Charlie Munger
Charlie Munger
Charles Thomas Mungeris an American businessman, lawyer, investor, and philanthropist. He is vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by Warren Buffett; in this capacity, Buffett describes Charlie Munger as “my partner." Munger served as chairman of Wesco Financial Corporation from 1984 through 2011. He is also the chairman of the Daily Journal Corporation, based in Los Angeles, California, and a director of Costco Wholesale Corporation...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth1 January 1924
CountryUnited States of America
Economic systems work better when there's an extreme reliability ethos. And the traditional way to get a reliability ethos, at least in past generations in America, was through religion. The religions instilled guilt. ... And this guilt, derived from religion, has been a huge driver of a reliability ethos, which has been very helpful to economic outcomes for man.
I think that if you have a single payer system and an opt-out for people who want to pay more [for better service, etc.], I think it would be better - and I think we'll eventually get there. It wouldn't be better at the top - [our current system] is the best in the world at the top. But the waste in the present system is awesome and we do get some very perverse incentives.
An investment decision in the common stock of a company frequently involves a whole lot of factors interacting ... the one thing that causes the most trouble is when you combine a bunch of these together, you get this lollapalooza effect.
Why would you want to invest with a guy whose thought process says, "If a second layer of fees is good, then let's add a third layer.
You have to learn to be a follower before you become a leader.
We want very good leaders who have a lot of power.
The name of the game is continuing to learn. Even if you're very well trained and have some natural aptitude, you still need to keep learning.
In the LBO field there is a buried "covariance" with marketable equities, toward disaster in generally bad business conditions, and competition is now extremely intense.
Litigation is notoriously time-consuming, inefficient, costly and unpredictable.
I think corporate managers should learn to be better investors because it would make them better managers.
Even in pure mathematics they can't remove all paradox, and the rest of us should also recognize we are going to have to endure a lot of paradox, like it or not.
If you want to understand science, you have to understand math. In business, if you're enumerate, you're going to be a klutz. The good thing about business is that you don't have to know any higher math....
We don't train executives, we find them. If a mountain stands up like Everest, you don't have to be a genius to figure out that it's a high mountain.
Our success has come from the lack of oversight we've provided, and our success will continue to be from a lack of oversight. But if you're going to provide minimal oversight, you have to buy carefully. It's a different model from GE's. GE's works - it's just very different from ours.