巴菲特在2017年伯克希尔股东大会上的开场发言

沃伦·巴菲特：谢谢你们，早上好！他是查理，我是沃伦。你们能够把我们区分开来，因为他能够听，我能够看。这就是为什么我们在一起配合得这么好。我们每个人都有自己的特长。我欢迎你们来到奥马哈。这是一座美妙的城市。查理在加利福尼亚州生活了大约70年，但他仍然有很多奥马哈的精神。我们两个都出生在你们进来的这座建筑物的两英里之内。而查理，就像他在描述高中时情场得意（amorous triumphs）的情形那样，他是从距离这里大约一英里的中部高中毕业的。这是一所公立高中学校。我的父亲，我的第一任妻子，我的三个孩子和两个孙辈都毕业于这同一所学校。实际上，我的孙辈们说他们有着和我父亲一样的老师。这是一个非常了不起的城市，我希望你们在这里时能看到很多东西。待会，我们将开始一个问答环节——希望是一个有问必答的环节——这个环节将持续到中午。然后我们休息一个小时左右。我们将在下午1点重新集合，然后我们将继续问答环节，直到下午3点半。然后我们将休息15分钟左右。然后，我们将召开伯克希尔年度会议。我们有三个大家想讨论的议题，因此会议可能持续一个小时。

在我们开始之前，我想进行一些介绍。第一位是和我们在一起约有七年的嘉莉·席尔瓦（Carrie Silva）。灯光可以照一下嘉莉吗？嘉莉，你在吗？站起来，嘉莉，来吧。嘉莉安排了整个会议程序。七年前，她加入了我们。几年前我说：“你为什么不替我安排年度会议呢？”她全权处理我们的年会。她有两个小孩。她要负责安排几十家、几十家、几十家的参展商。你们可以想像一下我们展出的一切东西和来到这里的所有人数，酒店，航空公司，租车以及其它所有的东西（everything,巴菲特惯用词汇）。她能够这么做，就好像她能在空中同时抛接三个球一样。她很棒，我想感谢她为我们制作了这个节目。

我也想请你们欢迎我们的董事们（directors）。稍后会对他们进行投票，所以我会按字母顺序来介绍。他们在第一排的座位上。如果我们能在他们被介绍的时候把灯光照在他们身上的话。按照字母顺序，霍华德·巴菲特（Howard Buffett），史蒂夫·伯克（Steve Burke），苏·德克尔（Sue Decker），比尔·盖茨（Bill Gates），桑迪·戈特曼（Sandy Gottesman），夏洛特·盖曼（Charlotte Guyman）。我们旁边还有查理·芒格（Charlie Munger），汤姆·墨菲（Tom Murphy），罗恩·奥尔森（Ron Olson），沃尔特·斯科特（Walter Scott）和梅丽尔·威特默（Meryl Witmer）。

我会再介绍一个人，需要等一下。

我们昨天公布了盈利报告（Earnings Report）。正如我们经常解释的那样，在任何时期里，实现了的投资收益或亏损（investment gains or losses）都是毫无意义的。我的意思是，如果我们愿意的话，我们可以报告很多的收益。如果我们愿意的话，我们（也）可以报告很多的亏损。但是除了与我们买卖的内在价值相关之外，我们完全不考虑我们做什么的时机。

我们不做盈利预测（earnings forecasts）。而我们在3月31日有超过900亿美元的未实现的净收益（net unrealized gains），所以如果我们想报告几乎任何你能得想到的数字，甚至把资本收益（capital gains）当作盈利（earnings）的话，我们可以做到这一点。如果其它条件都一样的话，我想说今年我们有非常非常轻微的偏好。其实，在任何一年里都是如此，但今年更是如此。如果两种证券的价值相同，我们宁愿因为税收而实现损失而不是收益（rather take losses than gains）。

而且今年可能会更多地强调这一点，因为对我们的收益征35％的税，这意味着我们如果实现损失（take loss）也可以获得35％的税收上的优惠。我想说这个税率（35%）有一定的可能会再降低，这意味着今年之后的亏损可能会对我们的税收价值要比明年的低。这并不是什么大不了的事情，但这将是一个非常轻微的选择倾向。它可能成为推迟任何收益（gain）的一个因素，并且可能在接近12月31日时加速实现损失（loss），假设 ——我不作任何这方面的预测——将有一个减少盈利（earnings）效果的税收法令（tax act）。

