Warren Buffett On how the economy is different now
Added: (Fri Apr 12 2019)
Pressbox (Press Release) -
Warren Buffett has recently been noticing a unique phenomenon happening in the global economy now, which is negative interest rates and low inflation. Buffett said in a recent interview “I think, now, there's still $11 trillion, at least, of government debt around the world that's at a negative rate, so we've never seen it before.”
As an example to put this into perspective, the yield on Germany’s Bund 10-YR is in the negative, what this means is that investors have to pay to hold government debt. Buffett continued to say “I don't think there was any economist I've ever read that talked about negative interest rates for long periods of time. If you go back and read Keynes or you read Samuelson, or you read any of them, they do not get into a negative rate environment. And we've never seen, at least, the conventional wisdom on a sustained period of long and growing deficits, while the economy's getting better. Extremely low interest rates, and really, very little inflation. So something different is happening, but something different happens all the time.”
Buffett who is the CEO and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway has always said that he does not make investment decisions based on speculation or economic ‘predictions’. For the last 54 years Buffett a and his partner Charlie Munger have been strongly against buying on a rumor, they have always made decisions based on facts and figures, stating that “current economic data does not tell them how the economy will be performing in the future.”
“I like to work with numbers, so I'm getting reports in weekly, in some businesses,” Buffett said. “But that doesn't tell me what the economy is going to do six months from now, or three months from now. It tells me what's going on now with our businesses.” Buffett has also stuck by his principles when it comes to buying businesses, Buffett always plans to hold his purchased companies over a long period of time, which decreases the efficacy of economic data figures. He said in a recent interview regarding his long hold strategy. “If we buy a business we are going to hold it forever, so we're going to have good years, bad years, in between years, and maybe disastrous years. And we care a lot about the price. We do not care about the next 12 months.”
Ryan Han – Midway Management