The quotes were originally posted on 25iq. This article covers Munger's quotes on topics that start with B.
BANKS:
“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'
BANKRUPTCY:
“I think much of [how bankruptcy is handled] is pretty horrible. It's a situation where courts themselves have gone into the business of bidding to attract bankruptcy proceedings…”
“How you behave in one place, will help in surprising ways later.”
“If you rise in life, you have to behave in a certain way. You can go to a strip club if you're a beer-swilling sand shoveler, but if you're the Bishop of Boston, you shouldn't go.”
BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS:
“How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn't behavioral, what the hell is it?”
“How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an enlightened economist's mind?… I think that these behavioral economics…or economists are probably the ones that are bending them in the correct direction. I don't think it's going to be that hard to bend economics a little to accommodate what's right in psychology.”
BEN FRANKLIN:
“There is the sheer amount of Franklin's wisdom… And the talent. Franklin played four instruments. He was the nation's leading scientist and inventor, plus a leading author, statesman, and philanthropist. There has never been anyone like him.”
BEN GRAHAM:
“The idea of a margin of safety, a Graham precept, will never be obsolete. The idea of making the market your servant will never be obsolete. The idea of being objective and dispassionate will never be obsolete. So, Graham had a lot of wonderful ideas.”
“Ben Graham could run his Geiger counter over this detritus from the collapse of the 1930s and find things selling below their working capital per share and so on…. But he was, by and large, operating when the world was in shell shock from the 1930s—which was the worst contraction in the English-speaking world in about 600 years. Wheat in Liverpool, I believe, got down to something like a 600-year low, adjusted for inflation. the classic Ben Graham concept is that gradually the world wised up and those real obvious bargains disappeared. You could run your Geiger counter over the rubble and it wouldn't click. … Ben Graham followers responded by changing the calibration on their Geiger counters. In effect, they started defining a bargain in a different way. And they kept changing the definition so that they could keep doing what they'd always done. And it still worked pretty well.”
BERKSHIRE:
“I'm a bull on Berkshire Hathaway. There may be some considerable waiting, but I think there are some good days ahead.”
“Personally, I think Berkshire will be a lot bigger and stronger than it is. Whether the stock will be a good investment from today's price is another question. The one thing we've always guaranteed is that the future will be a lot worse than the past.”
“We stumbled into this two-person format. It would not work if it was just one person. You could have the wittiest, wisest person on earth up there, and people would find it very tiresome. It takes a little interplay of personalities to handle the extreme length of the festival.”
“I don't think it would work well to have a half-and-half management. We don't need an operating guy; we have people running the businesses, and the main thing is not to destroy or damage the spirit they have.”
“Berkshire has the lowest turnover of any major company in the U.S. The Walton family owns more of Walmart than Buffett owns of Berkshire, so it isn't because of large holdings. It's because we have a really unusual shareholder body that thinks of itself as owners and not holders of little pieces of paper.”
“The future returns of Berkshire and Wesco won't be as good in the future as they have been in the past. The only difference is that we'll tell you. Today, it seems to be regarded as the duty of CEOs to make the stock go up. This leads to all sorts of foolish behavior. We want to tell it like it is. I'm happy having 90% of my net worth in Berkshire stock. We're going to try to compound it at a reasonable rate without taking unreasonable risk or using leverage. If we can't do this, then that's just too damn bad. The businesses that Berkshire has acquired will return 13% pre-tax on what we paid for them, maybe more. With a cost of capital of 3% — generated via other peoples' money in the form of float — that's a hell of a business. That's the reason Berkshire shareholders needn't totally despair. Berkshire is not as good as it was in terms of percentage compounding [going forward], but it's still a hell of a business.”
Warren Buffett (Trades, Portfolio) and Charlie Munger (Trades, Portfolio) Share Their 100-year Vision for Berkshire:
BETA:
“Beta and modern portfolio theory and the like – none of it makes any sense to me.”
BIOLOGY:
“Common stock investors can make money by predicting the outcomes of practice evolution. You can't derive this by fundamental analysis — you must think biologically.”
“I find it quite useful to think of a free market economy—or partly free market economy—as sort of the equivalent of an ecosystem… ”
BLACK-SCHOLES:
“Black-Scholes is a know-nothing system. If you know nothing about value — only price — then Black-Scholes is a pretty good guess at what a 90-day option might be worth. But the minute you get into longer periods of time, it's crazy to get into Black-Scholes. For example, at Costco we issued stock options with strike prices of $30 and $60, and Black-Scholes valued the $60 ones higher. This is insane.”
“Black-Scholes works for short-term options, but if it's a long-term option and you think you know something [about the underlying asset], it's insane to use Black-Scholes.”
BOARD OF DIRECTORS:
“A board member should be perfectly willing to leave at any time and willing to make the tough calls.”