在第一季度，保险承保（underwriting）是一个摆动因素。我们的10-Q（季度报表）中有更多关于这方面的信息，你们可以在网上查询。如果你们想认真评估我们的盈利或我们的业务，那么你们应该看10-Q。因为正如我们在每个季度指出的那样，总结报告（summary report）并没有真正地提供可以用来评估的一些要点。

我只想提与我喜欢的保险情况有关的两个因素。在头四个月里，不是头三个月，盖可（GEICO）净增加了70万份保单（policy）。这是我记得的最高的数字。可能过去有一个比这个更高的数字，我没有回去都看过一遍。但去年，我相信这个数字是30万，这对我们盖可来说是一个非常美好的时期，因为我们的几个主要竞争对手已经决定——他们公开地表示，尽管他们刚刚改变了方针——他们有意地减少新的业务，因为新业务在第一年会带来巨大的损失。

这是获得新业务的成本。够奇怪的是，而且第一年业务的赔付率（注：loss ratio，指保险公司在一定时期内赔偿保险损失额与收到的保险费间的比率。在汽车保险业中，赔付率一般在40%-60%）往往比续约业务高出近10个点。所以你不仅有购置成本（acquisition costs），而且实际上你会有更高的赔付率。因此，当你承保（write）很多新的业务的时候，你会在那一年里的新业务上亏钱。而我们承保了很多新的业务。至少有两个竞争对手宣布他们将减少新业务，因为他们不想承担第一年亏损的惩罚。当然，订单就给了我们。因此，我们只是把脚踩向油门（put our foot to the floor，美国俗语。这里的floor指的是加速踏板处的汽车地板。谷歌机器会错误地翻译为“脚踏实地”）尽力承保尽可能多的新业务。虽然这样做是有成本的。

第二个因素——但在第一个季度里是一个重要的事件——我们增加了我们的浮存金（float）。在幻灯片上，我相信，这显示同比是160亿美元。今年第一季度就增加了140亿美元，所以，我们浮存金有了140亿美元的增长。多年来，我一直在告诉你们，要增加浮存金是很难的。我仍然会说同样的事情。但多增加140亿是很好的，这也是为什么，当你看我们的10-Q时，你会发现我们的现金和现金等价物（cash and cash equivalents），包括国库券（Treasury Bills），现在已经超过900亿美元。

即使我们在一个有点下降的范围内经营，我对第一季度感觉非常好。但是仅一个季度不意味着什么。随着时间的推移，真正重要的是，我们是否正在创造我们拥有业务的价值。我总是对当前的数字感兴趣，但我总是在梦想着未来的数字。

还有一个人，我想今天介绍给你们。我很确定他在这里。我还没有看到他，但我明白他已经来了。我相信他今天到场了，那就是我在年报中谈到的杰克·博格尔（Jack Bogle，即John Bogle。Jack是昵称，发音比较容易）。为了美国投资者，杰克·博格尔可能比美国的任何一个人都做得更多。杰克，你能站起来吗？他在那！

杰克·博格尔，在多年前，他并不是唯一一个谈论指数基金的人，但是如果没有他，就不会有指数基金。我的意思是，保罗·萨缪尔森（Paul Samuelson，1915年－2009年，美国著名经济学家，专长于数理经济学、国际贸易等。他是凯恩斯学派能在美国推广的重要学界领导者之一。）谈到过它。甚至本·格雷厄姆也谈到过它。但事实是，它不符合华尔街投资行业的利益。事实上，发展指数基金并不符合他们的利益，因为它大大地降低了收费。正如我们所谈到的，有些在（我们）年报里谈的，以及其他人发表的评论。

总的来说，指数基金为股东带来了比华尔街专业人士更好的结果，其中部分原因是它们极大地降低了成本。所以当杰克开始的时候，很少有人——当然华尔街没有为他鼓掌，并且他是嘲笑和大量攻击的对象。而现在当我们提及指数基金时，我们谈论的是数万亿的美元。我们在谈论指数基金时，我们谈论的投资费用是几个基点（一个基点是0.01%），但在其它地方谈论费用时，仍然是几百个基点。

我估计杰克至少已经在投资者的口袋里省下了一笔钱，而且在指数基金整体表现上没有伤害过投资者——多数情况——他已经把数十万甚至数百亿的资金放入到了他们的口袋里，随着时间的推移，这个数字将达到数百亿和数千亿。星期一是杰克88岁的生日，所以我就说：“生日快乐，杰克。代表美国投资者，谢谢你。”

