lower left hand column. And those figures show the plant investment in the telephone business. That’s \$47 billion, starting off with, growing to \$99 billion over an eight or nine year period. More and more and more money had to be tossed in, in order to make these increased earnings, going from \$2.2 billion to \$5.6 billion.

电话公司拥有专利、MBA、期权等一切，却有一个致命问题。左下角数字说明这一点：电话业务的设备投资从470亿美元增至990亿美元，耗时八九年。为了把利润从22亿美元提高到56亿美元，不断往里砸钱。

So, they got more money, but you can get more money from a savings account if you keep adding money to it every year. The progress in earnings that the telephone company made was only achievable because they kept on shoving more money into the savings account and the truth was, under the conditions of the ‘70s, they were not getting paid commensurate with the amount of money that they had to shove into the pot, whereas Lord Thompson, once he bought the paper in Council Bluffs, never put another dime in. They just mailed money every year. And as they got more money, he bought more newspapers. And, in fact, he said it was going to say on his tombstone that he bought newspapers in order to make more money in order to buy more newspapers \[and so on].

他们确实赚到更多钱，可如果你每年往储蓄账户存钱，也能“赚”更多。电话公司利润的增长仅靠持续投入资本实现；但在70年代环境下，他们得到的回报与投入并不匹配。而汤姆森爵士买下Council Bluffs报纸后，再没投过一分钱，每年都只是收钱。钱多了，他就买更多报纸。事实上，他说自己的墓志铭会写：“买报纸是为了赚更多钱，以便再买报纸”，如此循环。

The idea was that, essentially, he raised prices and raised earnings there every year without having to put more capital into the business.

核心在于：他每年都能提价、提升收益，却无需再投入资本。

One is a marvelous, absolutely sensational business, the other one is a terrible business. If you have a choice between going to work for a wonderful business that is not capital intensive, and one that is capital intensive, I suggest that you look at the one that is not capital intensive. I took 25 years to figure that out, incidentally.

一个是非凡、令人惊叹的生意；另一个则糟糕透顶。如果你可选择加入资本开销小的好企业或资本密集型企业，我建议选前者。我花了25年才悟到这一点。

On the next page, I’ve got a couple of other businesses here. Company E is the ecstasy on the left. You can see earnings went up nicely: they went from \$4 million to \$27 million. They only employed assets of \$17 million, so that is really a wonderful business. On \$17 million they earned \$27 million, 150% on invested capital. That is a good business. The one on the right, Company A, the agony, had \$11 or \$12 million tied up, and some years made a few bucks, and in some years lost a few bucks.

下一页还有两家公司。左侧公司E“欣喜”，利润从400万增至2700万，仅动用1700万资产，投资回报率150%——真正好生意。右侧公司A“痛苦”，占用1100至1200万资本，有些年赚点小钱，有些年亏钱。

Now, here again we might ask ourselves, “What differentiates these companies?” Does anybody have any idea why company E might have done so much better than Company A? Usually somebody says at this point “maybe company E was better managed than company A.” There’s only one problem with that conclusion and that is, Company E and Company A had the same manager – me!

我们再次要问：“这两家公司差别在哪？”有人或许会说“可能E比A管理好”。但这种结论有个大问题：E和A的经理是同一个人——就是我！

The company E is our candy business, See’s Candies out in California. I don’t know how many of you come from the west, but it dominates the boxed chocolate business out there and the earnings went from \$4 million to \$27 million, and in the year that just ended they were about \$38 million. In other words, they mail us all the money they make every year and they keep growing, and making more money, and everybody’s very happy.

公司E是我们的糖果业务——加州See’s Candies。我不知道有多少人来自美国西部，那里的盒装巧克力几乎被它垄断，利润从400万增至2700万，在刚结束的一年约3800万。换言之，他们每年把赚到的现金全寄给我们，并持续增长，人人都很开心。

Company A was our textile business. That’s a business that took me 22 years to figure out it wasn’t very good. Well, in the textile business, we made over half of the men’s suit linings in the United States. If you wore a men’s suit, chances were that it had a Hathaway lining. And we made them during World War II, when customers couldn’t get their linings from other people. Sears Roebuck voted us “Supplier of the Year.” They were wild about us. The thing was, they wouldn’t give us another half a cent a yard because nobody had ever gone into a men’s clothing store and asked for a pin striped suit with a Hathaway lining. You just don’t see that.

公司A是我们的纺织业务。我花了22年才认清它并不好。在纺织业里，我们曾生产美国一半以上的男装里衬。如果你穿男士西装，很可能用的是Hathaway里衬。二战期间，其他厂商供不了里衬，我们照常供货。西尔斯百货把我们评为“年度最佳供应商”。他们对我们赞不绝口，但就是不肯多付半分钱一码，因为从来没人走进男装店说：“我要一件带Hathaway里衬的西装。”

As a practical matter, if some guy’s going to offer them a lining for 79 cents, \[it makes no difference] who’s going to take them fishing, and supplied them during World War II, and was personal friends with the Chairman of Sears. Because we charged 79½ cents a yard, it was “no dice.”

现实中，如果有人愿以79美分供应里衬，就算我们曾在二战救急、会带他们钓鱼、还是西尔斯董事长的朋友，他们也不会买我们79.5美分一码的货——说什么都不行。

See’s Candies, on the other hand, made something that people had an emotional attraction to, and a physical attraction you might say. We’re almost to Valentine’s Day, so can you imagine going to your wife or sweetheart, handing her a box of candy and saying “Honey, I took the low bid.”

反过来看See’s，卖的是让人产生情感依恋甚至生理依赖的东西。情人节快到了，你能想象把一盒糖果递给妻子或女友时说：“亲爱的，我选了最低价的”吗？

Essentially, every year for 19 years I’ve raised the price of candy on December 26. And 19 years goes by and everyone keeps buying candy. Every ten years I tried to raise the price of linings a fraction of a cent, and they’d throw the linings back at me. Our linings were just as good as our candies. It was much harder to run the linings factory than it was to run the candy company. The problem is, just because a business is lousy doesn’t mean it isn’t difficult.

过去19年里，我每年12月26日都会给糖果涨价，大家照样买。可我每隔十年试着把里衬价格提高哪怕几分之一美分，他们都把货退回来。我们的里衬质量并不比糖果差，运营里衬工厂比糖果厂难多了。问题在于：生意烂并不代表它做起来不费劲。

In the end, I like to think anyway that if Alfred P. Sloan \[the legendary CEO of General Motors during its heyday] came back and tried to run the lining business, it wouldn’t make as much money as a good business. The product was undifferentiated. The candy product is differentiated. (Garbled story of Hershey Bar and Coke versus unbranded but modestly cheaper products).

归根结底，就算让通用汽车传奇CEO阿尔弗雷德·斯隆回来经营里衬业务，他也不可能赚到好生意那样的钱。里衬缺乏差异化；糖果则不同。（录音模糊地讲了好时巧克力和可口可乐与无牌稍廉价产品的故事）

You really want something where, if they don’t have it in stock, you want to go across the street to get it. Nobody cares what kind of steel goes into a car. Have you ever gone into a car dealership to buy a Cadillac and said “I’d like a Cadillac with steel that came from the South Works of US Steel.” It just doesn’t work that way, so that when General Motors buys they call in all the steel companies and say “here’s the best price we’ve got so far, and you’ve got to decide if you want to beat their price, or have your plant sit idle.”

I put one business in here, CBS versus Cap Cities in 1957, when my friend Tom Murphy took over Cap Cities. They had a little bankrupt UHF station in Albany. They ran it out of a home for retired nuns. And it was very appropriate because they had to pray every day. At that time CBS was the largest advertising medium in the world: \$385 million in revenues whereas Cap Cities had \$900,000 in revenues. Cap Cities made \$37,000 a year and they paid my friend Murph \$12,000 a year. CBS made \$48 million pretax. Cap Cities was selling for \$5 million in the market and priced on the come, while CBS was selling for \$500 million.

我这里再举CBS与Cap Cities1957年的对比。我朋友汤姆·墨菲接管Cap Cities时，他们在奥尔巴尼有家破产的UHF电视台，设在退休修女院里运营，非常贴切——他们每天都得祷告。当时CBS是全球最大广告媒介，营收3.85亿美元，而Cap Cities营收90万美元，年赚3.7万美元，付给墨菲1.2万美元薪水。CBS税前利润4800万美元。Cap Cities市值500万美元，全靠前景定价；CBS市值5亿美元。

Now, if you look at the two companies, Cap Cities has a market value of about \$7 billion and CBS has a market value of about \$2 billion. They were both in the same business, broadcasting. Neither one had, certainly Cap Cities didn’t have, any patents. Cap Cities didn’t have anything that CBS didn’t have. And somehow CBS took a wonderful business that was worth \$500 million, and over about 30 years they managed a little increase – peanuts – while my friend Murphy, with exactly the same business, with one little tiny UHF station in Albany, (bear in mind that CBS had the largest stations in New York City and Chicago) and my friend Murph just killed them. And you say “how can that happen?” And that’s what you ought to study in business school. You ought to study Tom Murphy at Cap Cities. And you also ought to study Bill Paley \[who was the CEO] at CBS.

如今再看这两家公司，Cap Cities市值约70亿美元，CBS市值约20亿美元。他们同处广播业，Cap Cities当然没有专利，Cap Cities没有的东西，CBS也都有。但CBS把当初价值5亿美元的好企业，30年只增值一点点；而我朋友墨菲靠奥尔巴尼那座小小UHF站（别忘CBS拥有纽约和芝加哥最大电视台）却击败了CBS。你会问“这怎么可能？”这正是商学院该研究的。要研究Cap Cities的Tom Murphy，也要研究CBS的Bill Paley。

We have a saying around Berkshire that “all we ever want to know is where we’re going to die, so we’ll never go there.” And CBS is what you don’t want. It’s as important not to do what CBS did, and it is important to do what Cap Cities did. Cap Cities did a lot of things right, but if CBS had done the same things right, Cap Cities would have never come close.

伯克希尔有句俚语：“我们只想知道自己会在哪里死，这样我们就不会去那里。”CBS就是你不想去的地方；避免做CBS做过的事同样重要，正如要做Cap Cities做对的事一样。Cap Cities做对了很多事，但如果CBS同样做对那些事，Cap Cities根本追不上。

They had all the IQ at CBS that they had at Cap Cities. They had 50 times as many people, and they were all coming to work early and going home late. They had all kinds of strategic planners, they had management consultants. They had more than I can say. Yet they lost. They lost to a guy that started out with a leaky rowboat, at the same time the other guy left in the QE II. By the time they got into New York, the guy in the rowboat brought in more cargo than the QE II did. There’s a real story in that. And you can understand broadcasting, so it’s really worth studying what two people in the same field did, and why one succeeded so much and one failed.

CBS拥有与Cap Cities同等智商的团队，人数却是后者50倍，大家都早来晚走，各种战略规划师、管理顾问，应有尽有，却输了。他们输给了一个划着漏水小船的人，而CBS像坐着豪华邮轮QE II出发，但两者到达纽约时，小船运来的货物比QE II还多，故事耐人寻味。同在广播业，值得研究为何一个大获成功，一个却失败。

I couldn’t resist kicking in the last page: the only public offering Cap Cities ever made, back in 1957 which raised, as you can see, \$300,000. And this was when they were going to buy the station in Raleigh/Durham. The only public offering of stock the company’s every made (aside: they sold us a block of stock when they bought ABC). And if you look very carefully you’ll see that the underwriting commission – they took two firms to get this sold – the total underwriting commission was \$6,500 bucks.

我忍不住再讲最后一页：Cap Cities唯一一次公开募股是在1957年，筹资30万美元，用来收购罗利/达勒姆的电视台；这是公司历史上唯一的公开发行（顺带说，他们收购ABC时向我们卖过一大块股票）。若仔细看招股说明书就会发现承销佣金——两家券商联手才卖掉——总共只有6500美元。

The last thing I want to show you, before we get onto your questions, is an ad that was run June

16, 1969, for 1,000,000 shares of American Motors. This is a reproduction from the Wall Street Journal of that day. Now does anybody notice anything unusual about that ad?

在回答你们问题前，我想给大家看最后一样东西：1969年6月16日刊登的一则广告，发行100万股American Motors股票，这是当天《华尔街日报》的复印件。有人注意到这广告有什么异常吗？

\[Guesses from audience.]

【观众猜测。】

Everybody in that ad has disappeared. There are 37 investment bankers that sold that issue, plus American Motors, and they are all gone. Maybe that’s why they call them tombstone ads. Now the average business of the New York Stock exchange in 1969 was 11 million shares. Average volume now is fifteen times as large. Now here’s an industry whose volume has grown 15 to 1 in 20 years. Marvelous growth in the financial world. And here are 37 out of 37, and those are some of the biggest names on Wall Street, and some of them had been around the longest, and 37 out of 37 have disappeared. And that’s why I say you ought to think about \[the long-term durability of a business?] because these people obviously didn’t.

那则广告里的所有公司都消失了。承销该发行的 37 家投行加上 American Motors 本身，如今全都不在了，也许这就是“墓碑广告”之名的来历。1969 年纽约证交所的日均成交量是 1100 万股，如今平均成交量涨了 15 倍。金融业交易量 20 年翻了 15 倍，却有 37 家华尔街大名鼎鼎、历史悠久的公司 37 家全军覆没。这就是我常说的：你得考虑一家企业能否长期存续——显然他们没这么想。

These were run by people with high IQs, by people that worked ungodly hard. They were people that had an intense interest in success. They worked long hours. They all thought they were going to be leaders on Wall Street at some point, and they all went around, incidentally, giving advice to other companies about how to run their business. That’s sort of interesting.

