Reuters: Financial Services and Real Estate: HIGHLIGHTS 2-Buffett, Munger comments at Berkshire meeting

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HIGHLIGHTS 2-Buffett, Munger comments at Berkshire meeting May 5th 2012, 18:58 OMAHA, Neb. | Sat May 5, 2012 3:13pm EDT OMAHA, Neb. May 5 (Reuters) - Following are comments by Berkshire Hathaway Inc Chief Executive Warren Buffett and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger in the afternoon session of the conglomerate's annual meeting of shareholders in Omaha on Saturday. Highlights from earlier in the day can be found by clicking on: All quotes are from Buffett unless attributed to Munger. ON HIS SUCCESSOR AND OTHER MANAGERS "I virtually know that the successor we have in mind will not be the kind who will turn off our managers because the successor in mind has the culture and the people embedded as I do." "A majority could retire and wouldn't need to work at all. They're only going to work if it's more fun for them to work than anything else in the world." ON A TAKEOVER "Even 10 years from now it is likely that I would own, or my estate would own, 20 percent of the votes or thereabouts." "I think it's extraordinarily unlikely." ON VALUING DECLINING BUSINESSES AND BERKSHIRE'S HISTORY Munger: "They're not worth as much as growing businesses." Buffett: "We were sort of masochistic in the early days." Munger: "Ignorant too." ON APPLE AND GOOGLE VS INVESTING IN IBM "I would not be at all surprised to see them be worth a lot more money 10 years from now but I would not buy either one of them." "I sure as hell wouldn't short them either." "The chances of being way wrong in IBM are probably less, at least for us, than the chances of being way wrong in Google or Apple." ON CHINESE EXPANSION INTERNATIONALLY Munger: "I can't pronounce them but they've got some very great companies." ON COORDINATION WITHIN BERKSHIRE "We're the most uncoordinated pair of individuals." "There are certainly some people within Berkshire who have some contact with other people in Berkshire but there's nothing in the way of an organized way of doing that." ON $20 BILLION AS A MAGIC NUMBER FOR CASH HOLDINGS "There is no magic number." "We think about worst cases all the time and we add on a big margin of safety. We don't want to go back to 'Go.'" ON FANNIE AND FREDDIE AND THEIR CONSERVATORSHIP "It's important that you have a market that does minimize costs for borrowers that have an adequate down payment." "They will stay there in my view until politically we get some kind of resolution on a future policy that both parties can go along with and it looks to me like that's a long ways off." Link this Share this Digg this Email Reprints

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