杰克，我有个好消息。在星期一，你将达到88岁。而在仅仅两年之内，你将有资格在伯克希尔担任高管（executive）职位。因此，挺住，哥们！

好的，我们在这边有一个专家记者小组，那边有专家分析师，在中间有专家股东。我们将从分析师那里开始轮流。就这样，我们将一直进行到下午。如果我们完成了54（问答），即每个记者有6个，每个分析师6个，观众18个，那么我们就完全去观众（那里回答提问）。

我不认为我有任何关于场外大厅情况的信息，但我们至少会去其中一个房间回答提问。现在，让我们从《财富杂志》（Fortune Magazine）的卡萝尔·卢米斯（Carol Loomis）开始，他是时代公司（Time Inc.）历史上服务时间最长的员工。我相信已经有60年了。卡萝尔，开始吧！

(2017年伯克希尔年会) 

                                                                         ~~~~~

WARREN BUFFETT: Thank you and good morning! That’s Charlie, I’m Warren. You can tell us apart because he can hear and I can see, that’s why we work together so well. We each have our specialty.

I’d like to welcome you to Omaha. It’s a terrific city and Charlie’s lived in California now for about 70 years, but he’s still got a lot of Omaha in him. Both of us were born within two miles of this building that you’re in. And Charlie, as he mentioned in his description of his amorous triumphs in high school, graduated from Central High, which is about one mile from here. It’s a public high school. My dad, my first wife, my three children, and two of my grandchildren have all graduated from the same school. In fact, my grandchildren say they have the same teachers that my dad had. It’s a great city; I hope you get to see a lot of it while you’re here.

In just a minute we will start a question period—hopefully, a question and answer period—that will last until about noon, and then we’ll take a break for an hour or so. We’ll reconvene at 1 PM, and then we’ll continue with the question and answer period until 3:30 PM, and then we’ll break for 15 minutes or so. And then we’ll convene the annual meeting of Berkshire. We have three propositions that people wish to speak on, so that could last, perhaps, as long as an hour.

Before we start, I’d like to make a couple of introductions, the first being Carrie Silva who’s been with us about seven years. Can we have a light on Carrie? Carrie, are you there? Stand up Carrie, come on.

Carrie puts on this whole program. She came with us about seven years ago, and a few years ago I said “Why don’t you just put on the annual meeting for me?” And she handles it all and she has two young children, and she has dozens and dozens and dozens of exhibitors that she works with. You can imagine with all of what we put on and all of the numbers of you that come, the hotels and the airlines and the rental cars and everything, she does it as if she could do that and be juggling three balls at the same time. She’s amazing and I want to thank her for putting on this program for us.

I also would like to have you welcome our directors. They will be voted on later, so I’ll do this alphabetically. They're here in the front row and if we could just have the spotlight be dropped on them as they’re introduced. And alphabetically, there’s Howard Buffett, Steve Burke, Sue Decker, Bill Gates, Sandy Gottesman, Charlotte Guyman. We have Charlie Munger next to me, Tom Murphy, Ron Olson, Walter Scott, and Meryl Witmer. One more introduction I’m going to make, but I’ll save that for just a minute.

Our Earnings Report was put out yesterday. As we regularly explain, the realized investment gains or losses in any period really mean nothing, I mean, we could take a lot of gains if we wanted to. We could take a lot of losses if we wanted to, but we don’t really think about the timing of what we do at all except in relation to the intrinsic value of what we’re buying or selling.

We do not make earnings forecasts. And we have, on March 31st we have over $90 billion of net unrealized gains, so if we wanted to report almost any number you can think of, and count capital gains as far as the earnings, we could do it. And I would say that we have a very, very, very slight preference this year, if everything else were equal. Well, it’s true in any year, but it's a little more so, this year. We would rather take losses than gains because of the tax effect if two securities were equally valued.

And there’s probably one touch more of emphasis on that this year because we are taxed on gains at 35%, which means we also get the tax benefit of 35% of any losses we take, and I would say that there’s some chance of that rate being lower, meaning that losses would have less tax value to us after this year than they would have the next year. That is not a big deal, but it would be a very slight preference, and it may get to be more of a factor in deferring any gains, and perhaps accelerating any losses as the year gets closer to December 31st, assuming—and I’m making no predictions about it —that there were to be a tax act that had the effect of reducing earnings.