这些公司由高智商、极度勤奋的人经营，他们渴望成功、工作时间超长，都自认终有一天会成为华尔街的领袖，而且还到处给别的企业出谋划策，教人如何经营，这倒挺有意思。

You go to Wall Street today, and there’s some company the guy hadn’t heard of two weeks before and he’s trying to sell you. He will lay out this computer run of the next 10 years, yet he doesn’t have the faintest idea of what his own business is going to earn next week!

如今走进华尔街，你会遇到某人推销一家两周前他还没听过的公司。他会给你展示未来 10 年的电脑预测，可他对自己公司下周赚多少钱却毫无头绪！

Here are a group of 37. And the question is, how can you get a result like that? That is not a result that you get by chance. How can people who are bright, who work hard, who have their own money in the business – these are not a bunch of absentee owners – how can they get such a bad result? And I suggest that’s a good thing to think about before you get a job and go out into the world.

想想这 37 家公司的结果，怎么会这样？这绝非偶然。一群聪明、勤奋、拿自家钱做生意的人——绝不是甩手掌柜——怎么会落得如此下场？我建议各位在步入职场前，好好思考这个问题。

I would say that if you had to pick one thing that did it more than anything else, it’s the mindless imitation of one’s peers that produced this result. Whatever the other guy did, the other 36 were like a bunch of lemmings in terms of following. That’s what’s gotten all the big banks in trouble for the past 15 years. Every time somebody big does something dumb, other people can hardly wait to copy it. If you do nothing else when you get out of here, do things only when they make sense to you. You ought to be able to write “I am going to work for General Motors because ... “I am buying 100 shares of Coca Coals stock because...” And if you can’t write an intelligent answer to those questions, don’t do it.

若非要找出首要原因，就是盲目模仿同行。有人做什么，其余 36 家就像旅鼠般跟风。这正是过去 15 年所有大银行陷入麻烦的根源：每当大玩家做蠢事，其他人迫不及待复制。如果你毕业后只记住一件事，那就是——只有在自己看懂且合乎道理时才行动。你理应写得出“我要去通用汽车工作的原因是……”“我要买 100 股可口可乐股票的原因是……”，若答不出，就别干。

I proposed this to the stock exchange some years ago: that everybody be able to write out “I am buying 100 shares of Coca Cola Company, market value \$32 billion, because ....” and they wouldn’t take your order until you filled that thing out.

几年前我向交易所建议：每个人下单前都得写一句“我买入可口可乐 100 股，市值 320 亿美元，因为……”填好才能成交。

I find this very useful when I write my annual report. I learn while I think when I write it out. Some of the things I think I think, I find don’t make any sense when I start tying to write them down and explain them to people. You ought to be able to explain why you’re taking the job you’re taking, why you’re making the investment you’re making, or whatever it may be. And if it can’t stand applying pencil to paper, you’d better think it through some more.

我写年度报告时发现此法极有用；写的过程就是思考、学习的过程。有些自认为正确的想法，一写下来给人解释就发现不通。你应该能解释为何选择某份工作、为何做某项投资等；若无法落笔成文，就该再琢磨清楚。

People in that ad did a lot of things that could not have stood that test. Some major bankers in the United States did a lot of things that could not meet that test. One of the bankers in the United States, who’s in plenty of trouble now, bragged a few years ago he never made a loan. And, from the way things are starting to look, he’s never going to collect on one either.

那则广告里的公司干了许多经不起这项检验的事。美国一些大银行家也干了不少。其中一位如今麻烦缠身的银行家几年前吹嘘自己从不放贷，而眼下看来，他也永远收不回贷款了。

You should not be running one the major banks in the United States without having made loans. I mean, you learn about human nature, if nothing else, when you make loans.

\[Question and Answer With Students]

【与学生的问答环节】

That jewelry store, it’s an interesting story, I’ll take an extra minute. We bought a furniture store about five or six years ago. We bought it from a woman who was 89 \[Rose Blumkin, the legendary Mrs. B]. That woman came to this country with a tag around her neck from Russia. She walked out of Russia, and the Red Cross truck got her in Seattle and (garbled) then Fort Dodge, Iowa and sent her there. And she saved money. She sold used clothes and that sort of thing, and she brought over seven siblings, plus her mother and father. She sent over \$50 bucks at a time to get the rest of the family over here.

说到那家珠宝店，背后有段有趣的故事，我多花一分钟讲讲。五六年前我们收购了一家家具店，卖家是一位 89 岁的女士——传奇人物 Mrs. B（罗斯·布卢姆金）。她从俄国步行逃出，脖子上挂着名牌抵达美国，被红十字会卡车送到西雅图，（录音模糊）再辗转到爱荷华州福特道奇。她靠卖旧衣等小买卖攒钱，把七个兄弟姐妹和父母都接到美国，每次汇 50 美元过去。

In 1937, she would have been 44 at the time, she started a store with \$500, a home furnishings store. That’s all the money she ever put into it. Last year it made \$18 million, pretax. It’s become the largest home furnishings store in the country. And she put everybody out of business. She doesn’t know accounting, she’s never had an audit, she doesn’t know what accruals mean, she doesn’t know what depreciation means, but she knows how to run a business. And, unfortunately, two years ago she got mad at her grandchildren and she went out and quit and started competing with us, which shows you how stupid I was not to get a non-compete agreement from an 89-year-old woman! She is now in business right across the street, and works seven days a week at 97 years of age. And if you tell her that this room is 27 by 31, she will tell you how many square yards it is just like that, at \$6.99 a yard, and how much that comes to plus tax. She can do it just like that. She cannot read or write. She has never been to school a day in her life. But she knows how to run a business.

1937 年，44 岁的她用 500 美元开了家家居店，那也是她唯一投入的资金。去年这店税前赚 1800 万美元，成了全国最大的家居商，把同行都挤垮了。她不懂会计，从未做过审计，不知道权责发生、折旧这些词，但她懂经营。不幸的是，两年前因孙辈惹她生气，她辞职出来和我们对着干——这说明我没让 89 岁老太太签竞业禁止是多么愚蠢！如今她 97 岁，在街对面开店，每周工作七天。告诉她这屋 27×31 英尺，她立刻能算出多少平方码，每码 6.99 美元，总价加税多少，全都脱口而出。她不会读写，一天学都没上过，可她会经营。

One of the sisters she brought over, also to Omaha, was a woman named Rebecca. She went through Latvia, and the border guard took the money when she got to Latvia, and she had to sit in Latvia for a year until her sister got another \$50 bucks to bring her over here. They got over here, and it took them 20 odd years to get enough money to buy into a tiny little jewelry store. And I bought that business a couple of years ago from the Friedman family, which is Mrs. B’s sister. Incidentally, Mrs. B is 97, and her three other (garbled).

她带来的姐妹之一叫丽贝卡，也到奥马哈。她途经拉脱维亚时被边境士兵搜走钱，只得在那里滞留一年，直到姐姐再寄 50 美元才来到美国。到这边后，她们用了 20 多年才攒够钱买下一家小珠宝店。我几年前向弗里德曼家族（也就是 Mrs. B 的妹妹家）买下了那家公司。顺便说一句，Mrs. B 97 岁，她的另外三位（录音模糊）。

In any event, in that jewelry store last year, the sales were up 18%. I believe it’s the second largest jewelry store in the United States, next to Tiffany’s main location, and it uses exactly the same formula the furniture store used in building up the largest home furnishings store. The people that run them never went to business school, and they stress the things that Ben Franklin would stress. Essentially, their business is pure Ben Franklin. Tell truth and give people service. Ben Franklin said “take care of thy shop and it will take care of thee.” Now that’s old fashioned in terms of the phraseology, but it’s that simple. And, the truth is that family... If you were at our jewelry store last Saturday like I was, Ike Friedman who is 65, 66, was there. His mother, Mrs. Friedman, came in – she’s 89 years old – Wall Street Journal under her arm. You’ve got his son there, his only son, two sons-in-law, two daughters in there, they’re all busy. The family’s worth tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars. They don’t do it ‘cause they have to, they do it ‘cause they like to.

总之，那家珠宝店去年销售增长 18%。我相信它是美国第二大珠宝店，仅次于蒂芙尼旗舰店。它完全复制了家具店的成功公式。经营者从没上过商学院，他们强调本杰明·富兰克林强调的观念，本质上是纯粹的富兰克林式生意：讲真话，提供服务。富兰克林说：“照管好你的店，它就会照管好你。”措辞虽然老派，却就是这么简单。事实是，这个家族……如果上周六你像我一样在店里，就会看到 65、66 岁的艾克·弗里德曼在那里，他 89 岁的母亲夹着《华尔街日报》进门。他的独子、两个女婿、两个女儿也都在店里忙活。这一家资产几千万上亿美元，但他们不是因为必须工作，而是因为喜欢。

The one thing we’ve done well in buying businesses is the people who sold them were in love with their business and not in love with money. If they’re in love with money we can’t do it, but if they’re in love with their business we get along very well because we leave them alone.

我们收购企业最成功的一点是：卖家都是爱事业而非爱钱的人。如果他们只爱钱，我们就做不成；如果他们爱事业，我们相处融洽，因为我们会放手让他们干。

Actually Fran Blumkin, the wife of Louis Blumkin, who’s now Chairman of the Furniture Mart, comes in on Saturday, and works Tuesday, to help out Louis’ cousins. And she sells jewelry all the time there. It’s a great business. Berkshire bought a great business. It gets better, and better, and better. And no-one can knock ‘em off.

事实上，如今家具商城董事长路易斯·布卢姆金的妻子弗兰，每周六来店、周二再来，帮路易斯的堂兄弟们，她一直在卖珠宝。这是一门好生意，伯克希尔买到了一家好公司，它只会越来越好，无人能撼动。

That’s one of the things I always ask myself: If you give someone hundreds of millions of dollars, or billions of dollars, \[can you hurt a particular business?] You can’t hurt the Furniture Mart or Borsheim’s.

我常问自己：如果给竞争者几亿美元、几十亿美元，他们能否重创这家生意？他们伤不了家具商城，也伤不了 Borsheim’s。

【提问：评估一家公司时您如何估值、决定付多少钱？之后又会定什么价格卖出？】

Well, we won’t sell it. We just don’t sell businesses. If we had a business that would permanently lose money, or we had a manager lie to us, or cheat us, or (garbled). But we will never sell a business just because we get a wonderful offer for it. My house isn’t for sale. The children aren’t for sale. The businesses aren’t for sale. I tell shareholders that. That may make me crazy, but that’s who they’re getting in with, and they might as well know it. It is not a game we’re playing, like gin rummy, where we pick up one card and discard another.

我们不会卖。我们根本不卖公司。除非那家公司永久亏损，或经理对我们撒谎欺诈（录音模糊）。但绝不会因为有人开出好价就卖。我的房子不卖，孩子不卖，企业也不卖。我把这话告诉股东。也许这听起来疯狂，但这就是他们选择的合作伙伴，最好心里有数。这不是打金拉米，拿一张弃一张的游戏。

And I think good human relationships... I work with nothing but people I like. There’s not one person I work with that causes my stomach to churn in the least. In fact, I feel like tap dancing. I work with nothing but people I like. Well, just think how fortunate you are if you’re 60 years of age and that’s the way you’re going to be able to spend your life. These people are wonderful to work with. I mean, Ike Friedman...we never disagree. Charlie Munger, my partner, and I have never had a disagreement in 30 years. And, why in the world \[would I sell businesses run by people I like] so that I can be worth 110% of X, instead of X, when I die? It will all be in the foundation anyway. Why should I go around discarding people like that who are in the business, for some people who might not turn out so well? So I’m not interested in selling at all.

良好的人际关系很重要……我只与我喜欢的人共事，没有一个让我心里不舒服。事实上，我每天都想跳踢踏舞。我只跟喜欢的人一起工作。想想看，若你 60 岁还能这样度过余生多幸福。这些人共事愉快——比如艾克·弗里德曼，我们从不争吵。我的合伙人查理·芒格和我 30 年来也从未有过分歧。我又何必为了死时资产从 X 变 1.1X，把这些我喜欢的人和企业卖掉？反正最后都捐给基金会。我为什么要丢掉这些优秀伙伴，去换可能不靠谱的新伙伴？所以我根本不想卖。

Now, in terms of buying, a) I’ve got to like the people. I’m just not interested in marrying for money. That might have been great when I was 12, but it would be crazy now for me to marry someone for money. Why should I marry in business for money? It just doesn’t make sense. I get associated with these people, so I want to buy the people I like, and I want to buy businesses I understand, and then I don’t want to think too much. And, paying too much simply comes out.

至于收购：第一，我必须喜欢那些人。我对“为钱结婚”毫无兴趣。12 岁时也许可以，但现在为了钱结婚太荒唐。那为什么要为了钱在商业上“结婚”？毫无道理。我会和这些人长期相处，所以要买我喜欢的人，也要买我理解的生意，然后不要想太复杂。至于付高价，自然会在估值里显现。

If you can tell me what all of the cash in and cash out of a business will be, between now and judgment day, I can tell you, assuming I know the proper interest rate, what it’s worth. It doesn’t make any difference whether you sell yo-yo’s, hula hoops, or computers. Because there would be a stream of cash between now and judgment day, and the cash spends the same, no matter where it comes from. Now my job as an investment analyst, or a business analyst, is to figure out where I may have some knowledge, what that stream of cash will be over a period of time, and also where I don’t know what the stream of cash will be. I don’t have the faintest idea of where Digital Equipment will be in next week, let alone the next 10 years. I just don’t know. I don’t even know what they do. And I never would know what they did. Even if I thought I knew what they did, I wouldn’t know what they did. Hershey bars I understand.

