引用：
原文由 lewie 发表于 2009-3-10 13:25:26 :
好象还漏了一些："People's behaviour have changed and I never saw it before."（看新闻时听的，不一定完全准确）。疑问是：既然你never saw it before, 又凭什么predict "the economy will be running fine five years from now"呢？这个逻辑似乎有些矛盾。
lewie兄提出一个很有意思的逻辑疑问，我想巴老主要是想表述一个信心的重要性，就好像咱们老碰上几十年，乃至上百年的自然灾害一样，人寿有限，你这一生没碰到过，并不代表以前就未发生过，而历史经验又往往表明这些灾害总是会被克服的。 下面摘录相关话题，也许用巴老的原话更有说服力（见加黑体和红体）： BECKY: Right. We'll talk a lot more about this, but let's get back to the state of the economy... BUFFETT: Sure. BECKY: ...in general as well. What do you see right now? You spooked a lot of people last week when you talked about how the economy was in tatters and would be there for quite some time. BUFFETT: Yeah. The economy, ever since we talked in September, we talked about it being an economic Pearl Harbor and how--what was happening in the financial world would move over to the real world very quickly. It's fallen off a cliff, and not only has the economy slowed down a lot, people have really changed their behavior like nothing I've ever seen. Luxury goods and that sort of thing have just sort of stopped, and that's why Wal-Mart is doing well and you know, and I won't name the ones that are doing poorly. But there's been a reset in people's minds, and we see that in something like (Berkshire subsidiary) Geico where year after year after year we say you can save some money insuring with Geico, and year after year there's been a certain number of people who have said, `You know, I've got this pal, Rotary Joe, and I've been insuring with him and for 100 bucks, why should I shift?' Every week we're just seeing it build and build. More and more people are calling. Our price differentials haven't widened, our advertising isn't that much different, but the American public really has changed their buying habits. On the reverse side, our jewelry stores just get killed in a period like this. And high end gets hurt the most, next down gets hurt the second most, and the lowest people get hurt the least. BECKY: What's happening? What--you knew--you told us a while ago, you told us this was an economic Pearl Harbor about six months ago, but did this happen more quickly or more severely than even you expected? BUFFETT: It certainly happened close to the worst case. I mean, you never know what's going to happen, but I would not have--I would not have thought there could've been a much worse case than what has happened. Although, I will say this, the Fed did some things in September when it happened... BECKY: Mm-hmm. BUFFETT: ...that were vital in keeping the place going. I mean, when the--if they hadn't have insured money market accounts and, in effect, commercial paper, you know, you and I would be meeting at McDonald's this morning. BECKY: Instead. BUFFETT: Yeah. Right. BECKY: So why do you think consumers have gotten as frightened as they have? BUFFETT: Well... BECKY: The fear doesn't like too strong of a word. BUFFETT: No. They're scared, and fear is very contagious. BECKY: Hm. BUFFETT: And I've never seen the consumer or the Americans just generally more fearful than this. And they're also confused. And you can get fearful very quickly, but you don't get confident, you know, in five minutes. You can get fearful in five minutes, but you won't get confident for some time. And government is going to play an enormous factor in how fast it comes back. And if you're confused and fearful, you don't get over being fearful till you aren't confused. I mean, the message has to be very, very clear as to what government will be doing. And I think we've had--and it's the nature of the political process, somewhat, but we've had muddled messages, and the American public does not know what--they feel that they don't know what's going on and their reaction, then, is to absolutely pull back. BECKY: So there've been a lot of fingers of blame that have pointed in a lot of different directions. But you're saying the message from Washington has been confused or... BUFFETT: Well, I think it's the nature of things. BECKY: Right. BUFFETT: I mean, I think people watch 535 members of Congress each give their view of what every player is doing and all of that sort of thing, and I think that, you know, you had a change of administrations and you're dealing with things that people don't understand. I mean, when you first brought up the term SIV or something like that or when you talk about credit default swaps or you talk about--it's--when the public hears that, they just, they think something's wrong and they don't understand it. BECKY: And still, this is the worst-case scenario from what you had imagined. What went wrong? Why did we wind up in that worst-case scenario? BUFFETT: Well, we went wrong originally because we had a belief that--and everybody had the belief. I had it, the government had it, mortgage lenders had it, borrowers had it, media had it, everybody thought house prices could go nothing but up and--or at least they couldn't go down a lot. And once you had that belief--and it was nationwide--it didn't make any difference what you lent on the house because if the guy couldn't pay, you'd sell it at a profit anyway or you wouldn't lose much money. So you had 11 trillion of residential mortgage debt built on this theory that who