On May 4 and 5, 2018, Warren E. Buffett (born 1930) and Charles T. Munger (born 1924), both already legends during their lifetime, held the annual shareholders’ meeting of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Approximately 42,000 visitors gathered in Omaha, Nebraska, to attend the star investors’ Q&A session.
I frequently say “Washington D.C. will never fix America’s problems. Washington D.C. is America’s problem!”
People often take that to mean I don’t think we can fix America’s problems. That’s not the case. I just believe that instead of focusing on D.C., we need to start with change at the local and state level. From there, it will filter up to Washington D.C.
While the euro crisis seems far away as all Eurozone countries ran government deficits below 3 percent of GDP, there is one problem for the euro that quietly keeps growing: the unresolved banking crisis. And this is not a small problem. The Eurosystems´and euro banks´ balance sheets totaled €30 trillion in January 2018, that is about 291 percent of GDP.
European banks are in trouble for several reasons.
Back in the 2008 presidential race, I explained to then-candidate Rudy Giuliani the concept of “blowback.” Years of US meddling and military occupation of parts of the Middle East motivated a group of terrorists to carry out attacks against the United States on 9/11. They didn’t do it because we are so rich and so free, as the neocons would have us believe. They came over here because we had been killing Muslims “over there” for decades.
Back in 1999, I was in Tanzania relaxing by the pool at my hotel in the Serengeti after a dusty day of wildlife photography. A young attendant approached and informed me that former Tanzanian president Julius Nyrere was one of the most influential men in the world and that world leaders were streaming into Dar es Salaam to pay homage at his funeral. Nyrere had just died a few weeks before my arrival. The attendant went on to recite the many successes Nyrere and the government had achieved.
The recent congressional hearing of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg illuminates the complicated questions raised by our ever evolving technologically immersed society. The idea of a person or entity being able to track the digital viewing habits of innumerable individuals posits concern about the permissibility of encroaching on private lives. Fortunately, the concept of invading the intimacy of another person’s day to day dealings for financial gain has been addressed before, in the form of blackmail.
Apart from dealing with government intervention, understanding markets is probably the most challenging task of any business owner or entrepreneur. It was for good reason that Ludwig von Mises insisted that economists and institutions that teach economics go out of their way to share economics theory with business owners and the general public.