如果你能告诉我从现在到世界末日一家企业所有现金流入和流出，我就能在知道合适贴现率的前提下告诉你它值多少。不管是卖溜溜球、呼啦圈还是电脑，都一样——现金流都是钱。作为投资或商业分析师，我的工作是：在自己可能有认知优势的领域，估计未来现金流，同时承认哪些地方我根本不知道现金流如何。我一点也不知道数字设备公司下周会怎样，别说十年。我甚至不知道他们做什么——即便我以为知道，也还是不知道。好时巧克力我就懂。

So, my job is to look at the universe of things I can understand – I can understand Ike Friedman’s jewelry store – and then I try to figure what that stream of cash, in and out, is going to be over a period of time, just like we did with See’s Candies, and discounting that back at an appropriate rate, which would be the long term Government rate.  \[Then,] I try to buy it at a price that is significantly below that. And that’s about it. Theoretically, I’m doing that with all the businesses in the world – those that I can understand.

因此，我要做的是：在自己理解的范围内——比如艾克·弗里德曼的珠宝店——估算其未来现金流入流出，就像我们当年算 See’s Candies 一样，然后按适当利率（通常是长期国债率）折现，再力求以远低于该价值的价格买入。就这么简单。理论上，我对全球所有自己能理解的企业都这样做。

Every day, when I turn to the Wall Street Journal, back in the C Section, that’s like a big business brokerage ad. It’s just like a business broker saying “you can buy part of AT\&T for this, part of General Motors for that, General Electric...” And unlike most business broker’s ads, it’s nice because they change the price every day. And you don’t have to do business with any of them. So you just sit there, day by day, and you yawn, and you insult the broker if you want to, and talk to your newspaper, anything you want to, because someday, there’s going to be some business I understand selling for way less than the value I arrived at. It doesn’t have anything to do with book value, although it does have to do with earnings power over a period of time. It usually relates, fairly closely, to cash \[flow]. And, when you find something you understand, if you find five ideas in your lifetime and you’re right on those five, you’re going to be very rich.

每天我翻开《华尔街日报》C 版，都像在看一家大型企业经纪广告：AT\&T 多少价，通用多少价，通用电气多少价……与普通经纪人不同的是，它每天改价，而且你完全可以不跟任何人做生意。你就这样坐着，日复一日，打哈欠、骂骂报纸随你，因为总有一天，会有一家你能理解的企业价格远低于你算出的价值。这跟账面价值无关——关键是长期盈利能力，通常与现金流密切相关。若一辈子找到五个这样的点子，而且每次都对，你就会非常富有。

You know I always tell business students that if you got a punch card when you got out of here, and it only had 20 businesses on it, and every time you made an investment decision they took a punch, and when the 20 were gone you were all done, it would be wonderful. You’re not going to get more than 20 investment ideas in a lifetime. I’m not going to get more than 20 great ideas. And the important thing is that you recognize them when you see them, and that you do something about them.

我总对商学院学生说：毕业时若给你一张打孔卡，只能打 20 个孔，每做一次投资决策就打掉一个，孔打完就结束——这反而很好。你一生不会有超过 20 个投资好点子，我也不会有超过 20 个关键点子。重要的是当你遇到好点子时能认出来并采取行动。

So, when we find something we understand, if we’re buying all of the business, I want to like the people. If we’re buying part of the business, it’s less important. We want to buy things we understand, and we want to buy them very cheap. If we don’t understand them, we don’t buy them. If they’re not cheap, we don’t buy them. If we can buy them with Tom Murphy, my friend, at an attractive price, we do that in a second.

因此，当我们找到自己理解的生意时，如果要全资收购，我得先喜欢那些人；若只是买部分股权，人就没那么重要。我们只买自己理解且价格极便宜的东西。不懂的不买，不便宜的不买。如果能和朋友汤姆·墨菲一起以好价买下，我们立刻行动。

We bought 5% of the Walt Disney Company in 1966. It cost us \$4 million dollars. \$80 million bucks was the valuation of the whole thing. 300 and some acres in Anaheim. The Pirate’s ride had just been put in. It cost \$17 million bucks. The whole company was selling for \$80 million. Mary Poppins had just come out. Mary Poppins made about \$30 million that year, and seven years later you’re going to show it to kids the same age. It’s like having an oil well where all the oil seeps back in. Now the \[numbers today are] probably different, but in 1966 they had 220 pictures of one sort or another. They wrote them all down to zero – there were no residual values placed on the value of any Disney picture up through the ‘60s. So \[you got all of this] for \$80 million bucks, and you got Walt Disney to work for you. It was incredible. You didn’t have to be a genius to know that the Walt Disney company was worth more than \$80 million. \$17 million for the Pirate’s Ride. It’s unbelievable. But there it was. And the reason was, in 1966 people said, “Well, Mary Poppins is terrific this year, but they’re not going to have another Mary Poppins next year, so the earnings will be down.” I don’t care if the earnings are down like that. You know you’ve still got Mary Poppins to throw out in seven more years, assuming kids squawk a little. I mean there’s no better system than to have something where, essentially, you get a new crop every seven years and you get to charge more each time.

1966 年我们买下迪士尼公司 5% 股份，只花了 400 万美元。当时整家公司估值 8000 万。安纳海姆 300 多英亩土地，“海盗船”项目刚建好，耗资 1700 万；而整家公司市值才 8000 万。《欢乐满人间》刚上映，当年就赚约 3000 万，而且七年后你能再次放给同龄孩子看，这就像油井里油会自己渗回去。数字今天当然不同，但 1966 年迪士尼已有 220 部影片，账面全计零残值——60 年代之前的影片价值一律记零。如此多资产，仅 8000 万，还能让沃尔特·迪士尼为你打工，难以置信。任何人都不必是天才也能看出迪士尼不止值 8000 万。仅“海盗船”就花 1700 万！但事实摆在那。原因是 1966 年人们说，“今年《欢乐满人间》火，但明年不会再有一部，盈利会下滑。”我才不在乎盈利短期回落，因为七年后你还能再放这片子，只要孩子们闹腾一下。没有比这更好的商业模式了：基本上每七年就收获一茬，还能每次提价。

\$80 million dollars \[sigh]. I went out to see Walt Disney (he’d never heard of me; I was 35 years old). We sat down and he told me the whole plan for the company – he couldn’t have been a nicer guy. It was a joke. If he’d privately gone to some huge venture capitalist, or some major American corporation, if he’d been a private company, and said “I want you to buy into this.

This is a deal,” they would have bought in based on a valuation of \$300 or \$400 million dollars. The very fact that it was just sitting there in the market every day convinced \[people that \$80 million was an appropriate valuation]. Essentially, they ignored it because it was so familiar. But that happens periodically on Wall Street.

8000 万美元，唉。我去见沃尔特·迪士尼（他从未听过我，当时我 35 岁）。我们坐下，他把公司战略全讲给我听——他好得不能再好了。简直像开玩笑。如果他私下去找一家大型风投或大公司，让他们入股，估值肯定 3-4 亿。可因为股票每天挂在市场上，人们就认定 8000 万符合价值，反而忽视它，只因太熟悉。这种事情华尔街周期性出现。

I wanted to go see Mary Poppins, to see if she’d be recycled, and she was showing at the Loews Theater on 45th and Broadway in New York, and here I am with a briefcase at 2:00 in the afternoon heading in to see Mary Poppins. I almost felt like I had to rent a kid.

我想去看《欢乐满人间》，验证它是否能循环上映，当时电影在纽约百老汇 45 街的 Loews 剧院放映。我下午两点提着公文包去看，几乎觉得得租个小孩作陪。

\[Question from audience.]

【观众提问】

There’s very little relationship between Walt Disney and Salomon. In Salomon we have lent them, in effect, \$700 million on a preferred which matures in five equal installments, starting five years from now, which is also convertible. And this is primarily a fixed income investment with an interesting conversion privilege attached to it. But it is not primarily an equity investment. We get a 9% dividend which, because of the corporate dividend tax credit, converts to something over 7% on an after-tax basis. It’s a form of lending money. It’s an alternative to municipal bonds or something of that sort. It is not an investment like Coca Cola, or the Washington Post, or Cap Cities, which are pure equity investments.

沃尔特·迪士尼与所罗门的投资几乎没关系。在所罗门，我们实际上是以 7 亿美元认购一只优先股，五年后分五次等额偿还，还可转换股票。它主要是固定收益投资，只是附带可转股权，而非纯股权投资。我们拿 9% 股息，扣除公司股息抵免后税后收益逾 7%。本质上是贷款，类似买市政债等固定收益品种，不同于可口可乐、《华盛顿邮报》或 Cap Cities 这类纯股权投资。

We would rather, and this is nothing negative on Salomon, buy more things like Coca Cola. You know, those are the things that really cause excitement, because those are super businesses as far as the eye can see. Salomon is a perfectly decent business, but it’s just not the same kind of business. Neither is Champion Paper or US Air, which we’ve done the same thing for. If we had way less money, we wouldn’t be doing those things, as opposed to the Coca Cola thing. It’s because we can’t find more of those. And we should own some fixed income investments because of our \[insurance business].

如果可能——这对所罗门并非贬义——我们更愿意多买些像可口可乐那样的公司，那才真正令人兴奋，因为前景一望无际。所罗门固然不错，但性质不同。我们对 Champion Paper、US Air 也做了类似投资。如果资金规模小得多，我们不会买这些，而会买更多可口可乐式的生意，只是找不到而已。而且因保险业务需要，我们也应持有一定固定收益投资。

\[Question from audience.]

【观众提问。】

Well, I started out when I was 20. I had just finished Ben Graham’s course. And I took Moody’s Manuals – they had investment manuals – and I took Standard and Poor’s, where they put them all together, and do them all alphabetically, and I went through them all page by page. And things jumped out at me. I saw Western Insurance Services, in Fort Scott, Kansas, looking in Moody’s Bank and Finance Manuals. I’d never heard of Western Insurance Services until I turned that page that said Western Insurance Services. It showed earnings per share of \$20 and the high was \$16. Now that may not turn out to be something you can make a lot of money on, but the odds are good. It’s like a basketball coach seeing a guy 7’3” walk through the door. He may not be able to stay in school, and may be very uncoordinated, but he’s very large. So I went down to the Nebraska Insurance Department, and I got the convention reports on their insurance companies, and I read Best’s. I didn’t have any background in insurance. But I knew I could understand it if I worked at it for a while. And all I was really trying to do was disprove this thing. I was really trying to figure out something that was wrong with this. Only there wasn’t anything wrong. It was a perfectly good insurance company, a better than average underwriter, and you could buy it at one times earnings. I ran ads in the Fort Scott, Kansas paper to buy this stock when it was \$20. But it came through turning the pages. No one tells you about it. You get ‘em by looking.

我二十岁开始做投资，刚上完本·格雷厄姆的课。我拿着穆迪手册——投资手册——再拿标准普尔手册，它们把所有公司按字母顺序排好，我一页页翻。好机会会跳出来。我在穆迪的银行与金融手册里看到堪萨斯州福特斯科特的 Western Insurance Services。翻到那一页前我压根没听过这家公司，但它每股收益 20 美元，股价最高 16 美元。也许最终赚不了大钱，但几率很高，就像篮球教练看到一个七尺三的大个子走进门——也许他课业不行，动作笨拙，可个头在那儿。于是我去内布拉斯加州保险局调了该公司报告，读了《贝氏评级》。我没有保险背景，但知道自己花点功夫就能搞懂。我真正想做的是推翻它，找出毛病，可什么毛病也没有。这是一家非常好的保险公司，承保能力高于平均水平，股价却只有盈利的一倍。我当时在福特斯科特当地报纸登广告想 20 美元买股。机会就这样在翻页中出现，没有人告诉你，靠自己找。

I read hundreds of annual reports every year. I don’t talk to any brokers – I don’t want to talk to brokers. People are not going to give you great ideas. On the other hand, getting them is not that difficult. If you’d read the Disney report in 1966, believe me, you’d have known as much about Disney then as now. You wouldn’t have Michael Eisner, you’d have Walt Disney running it. And you could have multiplied, at two million shares outstanding (garbled).

我每年读数百份年报。我从不跟经纪人聊天——我不想和他们聊。别人不会给你绝妙主意。另一方面，找到好点子并不难。如果你 1966 年读过迪士尼年报，相信我，你那时对迪士尼的了解就和现在差不多。当时掌舵的不是迈克尔·艾斯纳，而是沃尔特·迪士尼。公司流通股只有两百万股（录音模糊），你完全可以算出来。

Cap Cities at that time was an act of faith. You had to believe in Tom Murphy. You could not see (garbled).

(Garbled) and some of you will be stars, and some of you will be less than stars. But it won’t correlate with your IQ at all. But you have it already. And everybody in the room has it. I’ll give you a little question. Let’s think about this. Let’s say that everyone here got a bonus when they left Notre Dame. Let’s say for \$25,000 you could buy a 10% interest in the income of any one of your classmates that you wanted to. Now, what are you thinking about? You can take anybody in this room, and for \$25,000 buy a 10% interest in their income for life. If they make \$25,000 the first year, you make \$2,500. If they’re unemployed, you don’t get anything. If they get stock options, you get 10% of the stock options. What are you thinking about as you look around? Are you thinking about which ones are the smartest? It’s interesting what ingredients you think now are what’s going to produce that in the classroom. I would suggest that you start thinking about, assuming you have a 10% interest, what qualities you want to have. I know I would take Tom Murphy. Why? Well, he’s got an IQ, there’s no question about that. But, that’s something one or two others might have as well.

（录音模糊）将来你们有人会成为明星，有人不那么出色，但这与智商毫无关系，而是你们已经具备的东西，房间里每个人都有。我给大家出个小问题：假设各位毕业时拿到一笔奖金，用 2.5 万美元就能买下任何一位同学未来收入 10% 的权益。你会怎么想？你可以挑这里任何人，花 2.5 万美元买下其终身收入一成。他第一年赚 2.5 万美元，你拿 2500；若他失业，你得零；若他拿期权，你得其中 10%。环顾四周你在想什么？你在挑最聪明的同学吗？有趣的是，现在你认为课堂上哪些因素能产生未来回报。我建议你思考：既然有 10% 股权，你希望那人具备哪些品质？我知道我会选汤姆·墨菲。为什么？他当然有智商，但那点其他人也有。

Think about why you picked him or her, and how much of that is transferable to you. And it usually won’t be anything you can’t attain yourself. But if it’s qualities of character, or qualities of enthusiasm, or whatever it may be, most of those things you can pick up.

