“Banking has turned out to be better than we thought. We made a few billion [dollars] from Amex while we miss-appraised it. My only prediction is that we will continue to make mistakes like that.”
“Financial institutions make us nervous when they're trying to do well.”
“What's fascinating . . .is that you could now have a business that might have been selling for $10 billion where the business itself could probably not have borrowed even $100 million. But the owners of that business, because it's public, could borrow many billions of dollars on their little pieces of paper- because they had these market valuations. But as a private business, the company itself couldn't borrow even 1/20th of what the individuals could borrow.”
Charlie Munger (Trades, Portfolio) on Berkshire's 2023 Shareholder Meeting: "I Don't Think Having a Bunch of Bankers Trying to Get Rich 'Leads to Great Things'
