Live From Omaha, It’s Warren Buffett on Saturday Night
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(Bloomberg Opinion) -- It’s what we all needed to hear: “Nothing can stop America” — Warren Buffett’s way of saying, “We will get through this.”
Saturday evenings aren’t normally the ideal time for tuning into a multi-hour investor conference, especially after being cooped up all week working from home due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But mere minutes into the live-streamed Berkshire Hathaway Inc. annual shareholder meeting, it was clear that something much more meaningful was unfolding. Buffett, sitting on a stage in an empty Omaha arena, began with a history lesson like no other — a vivid walk through the other moments in America’s past that tested its resiliency, but never broke it. At 89 years old, he’s lived through many of them.
The current crisis “is creating a huge amount of anxiety and changing people's psyche and causing them to somewhat lose their bearings, understandably,” the chairman and CEO of Berkshire told his virtual listeners, while peering out where some 40,000 of them would normally be sitting. “The American magic has always prevailed and it will do so again.”
While his unwavering confidence in the U.S. economy is hardly a new theme in Buffett’s lectures, they’re not normally so moving. Like many of those watching, he was in need of a haircut and acknowledged it, adding that he had grown used to wearing sweat suits — as opposed to the real suit and tie he donned on Saturday. It was a humanizing moment. Watching Buffett was like watching Dr. Anthony Fauci or New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, the two government leaders whose comforting words and realism have probably stuck with Americans most during the pandemic and helped to create a sense of hope and community.
Even so, going into the event, it wasn’t quite so clear that Buffett still believed in his mantra, “America’s best days lie ahead.” He had been notably quiet in recent weeks, and Berkshire was selling stock and shunning acquisitions, a bearish signal for a company where the ethos is to buy when others are panicking. After all, Buffett once wrote:
Every decade or so, dark clouds will fill the economic skies, and they will briefly rain gold. When downpours of that sort occur, it’s imperative that we rush outdoors carrying washtubs, not teaspoons. And that we will do.
Berkshire has done neither, even with $137 billion of cash just sitting there. As such, some say his optimistic outlook doesn’t align with his actions of late. But Buffett explained that the panic hasn’t hit the stock and credit markets to the extent it did during the 2008 financial crisis — or not for as long, thanks to the extraordinary measures taken by the Federal Reserve. His investing during that time “was not designed to make a statement, it was designed to take advantage of what we thought were very attractive terms,” he said. He’s not finding as many enticing investments now, partly because of those Fed actions, which removed the need for many companies to seek a lifeline from a deep-pocketed savior like Buffett.