想想你为何选中某人，以及这些品质有多少能转移到你身上。通常它们都不是你自己无法获得的。如果是品格、热情等特质，大多数你都能培养。

\[Question from audience.]

【观众提问。】

Well, we will do that anytime we feel that a dollar we retain in the company is not going to be worth more than a dollar in market price. And that can happen. I mean, as we get bigger, it’s more likely to happen. But so far, every dollar we’ve kept in the company has translated into more than a dollar in market price, so that anybody who wanted to take \$10 a share out, or \$50 a share out, is better off having us keep the \$50, having it appraised in the market at \$60, \$70, or \$80 and selling a little piece. They actually come out dollars ahead by doing that. But, when we can’t use the money for any extended period, not for a month or three months, but a period of years, when we find out that we don’t have ways to use money in a way that creates more than a dollar of market value for each dollar reinvested, then we won’t.

只要我们认为公司保留的一美元在市价上不能至少等值一美元，我们就会回购。这种情况可能出现，尤其随着规模增大更可能。但到目前为止，我们留下的每一美元都转化为超过一美元的市值，所以若有人想每股分红 10 美元或 50 美元，不如让我们把这 50 美元留下，市值反映成 60、70 或 80 美元，他卖一点股票反而赚得更多。不过如果多年都找不到能让每投入一美元就增加超过一美元市值的用途，我们就不会留钱。

I couldn’t attend the 50th birthday of one of my friends so I sent him a telegram “may you live until Berkshire splits.” That doesn’t apply to cash dividends. It will be a market failure but, nevertheless, that may be what happens.

有次我不能参加朋友的 50 岁生日，就发电报祝他“长命百岁直到伯克希尔拆股”。这不适用于现金分红；如果真拆股，说明市场失灵，但也可能发生。

\[Question from audience.]

【观众提问。】

Well, I won’t comment too much on that. The question is whether Security Pacific and Wells Fargo, two of the four largest banks in California, were in talks late last year, and a story appeared in the Wall Street Journal talking about this a week or two ago. They were in talks last year about merging. And that excited some people because Wells had done a particularly good job when they took over Crocker four years ago, or so. And then the deal, the Security Pacific/Wells Fargo thing, did not happen. And then the story leaked out so it’s in the paper. Security Pacific is probably an \$80 billion bank. Wells Fargo, I know, is a \$50 billion bank. It would have created what would have been the second largest bank in the country, next to Citicorp.

这个问题我不多评论。安全太平银行和富国银行——加州四大行中的两家——去年底是否洽谈合并，《华尔街日报》一两周前报道过。他们确实谈过合并，这让一些人兴奋，因为富国四年前收购克罗克银行表现出色。但该交易最终未成，消息泄露后登报。安全太平资产约 800 亿美元，富国约 500 亿，合并后将成仅次于花旗的全美第二大银行。

My guess is there will be some bank mergers in the next few years, but they may be more suicide pacts than mergers. There’s going to be a lot of action, not all good by a long shot, in banks, simply because there’s so much trouble there. The big problem in merging two banks these days is that you don’t know what’s in the other guy’s loan portfolio – because too often he doesn’t know. And people didn’t used to worry about that five or 10 years ago, and they worry about it a whole lot now because, if they merge with the wrong bank, they can go broke.

我猜未来几年还会有银行合并，但更多像“自杀契约”而非合并。银行业将发生很多事，但未必都是好事，因为问题太多。如今合并最大难题是你不知道对方贷款组合里藏了什么——很多时候他们自己也不知道。五到十年前没人担心这个，如今却十分担心，因为若并错对象可能直接破产。

C\&S, the Citizens and Southern Bank of Atlanta, merged with Sovereign earlier this year. Sovereign has got a lot of real estate problems in the Washington D.C. area, and that merger took place less than 12 months ago.

亚特兰大的 C\&S 银行今年早些时候与 Sovereign 合并。Sovereign 在华盛顿特区有大量地产问题，而这桩合并不足 12 个月。

Al Lerner merged his Equitable Trust Company in Baltimore into the old Maryland National. Al Lerner is a very, very, smart fellow. And he merged his own company, which he had a lot of his own money in, he merged it in with MNC and in six months MNC was in huge trouble. The stock was 10% of what the value was when he merged it six months ago. And Al just got in with something where he didn’t know how bad it was. But that was easy to do. So, everybody is super careful about that, and this is why there’s a problem, because to look at a Wells Fargo with assets of \$50 billion, and Security Pacific with \$80 billion, and if there’s \$2 or \$3 billion in there that’s no good, that wipes out equity. That’s a tough decision to make.

阿尔·勒纳把他在巴尔的摩的 Equitable Trust 并入旧马里兰国民银行。勒纳非常聪明，他把投入重金的自家公司并进 MNC，结果六个月后 MNC 深陷危机，股价只剩合并时的 10%。勒纳并不知道情况有多糟，但这很常见。所以大家都异常谨慎。问题在于，像富国 500 亿资产、安全太平 800 亿资产，如果有 20–30 亿坏账就能抹掉资本，这种决策很难。

\[Question from audience.]

【观众提问。】

Right now, in property/casualty insurance, generally speaking, prices are lousy, which means business is terrible. We have found a few things to do that will be in our annual report. We’ve found a few things that are OK, they’re not like they were four or five years ago, but they’re keeping us out of bars. And that’s what we look for in times like this. But that is a very interesting business. When that guy was predicting an earthquake near New Madrid we wrote a two month policy against a \$3 billion earthquake for some crazy rate as a percentage of everything. We ought to keep that guy out there.

目前财产险市场整体费率很烂，意味着生意惨淡。我们倒找到几件还能做的事，会写进年报。虽然不如四五年前，但至少让我们还能糊口。这就是此类时期我们要寻找的机会。不过保险业很有意思。有人预测新马德里附近将发生地震时，我们曾承保两个月、保额 30 亿美元的地震险，费率高得离谱。真希望那人继续喊地震。

We’ve had a chance to do some very interesting things in insurance. It’s a very tricky business. We are getting in claims on policies we wrote in 1970. We’re not getting in any premium, we’re just getting in claims. They tell the story in insurance ...

我们在保险业做过一些非常有趣的事。这行很复杂。我们仍在收到 1970 年承保的保单索赔，却收不到任何保费，只收赔款。保险业常讲……

\[Told burying dad in a rented suit story.]

【巴菲特讲“租礼服下葬”的故事略。】

We literally will pay hundreds of thousand of dollars for things that happened years back. On the other hand, overall, it can be a good business if you’re disciplined. We have a rule, we’re very Japanese in that, we never lay off anybody. We tell them, in times like this where we’re writing way less than we were writing a few years ago, we tell them that under no conditions will they be laid off for lack of business because otherwise they’ll go out and write some business. I mean, it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. And we tell them we’ll buy them golf memberships, country club memberships, if they’ll promise to play golf during business hours, because we don’t want them in the office during business under terms that are generally available these days. So we occasionally run into a good big deal, and we keep busy that way, but we are operating at 1/4 speed. We have a lot of people that are doing crossword puzzles, which is fine. It beats whatever else they’d be doing. You do not want energetic people in a lousy business.

我们确实要为多年前发生的事支付几十万美元赔款。但如果自律，保险总体仍能成为好生意。我们有条规定，很“日本”——绝不裁员。如今业务量只有几年前的四分之一，我们告诉员工绝不会因业务不足裁掉他们，否则他们会拼命去揽业务——那是世上最容易做成的坏事。我们甚至给他们买高尔夫或乡村俱乐部会员，只要答应上班时间去打球，因为在当前费率下我们不想让他们留在办公室接新单。所以我们偶尔做成一两笔大交易，靠此保持忙碌，但整体运行速度只有四分之一。很多员工做填字游戏，这很好，总好过干别的。在烂行业里你可不想要精力旺盛的人。

\[Question from audience.]

【观众提问。】

I read all kinds of business publications. I read a lot of industry publications. Coming in today on the plane (garbled). I’ll grab whatever comes in the morning. American Banker comes every day, so I’ll read that. I’ll read the Wall Street Journal. Obviously. I’ll read Editor and Publisher, I’ll read Broadcasting, I’ll read Property Casualty Review, I’ll read Jeffrey Meyer’s Beverage Digest. I’ll read everything. And I own 100 shares of almost every stock I can think of just so I know I’ll get all the reports. And I carry around prospectuses and proxy material. Don’t read broker’s reports. You should be very careful with those.

我读各种商业出版物，也读大量行业刊物。今天坐飞机过来时还在看（录音模糊）。早晨送到我就拿来读。《American Banker》日报必看，当然还有《华尔街日报》。我看《Editor & Publisher》《Broadcasting》《Property Casualty Review》《Beverage Digest》等等，什么都看。我几乎对想得到的每只股票都持有 100 股，为的是能收到所有报告。我随身带招股书和代理材料。别读经纪人报告，要非常小心。

\[Question from audience.]

【观众提问。】

I think the Wall Street Journal is essential. I spend 45 minutes a day with the Wall Street Journal. Actually, I got up the night before, about 11:00... I frequently read it at night. But I’ll read anything. Actually, I probably spend five or six hours a day on reading. We have no meetings at Berkshire. We have a directors meeting once a year, after the shareholders meeting, at lunch. And at the end, I say “I’ll see you next year.” It’s a very economical operation. We don’t have a slide projector. We don’t have a calculator. We do not have meetings on anything. If I take Ike Friedman, and bring him to a meeting, I’ve probably lost \$20,000 or something. He should be out there selling. There just isn’t anything to meet about. He’s having meetings in his head all the time about the jewelry store. I’m having meetings in my head about what to do with the money.

我认为《华尔街日报》必读，我每天花 45 分钟看它。实际上我常在夜里 11 点左右读报。总之，我什么都读，每天大概花五六小时阅读。伯克希尔没有会议。董事会一年一次，就在股东大会午餐期间，最后我说“明年见”。运营极其节俭。没有幻灯机，没有计算器，不开任何会。如果把艾克·弗里德曼叫来开会，我可能就损失两万美元，他应该去卖珠宝。真没什么可开会的。他整天在脑子里开珠宝店的会，我整天在脑子里开用钱的会。

\[Question from audience.]

【观众提问。】

We don’t attend any seminars, or trade things. I get all this stuff about how to incorporate in the Cayman Islands or how to never write a check to the IRS. We don’t do any of that stuff. There’s not much goes on at the place, and that’s probably just as well. Every now and then we get a chance to do something and we do it as best as we can.

我们不参加研讨会，也不搞任何花哨交易。我常收到关于如何在开曼群岛注册、如何永远不给国税局开支票的材料，但我们一概不碰。公司没什么花样，倒也好。偶尔遇到机会就尽力去做。

When Coca Cola got to where it was attractive, for seven or eight months we bought every share of Coca Cola we could. We bought what, on the old stock, 23 million shares, we probably bought that on 150 trading days, that’s 160,000 shares a day. You gotta do it when the time is right to do it.

当可口可乐股价具吸引力时，我们连续七八个月把能买到的股票全买下。在旧股本下我们买了 2300 万股，大约用 150 个交易日，也就是每天买 16 万股。时机对了就要下手。

【观众问是否可能收购英国公司。】

I look at them. I read the Financial Times every day. We’ve looked at, and we’ve come close, very close, to one deal. There’s another proposition I’ve got right now from somebody. But so far, we haven’t done anything. But I don’t rule it out.

我会关注。我每天读《金融时报》。我们研究并且非常接近成交过一笔英国交易，现在手头还有另一提案。但到目前还未出手，不过并不排除。

If Coca Cola were located in London, and was an English company, and did business exactly like they do, it would be worth slightly less than \[if it were a US company]. But overall, I’d do it. Obviously.

如果可口可乐总部在伦敦，是家英国公司，业务与现在完全相同，它的价值可能略低于美国公司，但总的来说我仍会买，显然如此。

We’ve looked at a lot \[at foreign companies]. \[But] we’ve got a \$3 trillion pond in terms of market value in this country. And if I can’t make money in a \$3 trillion pond, I can’t make money in an \$8 trillion pond. We tend to look in the \$3 trillion pond mostly.

我们看过不少外国公司。但美国市值池子有 3 万亿美元。如果我在 3 万亿的池子里赚不到钱，在 8 万亿的池子里也赚不到。所以我们主要还是关注 3 万亿的池子。

\[Question from audience.]

【观众提问。】

Usually they won’t. And I tell them, almost always, they shouldn’t. I’m going to have a letter in the annual report this year which I’ve sent many times to possible sellers of businesses. And the one thing I tell them is you’re not richer when you sell a business. You’ve got a wonderful asset that will be worth more money later on. I wouldn’t be talking to you if I didn’t think this was the case. If it takes care of a specific problem you have, and you want somebody that meets these certain parameters, we’ll talk. If it doesn’t, that great. You’ve got something better than I’ve got, because I’ve got cash, and I’ve got a problem, and you’ve got a good business, and you don’t have a problem.

通常他们不会卖，我也几乎总是劝他们别卖。今年我会在年报附上一封信，那是我多次寄给潜在卖家的。我告诉他们：卖掉企业并不会让你更富有。你拥有的是一项优秀资产，将来会更值钱；如果我不这么认为，就不会来谈。如果出售能解决你特定问题，而且你需要满足某些条件的买家，我们可以谈；否则就别卖。因为你拥有的东西比我强——我只有现金，还有难题；你有好生意，没有难题。

Mrs. B wasn’t richer when she sold me the business. She did have one son and, at that time, three grandsons in the business, and she had three daughters and their husbands, and a bunch of their children who weren’t in the business, and everybody owned 20% of it. So she thought there would be some sort of problem when she died. She was a strong enough matriarchal figure that there weren’t and problems when she lived – she told them what to do, and that was it. But, when she was gone, she could see trouble. You saw it down at the Louisville Courier/Journal a couple of years ago with the Bingham family. You get a lot of money, but somebody gets unhappy. Sometimes the in-laws get unhappy. Some people prefer to solve that problem themselves, when they’re alive, rather than have some trust department try and solve it when they dead. But, I don’t want people selling to me because they think they’re getting richer, I want them selling to me because it solves some particular problem, and I can help them solve it.

