THIS CHART SAYS IT ALL
Take a second to click here and five seconds to absorb it. It won’t take longer. (Thanks, James.)
ROW, ROW . . .
Susie Slanina: “It was just announced that Roz will make landfall at approximately 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time after rowing across the Indian Ocean. It took 153 days. I hope there will be good media coverage. If you can, please let your readers know!”
☞ This is her third ocean, if she makes it. She rows solo. Can you imagine? Almost as jaw-dropping as the ropeless cliff climbing you may have seen on “60 Minutes” last night.
A FEW MINUTES WITH WARREN BUFFETT
Speaking of “60 Minutes,” Andy Rooney seemed sharp as ever as he bid us adieu last night, at 92. Warren Buffett is a youthful 81, so let’s hope he’s just getting warmed up. At a dinner Friday he said he foresees no recession (65 of his 70 businesses are doing well – only his housing-related businesses are dead in the water); he foresees no deflation (we’ll print as much money as we need to to avoid it); inflation will spike at some point, but who knows whether that’s two years out or five. The housing market will firm when – forming 1.2 million new households a year but building just 500,000 new homes – we eventually sop up the excess supply. That process may be fairly far along. With prices down and such low mortgage rates, it’s a good time to buy a home. Europe will ultimately sort itself out and, however painful it may be short-term, Europeans will be living better in 10 years than now. He doesn’t expect the blowback from any European crisis to cause us another Lehman Brothers type crisis here. He’s been buying equities – including his own stock, which he believes is undervalued.* In his lifetime, astonishingly, real per capita income has grown six-fold – compared to most centuries of human history when there was no material progress at all. The American economy is unbelievably resilient (so don’t panic with each scary event). If we want to maximize our chances, we should help reelect the President and give him a Democratic Congress to work with – which is why the evening was a fundraiser and why Warren, perhaps history’s wisest and most successful capitalist, was headlining it.
*BRKA dropped $2,400 Friday; you might prefer the B shares, which represent one-fifteen-hundredth of an A share.