So in the first quarter, insurance underwriting was the swing factor and there’s a lot more about this in our 10-Q, which you can look up on the internet. If you’re seriously interested in evaluating our earnings or our businesses, you should go to the 10-Q because the summary report, as we point out every quarter, does not really get to a number of the main points of valuation.

I would just mention two factors in connection with the insurance situation which I love. In the first four months, not the first three months, GEICO has had a net gain of 700,000 policy holders and that’s the highest number I can remember. There may have been a figure larger than that somewhere in the past. I did not go back and look at them all, but last year, I believe that figure was like 300,000 and this has been a wonderful period for us at GEICO because several of our major competitors have decided— and they publicly stated this, although they just now changed their policy—they intentionally cut back on new business because new business carries with it a significant loss in the first year.

There’s just cost of acquiring new business, plus the loss ratio, strangely enough, on first year business, tends to run almost 10 points higher than on renewal business. So not only do you have acquisition costs, but you actually have a higher loss ratio. So when you write a lot of new business you’re going to lose money on that portion of the business that year. And we wrote a lot of new business and at least two of our competitors announced that they were lightening up for a while on new business because they did not want to pay the penalty of the first year loss, and of course that’s made order for us, so we just put our foot to the floor and try to write as much new business as we can, and there are costs to that.

A second factor—well, it’s not a factor in the PL, but an important event in the first quarter—is that we increased our float and on the slide, I believe, it shows that year over year, $16 billion. $14 billion of that came in the first quarter of this year, so we had a $14 billion increase in float. And for some years I've been telling you, it's going to be hard to increase the float at all and I still will say the same thing, but it's nice to have $14 billion more, which is one reason if you'll look at our 10-Q, you will see that our cash and cash equivalents, including Treasury Bills and now it's come to well over $90 billion.

I feel very good about the first quarter even though we're operating in a range we're down a little, but one quarter means nothing, I mean, over time. What really counts is whether we're building the value of the businesses that we own and I'm always interested in the current figures, but I'm always dreaming about the future figures.

There's one more person that I would like to introduce to you today and I'm quite sure he's here. I haven't seen him, but I understood he was coming. I believe that he made it today and that is Jack Bogle who I talked about in the Annual Report. Jack Bogle has probably done more for the American investor than any man in the country. Jack, could you stand up? There he is.

Jack Bogle, many years ago, he wasn't the only one that was talking about an Index Fund, but it wouldn't have happened without him. I mean, Paul Samuelson talked about it. Ben Graham even talked about it. But the truth is it was not in the interest of the investment industry of Wall Street. It was not in their interest, actually, to have the development of an index fund because it brought down fees dramatically and as we've talked about, some in the reports and other people would comment.

Index funds, overall, have delivered for shareholders a result that has been better than Wall Street professionals as a whole, and part of the reason for that is that they brought down the cost very significantly. So when Jack started, very few people—certainly Wall Street did not applaud him and he was the subject of some derision and a lot of attacks and, now, we're talking trillions when we get into index funds, and we're talking of a few basis points when we talk about investment fees in the case of index funds, but, still, hundreds of basis points when we talk about fees elsewhere.

I estimate that Jack, at a minimum, has saved and left in the pockets of investors, without hurting them overall in terms of performance at all—most performance—he's put tens and tens and tens of billions into their pockets and those numbers are going to be hundreds and hundreds of billions over time. So, it's Jack's 88th birthday on Monday so I just say, "Happy Birthday Jack and thank you on behalf of American investors."

And Jack, I've got great news for you. You're going to be 88 on Monday and in only 2 years, you'll be eligible for an executive position at Berkshire, so hang in there buddy.

Okay, we got a panel of expert journalists on this side and expert analysts on that side and expert shareholders in the middle, and we're going to rotate starting with the analysts. Here we go and we'll do this through the afternoon. If we get through 54, which would be six for each journalist, six for each analyst and 18 more for the audience, then we'll go strictly to the audience.

I don't think I've got any information as to what the situation is on overflow rooms, but we'll go to at least one of them. But let's start off with Carol Loomis of Fortune Magazine, the longest serving employee in the history of Time Inc., I believe, was 60 years and Carol, go to it.

Source: 2017 BRK Annual Meeting