I can do things that other companies can’t do. I can arrange the transfer of some of the ownership of the business to another generation. I can promise them it won’t get resold. Virtually no other American company can do that. If the XYZ company goes out and buys See’s or Borsheim’s, the President of XYZ company can say “we’re not going to sell it” but he may be taken over himself, his board of directors may tell him to do something, McKinsey may come in next week and say “get out of this business and get into some other business.” You can get double crossed in a lot of ways that there’s no moral stigma attached to, but that’s just the way the cards fall. With me that can’t happen. The only thing that can happen bad to them is if I double cross them. So they have to make a judgment whether I’m lying to them. I can’t come back to them later and say the board’s told me we’ve got to get out of the jewelry business, there’s this great offer that’s come in, I’ve got this fiduciary responsibility, blah, blah, blah, blah. That won’t happen.

我能做到别的公司做不到的事。我可以安排部分股权过渡给下一代，也能保证不会转售，几乎没有其他美国公司能提供这种承诺。如果 XYZ 公司收购 See’s 或 Borsheim’s，它的总裁可以说“我们不会卖”，但他自己可能被收购，董事会可能让他做别的，麦肯锡下周可能建议退出该业务、改做其他。你可能在各种道德上无可指责的情形下被“双重背叛”，但这就是现实。而跟我合作就不会发生，唯一风险是我背叛他们，所以他们要判断我是否说谎。我不可能日后说“董事会让我退出珠宝业务，有高价收购要约，我有受托责任等等”。这种事不会发生。

\[Question from audience.]

【观众提问。】

They’re rich because they’ve already gotten rich by having the company. All they’re going to do, if they take money from me, is they’re going pay some taxes, and they’re going to invest in some other business. They might buy Berkshire, they might buy General Motors, they might buy government bonds, but they already had a good business. And they don’t have to pay the taxes. So they are not getting richer.

他们之所以富有，是因为他们靠拥有那家公司已经致富。如果他们从我这里拿钱，他们只会去交点税，然后把钱投到别的生意里。他们可能买伯克希尔，也可能买通用汽车，或者买政府债券，但他们早就拥有一家好公司，而且不用为此缴税。所以他们不会因此变得更富有。

I can help them with some problems. When Ike at Borsheim’s came to me I said “look, I will pay you X, and I will show you how to get more money than that, and here is how you can do it.” He said “I’m not interested.”

我能帮他们解决一些问题。当伯克希尔旗下Borsheim的艾克来找我时，我说：“看，我会给你 X 金额，并且我会告诉你怎样获得比这更多的钱，这就是办法。”他却说：“我没兴趣。”

\[Question from audience.]

【观众提问。】

We don’t want what I call the used cigar butts, where you get one free puff and that’s it (garbled comment from audience). Well, partly I don’t have the people to stick in anyway. And I don’t want to go through the human travail that’s involved in that.

I don’t want to go through it, basically. And, if you have your choice, we’ll just think in terms of looks now, but marrying some gal that’s the girl of your dreams and having another one and saying “If I send her to the psychotherapist for five years and have some plastic surgery” well maybe it will work \[tape ends].

总之，我基本上不想碰这类事。如果让你选的话——先别谈别的，只说外观——就像你娶了心目中的梦中情人，却另外再娶一个，然后说：“如果我送她去做五年心理治疗，再加点整形手术，也许行得通。”【录音结束】

Lecture to Undergraduate Students

给本科生的讲座

\[Tape picks up in middle of lecture.]

【录音在讲座中段继续。】

...we let the operating managers run their businesses, and we have them send the money to Omaha. And then we try to buy more businesses. And sometimes we can buy all of a business, and sometimes we can only buy part of it. But we’re the largest shareholder of the Coca Cola Company, we’re the largest shareholder of Capital Cities/ABC Broadcasting, we’re the largest shareholder of Gillette Company, and then probably Champion Paper, Geico, the insurance company, the Wells Fargo bank. There’s quite a few.

……我们让经营经理们自己管理各自的业务，然后让他们把资金汇到奥马哈。接着我们再去收购更多企业。有时我们能整家公司全买下来，有时只能买一部分。不过，我们是可口可乐公司的最大股东，也是Capital Cities/ABC广播公司、吉列公司的最大股东，还可能是Champion Paper、盖可保险、富国银行等的最大股东，挺多的。

We buy entire businesses, or we buy tiny pieces of businesses called “stocks” and we have the same approach to it. And if the capital comes in, we’re willing to do either one. In this year’s annual report, in answer to the question of what I do, I tell the story of my granddaughter’s birthday party...

我们要么买下一整个公司，要么买下一小部分——也就是所谓的“股票”，而我们对两者采取相同的思路。只要资本到位，我们两种方式都乐意。今年的年报里，在回答“我都做些什么”这个问题时，我讲了我孙女生日派对的故事……

\[Told Beemer the Clown story again]

【再次讲起“小丑比默”的故事】

I sit there in Omaha and wave my magic wand. But, I’ve got all these Beemers out there, running businesses. They run them exceptionally well. Our businesses are generally characterized by unusual market strength and terrific continuity of management. Almost everybody that works for us is independently rich because we’ve usually bought their business. And they’ve received a lot of money from us. And one of the main parts of my job is to figure out, when I’m sitting across the table from John Smith and I’m going to hand him a check for \$50 or \$100 million, I have to decide whether he’s going to get out of bed the next morning. And it’s very important to me that he is just as interested in running his business, and he thinks of it as his business, the next day, and the next year, and the next decade, as he was when he owned it all himself. With a lot of people, there’s no way to buy that. You can’t set up an incentive compensation scheme that accomplishes that because they’ve already got all the money they need. You really have to make a judgment as to whether they run their business because they love business or because they love money. If they love money, we don’t have a chance. We can pay them a lot of money, but they’ve already got a lot of money. They never need to come to work another day in their life after they sell out to us, and yet virtually all of them works harder now than they’ve ever worked before. The main reason for this is that they’re that type – that is the way they’re put together.

我坐在奥马哈挥动我的魔杖，但外面有一大批“比默”在经营企业，他们做得非常出色。我们的企业通常具有非同寻常的市场实力和管理的高度持续性。几乎所有为我们工作的人都是独立富裕的，因为我们通常是买下他们的企业，他们从我们这里拿到了一大笔钱。而我的工作重点之一就是，当我和约翰·史密斯隔桌而坐，要递给他五千或一亿美元的支票时，我必须判断他第二天早上是否还会起床去工作。对我来说，非常重要的一点是，他在第二天、明年，乃至接下来十年里，对经营这家企业的兴趣与他自己完全拥有时一样强烈。对很多人来说，这种态度是买不到的。你无法通过激励薪酬制度来达成，因为他们早就拥有足够的钱。你必须判断他们是因为热爱事业而经营企业，还是因为热爱金钱。如果他们爱钱，我们就没戏。我们可以给他们很多钱，但他们已经富得流油；卖给我们后，他们此生再也不用上班，但几乎所有人都比以前更卖力地工作。这主要是因为他们天生如此——这就是他们的本性。

Secondarily, we try to provide an environment for them which is exactly like what we’d want if we were running a business. The main thing we would want is we would not want a lot of second guessing, we would not want a lot of home office meetings, we would not want a lot of supervision from some group Vice President at headquarters. We just would not want a lot of nonsense. We would like to run our own business in our own way. If you were a great golfer, and let’s just say, going back to my generation, you were Arnold Palmer, you’d basically play golf because you like to play golf. But if he was playing golf, and we were doing it for money, and in some way I owned him, and I kept saying “why don’t you use a four iron instead of a five iron, and why don’t you aim a littler further to the right” after a while he’d wrap the club around my neck. And rightly so. If you get really talented people, you’ve got to give them a chance to do their own thing.

其次，我们努力为他们提供一种若是我们自己经营企业也会想要的环境。最主要的是，我们不希望被人事后诸葛，不想要总部一堆会议，更不要总部某个集团副总裁的过度监管。我们不想要那些废话，我们希望按自己的方式经营企业。设想你是位伟大的高尔夫球手，比如回到我的时代，你是阿诺德·帕尔默，你打球主要因为你喜欢高尔夫。但如果他是为了钱而打球，而我在某种程度上拥有他，还总是在旁边说“你为什么不用4号铁而用5号铁，为什么不再往右对准一点”，时间久了他肯定会把球杆绕到我脖子上——而且他这么做是对的。如果你拥有真正有才华的人，你必须给他们自主发挥的机会。

We bought a uniform company in Cincinnati five years ago, a \$100 million company. I’ve never been to Cincinnati. I’ve never seen a factory of theirs, I don’t know what their offices look like. I know the people quite well.

五年前我们收购了辛辛那提一家制服公司，市值一亿美元。我从没去过辛辛那提，也没见过他们的工厂，不知道他们办公室长啥样，但我对那群人非常了解。

We’ve got a candy company, See’s Candies in California. We sold 13.5 million tons of boxed chocolates last year and made \$39 million before taxes. The fellow that runs it has been running it from the day we bought it 19 years ago. We made a deal with him, and in 30 seconds worked out an incentive compensation agreement. In 30 seconds. Never wrote it down, never had a lawyer. That deal is still the same deal 19 years later. He’s been to Omaha exactly once. Last year he came to the annual meeting to see whether their really was a Berkshire Hathaway in Omaha. We’ve never had a group meeting of any kind. We don’t force anything on them. We actually moved the headquarters of the company from Los Angeles to San Francisco because his wife liked living in San Francisco better than she like Los Angeles. Instead of having a guy with a wife that was considerably less happy living in LA, it was a lot easier to move the business to San Francisco, so that’s where it comes from now.

我们在加州有一家糖果公司——See’s Candies。去年我们卖出了1350万吨盒装巧克力，税前利润3900万美元。负责运营的人自从19年前我们收购那天起就一直担任这个职位。我们和他用了30秒钟就谈好了一份激励薪酬协议——30秒，没写下来，也没律师。19年过去，那份协议仍然一字未改。他只去过奥马哈一次，去年参加年会，就是想看看奥马哈到底有没有一家叫伯克希尔·哈撒韦的公司。我们从未召开过任何集团会议，也从不强加任何要求。事实上，我们把公司总部从洛杉矶搬到了旧金山，只因为他妻子更喜欢旧金山而不喜欢洛杉矶。与其让一个员工的妻子不开心地住在洛杉矶，不如把公司搬到旧金山，这样更简单，于是公司现在就在那里。

We have no retirement age. We had a woman running a business for us, we’d bought her business when she was 89, and she was Chairman of the Board, and she ran it for us until she got mad two years ago and left at 95, because, foolishly, I’d forgotten to get a non-compete agreement from this 89-year-old woman when we made the deal. She now competes with us across the street. She works seven days a week. We’ve never let anybody go because of age. We had one fellow, ran a savings and loan for us in Pasadena \[Wesco Financial], he kept trying to get me to get somebody else, he was 75 years old. \[He’d say] “you’ve got to get another guy in here” and I’d say “Louis, how’s your mother?” She lived to be 93 and that ended the conversation.

我们没有退休年龄限制。我们曾让一位女士帮我们经营一家企业——我们买下她的公司时她已89岁，担任董事长，并一直经营该业务直到两年前因生气离开，彼时她95岁。原因是我当年糊涂，居然没和这位89岁的女士签竞业禁止协议。现在她就在街对面跟我们竞争，每周七天都在工作。我们从不因年龄炒人。还有一位为我们在帕萨迪纳经营储贷机构的人【Wesco Financial】，他75岁时总催我找接班人。我就问：“路易斯，你母亲身体怎样？”她活到93岁，这话题就此打住。

So we have a business with very few rules. The only rules the managers have is to basically think like owners. We want those people thinking exactly like they own those businesses themselves. Psychologically, we don’t even want them to think there is a Berkshire Hathaway. They know they will never get sold. They don’t have to sit around and wonder if there’s going to be a takeover raid on Berkshire.

所以，我们的企业几乎没有规章。唯一的规矩就是让经理们从本质上像老板一样思考。我们希望他们完全把这些企业当成自己的。在心理上，我们甚至不希望他们想到还有伯克希尔·哈撒韦的存在。他们知道公司绝不会被卖掉，也不用成天担心伯克希尔会不会被恶意收购。

Let’s talk a little bit about what you’re interested in . This is a little bit different group than I usually talk to, its almost always been MBAs in the past, and its quite refreshing to get a mixture of liberal arts people in, so you can throw anything at me that you care to – nothing’s off limits.

我们来聊聊你们感兴趣的话题吧。你们和我过去常面对的听众有点不同，以前几乎都是 MBA，如今有文科生掺杂进来，令人耳目一新。所以你们想问什么尽管提——没有任何禁区。

\[Question from audience.]

【观众提问。】

They hardly get richer because they sell to me. I tell them “If you come to me, and you’ve got a wonderful business, I can’t make you richer than you are. If you sell to me for \$100 million, it’s only because your business is worth \$100 million. And you’ll pay a lot of taxes and you won’t have \$100 million. If you take the remainder after-tax and buy General Motors and AT\&T you’ll have a lot of businesses you don’t understand, instead of one you do understand. There’s no reason to sell to me to get richer. I always tell people the only reason I’m buying is because I think it’s going to be worth more. If they are selling to me simply to stick a lot of money into their own pocket, it’s the wrong reason. But frequently....