“The institution of the board of directors of the major American company. Well, the top guy is sitting there, he's an authority figure. He's doing asinine things, you look around the board, nobody else is objecting, social proof, it's okay? Reciprocation tendency, he's raising the directors fees every year, he's flying you around in the corporate airplane to look at interesting plants, or whatever in hell they do, and you go and you really get extreme dysfunction as a corrective decision-making body in the typical American board of directors. They only act, again the power of incentives, they only act when it gets so bad it starts making them look foolish, or threatening legal liability to them. That's Munger's rule. I mean there are occasional things that don't follow Munger's rule, but by and large the board of directors is a very ineffective corrector if the top guy is a little nuts, which, of course, frequently happens.”
BRAIN:
“I think it is undeniably true that the human brain must work in models. The trick is to have your brain work better than the other person's brain because it understands the most fundamental models: ones that will do most work per unit.”
“The basic neural network of the brain is there through broad genetic and cultural evolution. And it's not Fermat/Pascal. It uses a very crude, shortcut type of approximation. It's got elements of Fermat/Pascal in it. However, it's not good. So you have to learn in a very usable way this very elementary math and use it routinely in life just the way if you want to become a golfer, you can't use the natural swing that broad evolution gave you. You have to learn to have a certain grip and swing in a different way to realize your full potential as a golfer.”
“Man's imperfect, limited-capacity brain easily drifts into working with what's easily available to it. And the brain can't use what it can't remember or when it's blocked from recognizing because it is heavily influenced by one or more psychological tendencies bearing strongly on it…” “…the Deep structure of the human mind requires that the way to full scope competency of virtually any kind is learn it all to fluency – like it or not.”
BRANDS:
“It's hard to predict what will happen with two brands in a market. Sometimes they will behave in a gentlemanly way, and sometimes they'll pound each other. I know of no way to predict whether they'll compete moderately or to the death. If you could figure it out, you could make a lot of money.”
BRIDGE:
“The right way to think is the way Zeckhauser plays bridge. It's just that simple.”
“Your brain doesn't naturally know how to think the way Zeckhauser knows how to play bridge. ‘For example', people do not react symmetrically to loss and gain. Well maybe a great bridge player like Zeckhauser does, but that's a trained response. Ordinary people, subconsciously affected by their inborn tendencies…”
BUBBLES:
“[The Internet bubble circa 2000 is] the most extreme in modern capitalism. In the 1930s, we had the worst depression in 600 years. Today is almost as extreme in the opposite way.”
“One of the first big bubbles, of course, was the huge and horrible South Sea Bubble in England. And the aftermath was interesting. Many of you probably don't remember what happened after the South Sea Bubble, which caused an enormous financial contraction, and a lot of pain. They banned publicly traded stock in England for decades.”
BULL MARKETS:
“Bull markets go to people's heads. If you're a duck on a pond, and it's rising due to a downpour, you start going up in the world. But you think it's you, not the pond.”
BUREAUCRACY:
“The great defect of scale, of course, which makes the game interesting—so that the big people don't always win—is that as you get big, you get the bureaucracy. And with the bureaucracy comes the territoriality—which is again grounded in human nature. And the incentives are perverse. For example, if you worked for AT&T in my day, it was a great bureaucracy. Who in the hell was really thinking about the shareholder or anything else? And in a bureaucracy, you think the work is done when it goes out of your in-basket into somebody else's in-basket. But, of course, it isn't. It's not done until AT&T delivers what it's supposed to deliver. So you get big, fat, dumb, unmotivated bureaucracies…. The constant curse of scale is that it leads to big, dumb bureaucracy—which, of course, reaches its highest and worst form in government where the incentives are really awful. That doesn't mean we don't need governments—because we do. But it's a terrible problem to get big bureaucracies to behave.”
“Sears had layers and layers of people it didn't need. It was very bureaucratic. It was slow to think. And there was an established way of thinking. If you poked your head up with a new thought, the system kind of turned against you. It was everything in the way of a dysfunctional big bureaucracy that you would expect.”
BUSINESSES:
“We've really made the money out of high quality businesses. In some cases, we bought the whole business. And in some cases, we just bought a big block of stock. But when you analyze what happened, the big money's been made in the high quality businesses. And most of the other people who've made a lot of money have done so in high quality businesses.”
BUSINESS SCHOOL:
“I was recently speaking with Jack McDonald, who teaches a course on investing rooted in our principles at Stanford Business School. He said it's lonely — like he's the Maytag repairman.”
BUYING BACK SHARES:
“A lot of share-buying, not bargain-seeking, is designed to prop stock prices up. Thirty to 40 years ago, it was very profitable to look at companies that were aggressively buying their own shares. They were motivated simply to buy below what it was worth."