was borrowing it, what their income was really wasn't that important because the house itself had to go up in price. And when that tumbled and houses which might've been worth 22 trillion at the peak are worth maybe four or five trillion less, it's a huge amount out of people's net worth. It's the biggest asset most people have. And then secondarily, all of these instruments that were built on it, which people didn't understand too well, started toppling to various degrees in value and then that exposed other things. I mean, it was like, you know, some kid saying, `The emperor has no clothes.' And then after he says that, he said, `On top of that, the emperor doesn't have any underwear either.' You know. I mean, various layers have been--and they interact. When people get scared, they change their buying habits. When they quit buying as much, people lay off. We are in a very, very vicious negative feedback cycle. It will end, but, believe me, I mean, I don't want this to be the last line of the movie, the last line of my annual report that America's best days lie ahead. And we can talk about why that is, but--and that is the final answer. But how fast we get there depends enormously on not only the wisdom of government policy, but the degree in which it's communicated properly. People--when you have a Pearl Harbor, you have to know the nation is going to be united on December 8th to take care of whatever comes up. And we have little squabbles, otherwise we put them aside and everybody goes to work on defense plans, we start building planes, we start building ships, even though they're not going to be ready tomorrow, people join. The Army doesn't blame the Navy because there were too many ships in Pearl Harbor, and it shouldn't have happened. The Army doesn't say, `Well, it was your fault, so we're not going to send our troops.' None of that sort of thing. We got united, and we really need that now. BECKY: Do you think that there has not been that to that extent? There's not enough of the united front right now? BUFFETT: Yeah, I think--and I can understand why because, economically--Pearl Harbor itself, you knew exactly what had happened and we wiped out a good bit of the fleet and all of that and people knew in a general way what had to be done and they knew who they had to respond to a leader who was unquestionably the commander and chief. And so you didn't have--start congressional hearings on December 8th, you know, that were going to last for weeks while all of the commanders and the various people were in various ways pilloried or taunted or whatever about `Why in the world did they let this happen?' and the Republicans didn't say, `You Democrats have been in since 1933, and it's all your fault.' None of that. I mean, people said, `We've got to get something done.' And they--and they trusted their leadership to do it and put aside mostly the partisan stuff and the--and we went--and everybody, incidentally, felt we'd win the war, even though we, you know, for the first six months, we were--Corregidor fell and we had the death march of Bataan, all kinds of--there was terrible, terrible news, but we knew that if we stuck together and we followed leadership, we would--we would prevail. BECKY: We're going to have a lot more time to talk about solutions this morning, but in terms of the economy, where do you think it goes from here? What's the best case scenario and the worst case scenario? BUFFETT: Well, it can't turn around on a dime. That doesn't happen. I mean, it--a lot of stuff works this way. When 600,000 more people become unemployed last month, that not only affects those 600,000, it affects them terribly, but it affects everybody else. They get scared about losing their jobs. The percentage of people are scared about losing their jobs in this country is way higher than the actual numbers that are going to lose them, but they're behaving in an entirely different manner. I mean, they are not--they are not going to go into a--even at Costco or Wal-Mart, their jewelry departments are way down, but other departments are up. People, they started saving money. For years we told them to save money, and now they're saving money, and that's a double whammy. So we've had this great economic machine like nothing the world's ever seen, and it started sputtering a little, and we said, `Well, maybe we should kind of slow it down and see what happens.' And it sputters more. And what we may not realize is that there's interaction, that the slower you run the machine at, the more it sputters. So it's a job to get it working again, and it won't happen fast, Becky, I mean--and unemployment will lag at the end, the actual turn around. BECKY: We're already talking about unemployment at 8 percent. Where do you see it headed? BUFFETT: I can't name a number because, frankly, it depends to an extent on the wisdom of government policies. It's going to go higher. It's probably going to go a fair amount higher, but on the other hand, five years from now I can guarantee you that the machine will be running fine, but I'd like to get there a lot faster than five years. And we can.
最后把3月9日CNBC这次采访节目的谈话全本传上，有兴趣者可下载阅读。  相关附件 | 
发表于 2009-3-28 08:47:17
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