他们把公司卖给我并不会让自己更富。我告诉他们：“如果你们来找我，手里有一桩好生意，我没法让你比现在更富有。你若以一亿美元价格卖给我，只是因为你的公司确实值一亿美元。而且你得缴一大笔税，最后到手也不到一亿。你拿税后余额去买通用汽车或 AT\&T，你拥有的就会是一堆你不懂的生意，而不是你熟悉的那一家。要变得更富，没有理由卖给我。我总对人说，我买的唯一原因是我认为它将来更值钱。如果他们卖给我只是想往自己口袋塞一大笔钱，那动机就错了。但通常……”

One woman was 89 when she sold to me. She had four children. One worked in the business, three didn’t work in the business. She had multitudes of grandchildren. three of them worked in the business, two of them didn’t. The stock was divided equally, 20% with each branch, plus 20% she kept. As long as she was around, she was an enormously strong personality, there weren’t going to be any problems because she was going to tell people what he answers were. The day she died, she felt that there would be a developing situation where people didn’t work and wanted to get the money out of the business and that the people who did work would resent the fact that the people who didn’t work were cashing in. You get a lot of that as families move along. So she preferred to solve it herself by getting cash for the members of the family that weren’t involved in the business, and then I moved the ownership of the remaining people down to the lowest generation of the ones that were in the business. That happens a variety of times.

有位女士在89岁时把公司卖给我。她有四个孩子，其中一个在公司工作，三个没在公司。还有一大堆孙辈，其中三个在公司，两人不在。股份分配是：四支家族各拿20%，她本人保留20%。只要她还在，就凭她那强势性格，谁敢不听？可她预见到自己一去世就可能出现问题——不工作的人想把钱抽走，工作的人会对那些不干活却套现的人心生怨气。家族企业发展到后来常会遇到这种事。所以她选择亲自解决：让不在公司的人套现拿现金，然后我把留在公司那支的所有权直接下放到最年轻一代。这种情况我们遇到过不少次。

The uniform company we own in Cincinnati had an LBO some years earlier and there were four or five venture capital firms there and they just wanted to take a quick profit. The guy who ran it realized he’d made a mistake when he sold out to a group like that in the first place, so he steered it to us. He wrote me out of the blue.

我们在辛辛那提的制服公司几年前经历过一次杠杆收购，四五家风投在里面，他们只想捞个快钱。公司经营者后来意识到当初把公司卖给那样的群体是个错误，于是把公司引到我们这边来。他突然给我写了封信。

I’ve got a little ad in my annual report every year. We’re in advertising businesses (garbled) and this year it’s under the section “Help, Help.” I tell them the kinds of businesses we want to buy. This fellow had seen that in Cincinnati, wrote me a letter and said “I’m your guy.” And I looked at him and said “You are my guy.” We bought out all the venture capitalists, but we kept the family in. And they run the business. It’s that kind of thing that comes along.

我在每年的年报里都会登一个小广告。我们本就干广告业（音频杂音），今年广告标题是“Help, Help”。我在里面写明我们想买什么样的企业。这位辛辛那提的先生看到了，给我写信说：“我是你要找的人。”我一看，果然如此。我们买下所有风投的股份，但让家族继续留下来运营公司。这类事情就这样发生了。

The Scott Fetzer company, which is 20 other businesses, World Book, Kirby, 20 others, Campbell Hausfeld, almost a billion of sales. They had been a New York Stock Exchange company and there was a takeover attempt, even Ivan Boesky was involved, they had a whole raft of things. I’d never met the fellow then. I wrote him a letter, I said “Dear Mr. Schey: Here’s what we are...” I sent him an annual report and said “If you want to do businesses with someone whose checks will clear, who won’t bother you, here’s all the shoes that will drop (I told him all the bad things about us), a one-page letter. Sent it. (Kind of difficult to get all the bad things about us on one page.) I said “If you want to talk about it, I’ll meet you, and if you don’t, throw the letter away.” He called me up, we met on a Sunday in Chicago, made a deal that night and, in a week, the deal was done. That was five or six years ago – I’ve been to Cleveland twice, not because I needed to be. He runs that business exactly like he \[owned it himself]. \$97 million pretax earnings.

斯科特·费策公司旗下有二十个业务，World Book、Kirby、Campbell Hausfeld 等，总销售额近十亿美元。当时它已在纽约证交所上市，却遭遇收购企图，甚至伊万·博斯基也卷入其中，一团糟。我那时没见过老板。我便写了一封信：“亲爱的谢伊先生：我们是……”，附上年报，并说：“如果您想和支票绝不会跳票、又不会来烦您的买家做生意，这是所有可能的坏消息”（我把关于我们的所有缺点都告诉他，一页纸搞定——要把所有缺点写在一页上可真难）。我说：“想谈，就见面；不想，就把信扔了。”他给我打电话，我们在芝加哥一个星期天见面，当晚达成交易，一周内就办妥。那是五六年前的事——我只去过克利夫兰两次，而且不是非去不可。他经营得就像仍然完全属于他自己一样，税前盈利9700万美元。

\[Question from audience.]

【观众提问。】

I don’t know if everybody could hear that. In that past, at least in some departments, you’ve heard that there is no such thing as buying an undervalued stock, or making money in stocks, that the market is efficient, and that everything is priced right at all times relative to the known information about it. Therefore, there’s no use thinking. And, of course, from my standpoint I’d like to have everyone believe that, because it’s a terrific advantage to be in a game where your opponent has been taught not to think. I wish the people I played bridge would. An appreciable percentage of the money in Wall Street is managed by people who believe that. It’s the old story that if there’s a \$20 bill on the floor there’s no sense picking it up because it can’t be there. That thinking, I would say, prevailed extensively 10 years ago. I would say there’s a little less of it now. All I can tell you is it simply isn’t true.

不知道大家是否都听清了。过去，至少在某些学术圈子里，你们听到过这样的说法：不存在买到被低估的股票，也不存在靠股票赚钱；市场是有效的，所有股票的价格随时都已充分反映已知信息，因此思考毫无意义。当然，从我的角度讲，我巴不得所有人都信这一套，因为当你的对手被教导不要思考时，你就占了大便宜。我希望和我打桥牌的人也这样。一大笔华尔街资金其实掌握在相信这套理论的人手里。这就像老故事——地上如果有张20美元钞票，肯定是假象，所以不必去捡。十年前，这种想法相当盛行；如今少了一些。我只能说，这压根不是真的。

The last class I told of how, in 1966 or so, we bought 5% of the Disney company for \$4 million.

上一堂课我讲到，大约在1966年，我们用400万美元买下迪士尼公司5%的股份。

The whole company was selling for \$80 million! They’d written off all their films, Snow White, Three Little Pigs, Fantasia, all 220 some of them, written down to zero. You got 300 acres down in Anaheim and all of Disneyland for zero. The Pirate Ride had just been put in that year – \$17 million it cost, yet the whole company was selling for \$80 million. It was a joke. Mary Poppins made \$30 million that year. They were going to recycle Mary Poppins seven years later, they were going to recycle Snow White seven years later. It’s like an oil field where the oil seeps back in, and every seven years a new crop of kids comes along and they all want to see Snow White. And they drive their parents crazy until they get to see it. Well, that whole company was selling for \$80 million. You don’t have to be a financial analyst, you don’t have to be finance major, to know that’s a ridiculous valuation. Eleven million people a year go to Disneyland. That’s seven bucks a person and you get the (garbled) thrown in free. It was a joke. And Walt Disney would tell you, if you went out to see him, would tell you all about the values, and what he had planned. It just happens occasionally in securities.

当时整个公司市值仅8000万美元！他们把所有影片——《白雪公主》《三只小猪》《幻想曲》等共220多部——全部冲销为零。位于阿纳海姆的300英亩土地外加整个迪士尼乐园也计为零。那年新建的海盗船项目花了1700万美元，而整家公司才卖8000万，简直是笑话。那一年《欢乐满人间》赚了3000万美元；七年后他们还要重映《欢乐满人间》，再过七年重映《白雪公主》。这就像油田，油会再渗回来；每七年就有一批新孩子冒出来，都想看《白雪公主》，直到逼疯父母才罢休。而整个公司只值8000万。你不用是金融分析师或金融专业出身，也看得出这估值荒谬。每年有1100万人去迪士尼乐园，每人7美元，还送（录音模糊）免费。真是个笑话。如果你去找华特·迪士尼，他会告诉你这些价值以及他的计划。证券市场偶尔就会出现这种机会。

Now, an efficient market theorist would tell you that \$80 million is the correct value on the Walt Disney company. And he’s wrong. You do not have to have very many like that in a lifetime. It’s not very esoteric, it does not require some insight into what’s going to cure AIDS, or what’s going to be the best computer five years from now, or the best software manufacturer – it doesn’t require anything like that. It just requires figuring out whether people will be eating Hershey bars or drinking Coca Cola.

然而，一个有效市场理论家会告诉你，8000万美元就是华特·迪士尼公司的正确价值。他错了。一辈子中你用不着遇到很多这样的例子。这并不艰深，也不要求你洞见未来谁会治愈艾滋，或者五年后什么电脑最棒、哪家软件公司最好——完全不需要。你只要判断人们是否会继续吃好时巧克力、喝可口可乐即可。

This company \[Coke] you could have bought one share of stock for \$40 in 1919, when they went public. If you reinvested the dividends, you’d be worth a million now. There are 150 countries in the world where they sell this and in every single one of them per capital consumption goes up every year. It’s not that complicated. The Chairman of your \[Notre Dame’s] Board, Don Keough – I don’t know if you’re familiar with that; he is also the President of Coca Cola – used to live across the street from me in Omaha in 1960. He was a coffee salesman for Butternut Coffee, making \$200 a week. And if you knew Don Keough there was no way that, if you put Don Keough together with Coke, you were going to miss. There really isn’t any way they won’t be selling a lot more Coca Cola products five years from now than they are now. And, they’ll be making more money on each one. If you raise the price of each one of these a penny, it’s \$2 billion a year.

这家公司【可口可乐】在1919年上市时，一股40美元。如果你把股息全部再投资，如今就值一百万。全球共有150个国家销售可口可乐，而且每一个国家的人均消费年年上升。这并不复杂。你们圣母大学董事会主席唐·基欧——他同时也是可口可乐总裁——1960年和我住在奥马哈同一条街对面。当时他是巴特纳特咖啡公司的咖啡推销员，周薪200美元。如果你认识唐·基欧，就会知道，只要把他和可口可乐放在一起，就不可能失败。五年后，他们卖的可口可乐产品肯定比现在更多，而且每卖一瓶赚得也更多。只要每瓶涨价一美分，年收入就增加20亿美元。

\[Question from audience.]

\[观众提问。]

The question is whether LBOs and junk bonds and so on have hurt the country in some fundamental way in terms of its competitiveness vis-à-vis the world. I wouldn’t go that far, but I think on balance it’s been a huge minus on the financial scene. Extreme leverage has been, generally speaking, a net minus. The analogy has been made (and there’s just enough truth to it to get you in trouble) that in buying some company with enormous amounts of debt, that it’s somewhat like driving a car down the road and placing a dagger on the steering wheel pointed at your heart. If you do that, you will be a better driver – that I can assure you. You will drive with unusual care. You also, someday, will hit a small pothole, or a piece of ice, and you will end up gasping. You will have fewer accidents, but when they come along, they’ll be fatal. Essentially, that’s what some of corporate America did in the last 10 years. And it was motivated by huge fees. And it was motivated by greed.

问题是，杠杆收购（LBO）、垃圾债券等等是否在某种根本层面上损害了我们国家在全球竞争中的实力。我不会说得那么绝对，但我认为总体而言，它们在金融领域造成了巨大的负面影响。极端的杠杆使用，从总体上来看，是一种净负面。有人打过一个比方（而这个比喻的确有几分道理，也正因为如此才危险）：用巨额债务收购一家公司，就好比在驾驶汽车时在方向盘上竖起一把尖刀对准自己的心脏。如果你那样做，你的驾驶技术肯定会更好——这一点我敢保证。你会开得格外小心。但迟早你会撞到一个小坑，或滑上一块冰，最终气喘吁吁地收场。你确实事故会更少，但一旦发生，就可能致命。本质上，这正是过去十年里美国一些公司所做的事情。而动机则是高昂的费用和贪婪。

The most extreme case I saw was a television station. About three years ago, a television station in Tampa sold for an amount where, when they had to borrow the money, the interest amounted to more than the total sales of the station. If everybody donated their labor, if they donated their programming, if they donated their utilities, they still wouldn’t have enough to pay the interest. They went crazy. And you can buy those bonds at 15 cents on the dollar. Charlie Keating’s enterprise \[Lincoln Savings and Loan Association in California, which became the nation’s largest thrift failure] had a bunch of them too. There’s a lot of crazy stuff that went on in the last five or six years. The fees on that deal, they paid \$365 million for the station, they borrowed \$385 million and you can guess where the extra money went. It went into the pockets of the people who put the deal together.

我见过最极端的例子是一家电视台。大约三年前，佛罗里达坦帕的一家电视台被出售，成交价之高使得他们不得不借款，而光是利息就超过了电视台的全部收入。就算所有人无偿工作，节目内容免费，电力水费也全免，还是不够支付利息。他们完全疯了。而如今你可以用一美元15美分的价格买到那笔交易的债券。查理·基廷的公司（加州林肯储贷协会，美国历史上最大的储贷失败案例）也持有不少这种债券。过去五六年里发生了很多疯狂的事情。在那笔交易中，他们为电视台支付了3.65亿美元，却借了3.85亿美元，你可以猜猜多出来的那部分钱去了哪儿——进了撮合交易者的口袋。

[提问：能不能把公司债务的问题类比到政府债务上？]

No, it really isn’t comparable. The important thing on government debt is how much is owed externally. If this group landed on an island someplace, we were stranded, and the only person we could do business with was another islander, and we all went to work producing rice, and we worked hard eight hours, and we had just enough rice to stay alive. If we worked out some internal system where some people worked 10 hours a day, and some other people worked six hours a day, and the people who worked six hours a day “borrowed” two hours worth of rice daily from the people who worked 10 hours a day, as an island we wouldn’t be getting poorer. We might have some class that owed future rice, plus interest, to the people that had saved, but we would not be any worse off. We would consume all the rice we produced each day, it’s just that some of us would have claim chits on each other.

