Points To Ponder Across Europe just now men who thought their title was “minister of finance” have woken up to the idea that their job is actually government bond salesman. – Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair, March 2011 Many European companies are in better shape than the nations in which they’re based. – James H. Glassman, Kiplinger’s Magazine, December 2011 In Absolute Agreement Stocks have climbed a wall of worry for 42 years. The bigger the worry, the better the returns. – Bob Olstein, Morningstar Advisor, February/March 2011 As long as inflation doesn’t ramp up to the double-digit levels of the 1970s and early 1980s—a scenario I consider extremely unlikely—stocks will act as an excellent hedge. The reason is simple: Stocks are claims on real assets, such as land and plant and equipment, which appreciate in value as overall prices increase. – Jeremy J. Siegel, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, June 2011 To the extent that some managers are trying to replace active security selection with active allocation across sectors, that is another name for market timing. History suggests that is rarely a durable strategy. – Edward Bernard, T. Rowe Price Vice Chairman, Bloomberg, June 9, 2011 | | Unquestionably, some people have become very rich through the use of borrowed money. However, that’s also been a way to get very poor. When leverage works, it magnifies your gains. Your spouse thinks you’re clever, and your neighbors get envious. But leverage is addictive. Once having profited from its wonders, very few people retreat to more conservative practices. And as we all learned in third grade—and some relearned in 2008—any series of positive numbers, however impressive the numbers may be, evaporates when multiplied by a single zero. History tells us that leverage all too often produces zeroes, even when it is employed by very smart people. – Warren Buffett, 2010 Berkshire Hathaway Letter to Shareholders From now on, price pressure and shortages of resources will be a permanent feature of our lives… The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly. – Jeremy Grantham, The New York Times, August 11, 2011 If investing was just all history, the historians would be billionaires. Same with quant and algorithms. High quality stocks in the US and the emerging markets are the place to be, and this panic is a wonderful opportunity to buy them. – Barton Biggs, Macroeconomic Thoughts, August 16, 2011 | | When markets are highly correlated is exactly when you have really good opportunities to make great long-term investments. – David Chung, Barron’s, September 5, 2011 Our discipline is very much bottom-up stock-picking, with a strong value-investing bias. I am very cheap in terms of what we want to pay for things. It is not like we don’t like growth. We like growth as much as the next guy. But we just don’t want to pay pie-in-the-sky prices for future bets. – Michael Katz, Barron’s, November 26, 2011 Cocktail Conversation The pace at which we can reach our destination of economic bliss will be governed by four things—our power to control population, our determination to avoid wars and civil dissensions, our willingness to entrust to science the direction of those matters which are properly the concern of science, and the rate of accumulation as fixed by the margin between our production and our consumption; of which the last will easily look after itself, given the first three. – John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, 1930 Some people say they want to wait for a clearer view of the future. But when the future is again clear, the present bargains will have vanished. In fact, does anyone think that today’s prices will prevail once full confidence has been restored? – Dean Witter, May 1932 |