不，这其实并不能类比。政府债务的问题关键在于有多少是对外负债。打个比方，如果我们这群人被困在一座孤岛上，岛上唯一能交易的对象就是我们彼此，那么我们每天努力干八小时种稻，产出的稻米刚好够活命。如果我们搞一个内部制度，有些人每天干10小时，有些人干6小时，而后者每天从前者“借”2小时产出的稻米，这座岛整体来说不会变穷。或许会出现一部分人欠下未来的稻米加利息，欠给那些存下粮食的人，但整体生活水平不会下降。我们每天还是吃掉我们种出的所有稻米，只不过彼此之间出现了债权凭证。

If, on the other hand, we all decided to quit working, because people on the other island would work 16 hours a day, and they would ship over eight hours a day of rice to us, so we would just eat and mail them IOU’s (we’d send over a guy in a canoe each night with the IOUs, they’d send over rice every day), we’d all just sit around, but the little IOUs we sent them drew interest, and then after 10 years they said “we would just as soon quit producing rice the next 10 years and you guys work 16 hours a day.” That won’t work so well, particularly if it’s a different generation that’s being asked to work the 16 hours a day later on to pay back the rice from the first generation.

但如果我们全体都不再干活，因为另一个岛上的人每天干16小时，他们每天送来等值8小时工作的稻米，我们就坐着吃，并每天晚上派人划船送过去欠条，而他们继续送稻米。那我们就一直闲着，可那些欠条是要付利息的。十年之后，他们可能会说：“接下来10年我们不干了，该轮到你们每天干16小时了。”这个就不行了，尤其是要还债的不是最初吃饭的那一代人，而是后来的一代。

External debt, something our country owes the rest of the world, is a whole different question than internal debt. The national debt is largely held internally, but the game is changing as we run a trade deficit. So the trade deficit is a threat, essentially, to living as well as we live now. We are, essentially, selling off a little piece of the farm every day, as we run a trade deficit in order to finance our own consumption. We’ve got a very big rich farm, so we can sell a little piece of that farm for a long time without hardly noticing it. It’s a lot like eating a little too much over time. You never see it in any one day. You don’t all of a sudden get up, all of your buttons pop, and people say “God, you look fat!” It just doesn’t happen. What happens is you just keep doing it so pleasantly until, after a while, you’ve got a helluva waistline. And that is, essentially, the situation in our trade deficit. We are giving the rest of the world claim checks on us. That has consequences over time.

外部债务，也就是我们国家欠世界其他国家的债，是和内部债完全不同的问题。目前美国的国债主要是内部持有的，但随着我们不断产生贸易赤字，局势正在变化。所以说，贸易赤字从本质上威胁到我们现在的生活水平。我们基本上是在每天卖掉农场的一小块，用来资助我们的消费。我们拥有一座非常大、非常富饶的农场，所以我们可以卖掉小块土地很长时间都不会察觉。但这就像是每天吃得稍微多一点。你不会在某天一觉醒来，扣子全崩，大家都说：“天哪，你太胖了！”不是这样的。你每天都很舒服地多吃一点，时间久了，就发现腰围大得惊人。这就是我们贸易赤字的真实写照。我们把索取权交给世界其他国家，而这会在未来产生后果。

In fact, we sold our building to the Japanese, but it doesn’t make any difference whether it’s the Japanese or anybody else. We sold our buildings at ABC two years ago for about \$175 million. That was equal to one day’s trade defect with Japan. They sent up a bunch of VCRs and things, and we sent them the title to 54th Street and 6th Avenue. And we use up the one thing and they’ve got the other.

事实上，我们把大楼卖给了日本人，但其实是日本人还是其他人并不重要。两年前，我们把ABC的办公大楼卖了，成交价约1.75亿美元，刚好等于我们与日本一天的贸易逆差。他们送来一堆录像机之类的东西，而我们把54街和第六大道的地契交给了他们。我们用光了他们送来的东西，而他们拥有了我们的资产。

It’s got sort of a poetic justice to it. As a matter of fact, in 1626 I think, Peter Minuet handed a bunch of trinkets to the Indians and they paid him the island. And now, people are handing us the trinkets, and we’re giving them the island. It happens every day. The trade deficit will be \$100 billion plus, and that means we are giving out IOUs to the rest of the world that will draw interest, which are claims of future production of everybody in this room.

这件事有点讽刺意味。实际上，在1626年，我记得是彼得·米纽伊特拿一堆小饰品换了印第安人手中的岛屿。而现在，别人把小饰品给我们，我们却把岛屿送出去。这样的事情每天都在发生。我们的贸易逆差将超过1000亿美元，这意味着我们向全球发出欠条，这些欠条会计息，成为在座每一个人未来劳动成果的索取权。

Now the internal debt, that’s an entirely different story. That person helps, but the help is commensurate with the hurt. When it goes abroad, the equation is not the same.

而内部债务，那就是完全不同的故事了。债务人在接受帮助的同时，债权人也受损，两者在国内是一种对等交换。但当债务转向海外时，那个平衡就不复存在了。

[Question from audience.]

[观众提问。]

The question is whether we just invest domestically or also abroad. The answer to that is, in terms of buying securities, everything we’ve bought, almost, has been domestic. It’s not that I rule out other investments. We almost bought a pretty good sized investment in England a year or two ago, and we look at things elsewhere.

问题是我们是否只在国内投资，还是也进行海外投资。对此我的回答是，就证券投资而言，我们买的大多数资产几乎都是国内的。这并不意味着我排除其他投资机会。大约一两年前我们差点在英国完成一笔相当大的投资，我们也在关注其他国家的机会。

The United States is a \$3 trillion equity pool, a \$3 trillion pool of equity investments. If you can’t make money in a \$3 trillion pool, you’re probably not going to make money in a \$6 trillion pool.

美国股市的市值是3万亿美元，这是一个3万亿美元的股票投资池。如果你在一个3万亿美元的池子里都赚不到钱，那你在一个6万亿美元的池子里恐怕也赚不到钱。

Now, Coca Cola earns 80% of its money abroad and we hold 7% of that. Our 7% share is roughly \$100 million. Of that, roughly \$80 million comes from abroad. Coca Cola is spending an enormous amount of money in East Germany in the next year. They were in there big in March of 1990. Interestingly enough, the first Coca Cola they sold in East Germany, you may be too young for this, but it was shipped from Dunkirk where the Germans, essentially, drove the English into the sea 50 years ago. For a while all the Coca Cola was going from our big bottling plant in Dunkirk to East Germany. Now, the infrastructure has been built up within East Germany tremendously, and it will be a good market for Coke.

可口可乐有80%的利润来自海外，而我们持有其7%的股份。我们这7%的持股大约能带来1亿美元利润，其中大约8000万美元来自海外。可口可乐计划明年在东德投入巨资。早在1990年3月，他们就大举进入东德。有趣的是，可口可乐在东德销售的第一批饮料是从敦刻尔克运过去的——你可能太年轻了不知道，50年前德国人正是在敦刻尔克把英国人赶下了海。有一段时间，所有销往东德的可口可乐都来自我们在敦刻尔克的大型灌装厂。现在东德的基础设施已经大大改善，那会成为可口可乐的一个好市场。

Coke is also in McDonald’s in Moscow. The Moscow McDonald’s is doing \$235,000 in business a day, 50 times the average McDonald’s in this country. You think of 50 McDonald’s opening and that’s how much business that Moscow McDonald’s has done. That’s a lot of people buying Coke.

可口可乐也出现在莫斯科的麦当劳中。莫斯科的那家麦当劳每天营业额高达23.5万美元，是美国平均麦当劳门店的50倍。你可以想象相当于一下子开了50家麦当劳的生意量，那是很多人在买可口可乐。

[Question from audience.]

[观众提问。]

The question was, “Have I changed my ideas over the years as my bank account has increased?” The truth is, I used to have more ideas than money and now I’ve got more money than ideas. You’ve put your finger on that particular problem, but there are worse problems.

问题是：“随着我账户里的钱变多，我的投资观念有没有变化？”老实说，我过去是点子多而钱少，现在是钱多而点子少。你确实一针见血指出了这个问题，但这还不是最糟的问题。

The only ideas we’re interested in now are big ideas. We are not interested in anything that we do not think we can put at least \$100 million into, usually quite a bit more. We own fewer stocks now, with \$7 or \$8 billion, that we owned back when we had \$15 million in 1970.

我们现在只对“大点子”感兴趣。任何我们认为不能投入至少1亿美元（通常更多）的投资，我们都不会考虑。现在我们管理着70到80亿美元的资产，但持有的股票数量比1970年我们只有1500万美元时还少。

We do not try and buy more and more of everything. I call that the Noah’s Ark approach to investing – have two of everything. We’ve got a very selective ark, and we only want a couple of specimens on there. It makes it more difficult, but you don’t need very many good ideas. If we get one good idea a year, that would be terrific. And if you negotiate with me, you’d get me down to one every two or three years. That’s all you need. You do not have to keep hitting home runs all the time. That’s one of the nice things about this business. If you make one decision on something like that, it takes care of a lot.

我们不会想着样样都买一点。我把那种方式叫“诺亚方舟式投资”——每种来两个。我们的“方舟”选得非常严格，我们只想带上少数几个标本。这样确实更难，但你真的不需要太多好点子。如果我们一年有一个好点子，那已经很棒了。如果你和我谈谈，可能我会退让到两三年一个好点子就行了。这就够了。你不需要总是打全垒打——这是投资这门生意里的一大好处。如果你做出一个正确的大决定，那就已经解决很多问题了。

I always tell classes that, in the investment world, if you had a punch card when you got when you got out of school, and there were only 20 punches on it, and when that was done, you were all done investing, you’d make more money than having one with unlimited punches. You’d make sure you used them for the right things.

我经常对学生说，在投资这个行业，如果你毕业时手里拿到一张打孔卡，上面只有20个孔，每打一次孔就少一个，打完就不能再投资了，你最终会比拿一张可以无限打孔的卡赚得更多。因为你会确保每一次出手都用在最重要的地方。

The big things are not what you do, they’re what you don’t do. Basically, we’ve had very few things we’ve lost money on. We’ve had no more good ideas than other people. But we’ve not made big mistakes – that I learned from Ben Graham. He used to say there are two rules in investing. The first: don’t lose. The second: don’t forget the first.

真正重要的事情，不在于你做了什么，而在于你没做什么。基本上，我们亏钱的事情非常少。我们的好主意不比别人多，但我们没犯大错——这是我从本·格雷厄姆那儿学来的。他常说，投资有两条规则：第一，不要亏钱；第二，别忘了第一条。

[Question from audience.]

[观众提问。]

The first question was, “Does the current recession change our attitude toward investing?” It doesn’t change it a nickel’s worth. If something comes along tomorrow that’s interesting, I will do it tomorrow. And it will be by exactly the same yardsticks I used whenever the business cycle was at its peak. We don’t care what businesses are doing. If the Chairman of the Federal Reserve called me tonight and said “I am really panicking and things are terrible,” I don’t care. We will do exactly what we were going to do tomorrow morning. The truth is, on balance, we will do more business when people are pessimistic. Not because we like pessimism, but because it makes for prices that are much more attractive. If you all have filling stations to sell in South Bend, I want to do business with whomever is most negative about filling stations. And that’s were I’m going to make the best buy. Times are really good and times are really bad, over a period of time. We don’t quit selling candy in July just because it isn’t Christmas. We pay no attention to economic forecasts. I don’t read anything \[along those lines]. I read annual reports, but I don’t read anybody’s opinion about what’s going to happen next week, or next month or next year.

第一个问题是：“当前的经济衰退是否改变了我们对投资的态度？”答案是：一分钱也没变。如果明天出现了一个有意思的投资机会，我明天就会出手，而且我用的标准和在经济周期高峰时完全一样。我们不在乎商业环境如何。就算今晚美联储主席打电话告诉我：“我真的很恐慌，情况糟透了。”我也不在乎。我们明天照样按原计划行事。事实上，总体而言，当人们悲观时我们会做更多生意。这不是因为我们喜欢悲观，而是因为悲观带来了更具吸引力的价格。如果你们在南本德都有加油站要卖，我就想跟那个对加油站最悲观的人做交易，那才是我能拿到最好买卖的地方。经济有好有坏，这是长期的常态。我们不会因为不是圣诞节，就在七月停止卖糖果。我们根本不理会经济预测。我不会读这方面的任何内容。我读年报，但不读任何人对下周、下个月或明年会发生什么的预测。

The second question is whether there are any special industries we favor. The only thing we favor is industries we can understand. And then, we like businesses with what I call “moats” around them. We like businesses that are protected in some way from competition. If you go in the drugstore and say “I want to buy a Hershey bar” and the guy says “I’ve got an unmarked chocolate bar that’s a nickel cheaper,” you’ll buy the Hershey bar or you’ll go across the street.

第二个问题是我们是否偏好某些特定行业。我们唯一偏好的是我们能理解的行业。除此之外，我们喜欢有“护城河”的企业。我们喜欢那些在某种程度上受到竞争保护的企业。比如你走进药店说：“我要买一块好时巧克力。”店员说：“我这有一块没牌子的，便宜5美分。”你还是会买好时巧克力，或者你会直接走去对面的店买。

One of the interesting things to do is walk through a supermarket sometime and think about who’s got pricing power, and who’s got a franchise, and who doesn’t. If you go buy Oreo cookies, and I’m going to take home Oreo cookies or something that looks like Oreo cookies for the kids, or your spouse, or whomever, you’ll buy the Oreo cookies. If the other is three cents a package cheaper, you’ll still buy the Oreo cookies. You’ll buy Jello instead of some other. You’ll buy Kool Aid instead of Wyler’s powdered soft drink. But, if you go to buy milk, it doesn’t make any difference whether its Borden’s, or Sealtest, or whatever. And you will not pay a premium to buy one milk over another. You will not pay a premium to buy one \[brand of] frozen peas over another, probably. It’s the difference between having a wonderful business and not a wonderful business. The milk business is not a good business.

有趣的一个练习是你可以在超市里逛一圈，思考谁有定价权、谁拥有品牌护城河，谁没有。如果你要买奥利奥饼干，准备带回家给孩子、配偶或其他人，你会买正牌的奥利奥。即使其他品牌便宜3美分一包，你也还是会买奥利奥。你会买吉利丁布丁，而不是其他牌子的；你会买酷爱饮料，而不是Wyler的粉末饮料。但如果你要买牛奶，那是博登、Sealtest，还是其他品牌，根本无所谓。你不会为某个牛奶品牌多付一分钱；冷冻豌豆也一样，基本不会有人为品牌付溢价。这就是优质生意与非优质生意的差别。牛奶生意就不是个好生意。

In our candy business, Valentine’s is coming up, and See’s candy on the West Coast is a very desirable item, and very few men will want to hand their girlfriend, or wife, or whatever, and say “Here honey, I took the low bid.” It just doesn’t sell. We want things where they’re not terribly price sensitive. And if you’re going to go out and buy a car this afternoon, you’re not going to say “I’d like that red job there, but I want to be sure it has steel that came from Bethlehem steel.” You don’t care where the steel came from. And, therefore, Bethlehem’s got nothing to say to General Motors, or Ford, except what wonderful guys they are. And General Motors says “We know you’re wonderful guys, and so, if Y sells it for X dollars a ton and you’d better be \$5 under them.” Anything that differentiates your product – those are the businesses we like to be in.

以我们自己的糖果生意为例，情人节快到了，西海岸的See’s糖果是一件非常受欢迎的礼品。很少有男人愿意把糖果递给女朋友或妻子时说：“亲爱的，这是我挑的最便宜的。”这么说可不会让糖果更好卖。我们喜欢那种对价格不太敏感的产品。如果你今天下午去买车，你不会说：“我想买那辆红车，但我得确认它用的是伯利恒钢厂的钢铁。”你根本不会在意钢材的来源。所以伯利恒钢厂根本无法和通用或福特讨价还价，只能说他们人不错。而通用会说：“我们知道你们人不错，但如果Y家卖X美元一吨，那你们必须比它低5美元。”任何能够让产品与众不同的地方——那些就是我们喜欢涉足的业务。

We like to be in businesses I can understand. There are all kinds of businesses I don’t understand, but we’re not going to own them. Thomas Watson Sr., of IBM, in that book “Father, Son, and Company, that his son wrote, quoted his father as saying “I’m no genius, but I’m smart in spots, and I stay around those spots.” The real trick is knowing what you know, and what you don’t know. It isn’t how much you know, it’s whether you can define it well, so you know when you can take a swing at the ball, and you know when you’ve got no business swinging.

我们喜欢那些我能理解的生意。这个世界有各种各样我不懂的生意，但我们不会去投资那些我不懂的。IBM的托马斯·沃森（Thomas Watson Sr.）在他儿子写的那本《父亲、儿子与公司》中说过一句话：“我不是天才，但我在某些地方挺聪明，而且我就待在那些地方。”关键不是你知道多少，而是你是否能清楚地界定你知道什么、不知道什么。你要知道什么时候可以挥棒击球，什么时候根本不该挥棒。

[Question from audience.]

[观众提问。]

The durability and strength of the franchise is the most important thing in figuring out \[whether it’s a good business]. If you think a business is going to be around 10 or 20 years from now, and that they’re going to be able to price advantageously, that’s going to be a good business. And if somebody has to have a prayer session every time they want to raise the price a dollar a pound on whatever they’re selling, that’s not going to be a good business.

判断一项业务是否优秀，最重要的就是它的品牌持久性和护城河。如果你相信一家企业在十年、二十年后仍将存在，并且能够保持价格优势，那这就是一门好生意。但如果他们每次想把产品涨价一美元一磅都得开祈祷会，那就不是好生意了。

What’s the highest priced daily newspaper in the United States? Most of you are familiar with it.The highest priced daily newspaper in the United States, with any circulation at all, is the Daily Racing Form. It sells about 150,000 copies a day, and it has for about 50 years, and it’s either \$2.00 or \$2.25 (they keep raising prices) and it’s essential. If you’re heading to the racetrack and you’ve got a choice between betting on your wife’s birthday, and Joe’s Little Green Sheet, and the Daily Racing Form, if you’re a serious racing handicapper, you want The Form. You can charge \$2.00 for The Form, you can charge \$1.50, you can charge \$2.50 and people are going to buy it. It’s like selling needles to addicts, basically. It’s an essential business. It will be an essential business five or 10 years from now. You have to decide whether horse racing will be around five or 10 years from now, and you have to decide whether there’s any way people will get their information about past performances of different horses from different sources. But you’ve only got about two questions to answer, and if you answer them, you know the business will make a lot of money. The Form has huge profit margins, incidentally. Wider than any other newspaper. They charge what they want to basically. It’s an easy to understand business – so easy to understand.

美国售价最高的日报是哪一家？你们大多数人都熟悉它。美国售价最高的日报（在有一定发行量的报纸中）是《赛马日报》（Daily Racing Form）。它每天销量大约15万份，50年来都差不多，而且售价是2美元或2.25美元（他们一直在涨价），这是一个“刚需”产品。如果你要去赛马场，在下注时，你可以选择靠你老婆的生日来猜、靠乔的小绿单，或者靠《赛马日报》，但如果你是一个认真的赛马赌客，你肯定会选《赛马日报》。你可以定价2美元、1.5美元、2.5美元，人们还是会买。这基本上就像是卖针给上瘾者——它是必需品。五年、十年后它还是必需品。你只需判断两件事：第一，赛马运动在五年、十年后还存在吗？第二，人们是否可能从其他渠道获取赛马过往表现的数据？如果这两题你能回答，那你就知道这门生意会很赚钱。顺便提一句，《赛马日报》的利润率非常高，远高于其他报纸。他们基本上可以随意定价。这是一门很容易理解的生意——非常容易理解。

Snow White is going to show up every so often, and when she shows up, millions of kids are going, and they’ll make their money, and they don’t have to make the picture again. Made back in 1937 or so. It’s a perpetual royalty on youth. And that’s not a bad business.

《白雪公主》每隔一段时间就会重新出场，每次出现都会吸引数百万孩子观看，他们就能赚到钱，而且这部片子根本不需要重拍，它最初是在大约1937年制作的。这相当于对青春年少者的一项永久版税。这种生意可不赖。

[Question from audience.]

[观众提问。]

Where did Donald Trump go wrong? The big problem with Donald Trump was he never went right. He basically overpaid for properties, but he got people to lend him the money. He was terrific at borrowing money. If you look at his assets, and what he paid for them, and what he borrowed to get them, there was never any real equity there. He owes, perhaps, \$3.5 billion now, and, if you had to pick a figure as to the value of the assets, it might be more like \$2.5 billion. He’s a billion in the hole, which is a lot better than being \$100 in the hole because if you’re \$100 in the hole, they come and take the TV set. If you’re a billion in the hole, they say “hang in there Donald.”

唐纳德·特朗普到底哪里出错了？最大的问题是，他从来就没走对过。他基本上是以过高价格买入资产，但他能说服别人借钱给他。他在借钱方面确实很厉害。如果你看看他的资产、购入价格，以及他为此借了多少钱，你会发现里面从来没有真正的股权价值。他现在可能欠了大约35亿美元的债，而他的资产如果估个值，也许只有25亿美元左右。他相当于倒亏10亿美元。话说回来，这总比亏100美元好——亏100美元时，债主会上门把电视搬走；亏10亿美元时，他们反倒会说：“坚持住，唐纳德。”

It’s interesting why smart people go astray. That’s one of the most interesting things in business. I’ve seen all sorts of people with terrific IQs that end up flopping in Wall Street or business because they beat themselves. They have 500 horsepower engines, and get 50 horsepower out of them. Or, worse than that, they have their foot on the brake and the accelerator at the same time. They really manage to screw themselves up.

聪明人为什么会走偏，是商业世界中最耐人寻味的问题之一。我见过各种高智商的人最后在华尔街或商界失败，因为他们输给了自己。他们像拥有500马力引擎的人，却只能发挥出50马力的动力。更糟的是，有些人一边踩油门一边踩刹车，结果把自己彻底搞砸。

I tried this with the last class. Let’s say each one of you could buy 10% of the earnings, forever, of anybody else in this room, except me. Let’s charge \$50,000. And that means that if somebody gets out of here and earns \$30,000 you get a \$3,000 royalty off them. But, if they do extremely well, and become President of Coca Cola like Don Keough did, you’ll make a fortune.

我在上一届学生中做过一个实验：假设你们每个人都可以花5万美元买下在座除我以外任意一个人的10%终身收入。如果某人毕业后年收入3万美元，你每年就能拿到3000美元的分成。但如果他发展得特别好，比如像唐·基欧那样当上可口可乐总裁，那你可就赚大了。

How are you going to think, in terms of the rest of the people here, of which one you want to buy the 10% of? Let’s say we had Donald Trump here, and my friend Tom Murphy, who runs ABC, or Don Keough, and you’re really betting on the lifetime of each of them, and let’s say they’re all in equally good health. Would you give them an IQ test? Well, you’d want to be certain they have a certain amount of IQ. Would you want to measure how strongly motivated they were, how much they wanted to get rich? Donald Trump wanted to get rich. That might not be a great qualifier. What would you do to select that one person out of this whole crowd here, because there will be a huge difference in results here. There’s not a huge difference in IQ. But there will be a huge difference in results. I would venture to say, I don’t know how well this group knows each other, you come from two different schools, so I’d break it down into two groups, I would venture to say that your guesses would not be bad. They’d be better if you’d had more experience with the group, and if you’ve had more experience generally, but they will be way better than flipping coins. You would probably relate it to a lot of qualities, some of which would be straight from Ben Franklin – I would suggest that the big successes I’ve met had a fair amount of Ben Franklin in them. And Donald Trump did not.

你该怎么判断你想投资哪一个人？假设现在唐纳德·特朗普也在座，另有我的朋友汤姆·墨菲（ABC高管）和唐·基欧，你实际上是在押注他们的一生。假设他们健康状况都一样，那你会怎么挑？你会给他们做智商测试吗？当然，你希望他们有一定的智商。但你会衡量他们想发财的动机有多强吗？特朗普当然很想发财，但那可能不是一个好标准。那么你该如何从在座这群人中选出一个呢？这群人的智商差距其实不大，但结果的差异会非常大。我敢说，即使你们来自两个不同的学校、对彼此还不熟悉，你们的判断也不会差太远。如果你有更多经验，会判断得更好，但即使没有经验，你的判断也远远胜过抛硬币。你可能会关注一些特质，有些特质甚至可以直接从本杰明·富兰克林的箴言中找到。我接触过的大多数成功人士，都多少具备一点富兰克林式的品质，而唐纳德·特朗普没有。

One of the things you will find, which is interesting and people don’t think of it enough, with most businesses and with most individuals, life tends to snap you at your weakest link. So it isn’t the strongest link you’re looking for among the individuals in the room. It isn’t even the average strength of the chain. It’s the weakest link that causes the problem.

有一点很有意思，但人们常常忽略：不论是企业还是个人，生活最终都会从你最薄弱的环节处折断。所以，在评估一个人时，不是要看他最强的那一环，甚至也不是看他整体的平均水平，而是看他最弱的一环——问题就出在那里。

It may be alcohol, it may be gambling, it may be a lot of things, it may be nothing, which is terrific. But it is a real weakest link problem.

这个薄弱点可能是酗酒、赌博，也可能是其他很多问题；当然也可能什么都没有，那就太好了。但它确实是一个“最弱环节”的问题。

When I look at our managers, I’m not trying to look at the guy who wakes up at night and says “E = MC 2” or something. I am looking for people that function very, very well. And that means not having any weak links. The two biggest weak links in my experience: I’ve seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage – leverage being borrowed money. Donald Trump failed because of leverage. He simply got infatuated with how much money he could borrow, and he did not give enough thought to how much money he could pay back.

当我评估我们的经理人时，我不是在找那种半夜会突然醒来说“E=MC²”的天才。我找的是那些做事非常稳健的人。而这意味着不能有薄弱环节。根据我的经验，最常见的两个薄弱点是：酒精和杠杆（杠杆就是借钱）。唐纳德·特朗普就是因为杠杆失败的。他被自己能借多少钱迷住了，却没有认真思考自己到底能还多少钱。

You really don’t need leverage in this world much. If you’re smart, you’re going to make a lot of money without borrowing. I’ve never borrowed a significant amount of money in my life. Never. Never will. I’ve got no interest in it. The other reason is I never thought I would be way happier when I had 2X instead of X. You ought to have a good time all the time as you go along. If you say “I’m taking this job – I don’t really like this job but in three years it will lead to this,” forget it. Find one you like right now.

在这个世界上，其实你并不需要太多杠杆。如果你足够聪明，你根本不用借钱也能赚大钱。我这辈子从来没借过什么大钱。一次也没有。将来也不会。我对借钱没有兴趣。还有一个原因是，我从不认为从X到2X能让我更幸福。你应该在当下就过得愉快。如果你说：“我现在接这个工作，我其实不喜欢，但三年后它能让我做别的。”那就别干了。去找一个你现在就喜欢的。

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