One-on-One with Warren Buffett by Nightly Business Report

Warren Buffett sat down recently for a taped interview with Susie Gharib of Nightly Business Report to mark the PBS program's 30th anniverary on 22nd January 2009.

Video of the complete 24-minute conversation has been posted on the program's website.

Transcript of that entire interview available as a PDF download.

Some of the excerpts of the interview:

Buffett: We’ve spent a lot of money. We’ve got money left, but I love spending money. Cash makes me very unhappy. I like to always have enough and never way more than enough, but I always want to have enough. So we would never go below $10 billion of cash at Berkshire. We’re in the insurance business - we got a lot of things. We’re never going to depend on the kindness of strangers. But anything excess in that, I love the idea of buying things and the cheaper they get, the better I like it.

Buffett: I am unquestionably optimistic about the long-term. I’m more than a little pessimistic about the short-term, but that doesn’t mean I am pessimistic about the stock market. We bought stocks today. If you tell me the economy is going to be terrible for 12 months, pick a number, and then if I find something that is attractive today, I am going to buy it today. I am not going to wait and hope that it sells cheaper six months from now. Because who knows when stocks will hit a low or a high? Nobody knows that. All you know is whether you’re getting enough for your money or not.

Buffett: Well, I’ve learned my lessons before that. I read a book, what is it, almost 60 years ago, roughly, called The Intelligent Investor, and I really learned all I needed to know about investing from that book, and particularly chapters 8 and 20. So I haven’t changed anything since. I see different.

GHARIB: Graham and Dodd?

BUFFETT: Well, that was Ben Graham’s book The Intelligent Investor. Graham and Dodd goes back even before that, which was important, very important. But, you know, you don’t change your philosophy, assuming you think have a sound one. And I picked up, I didn’t figure it out myself, I learned it from Ben Graham. But I got a framework for investing which I put in place back in 1950, roughly, and that framework is the framework I use now. I see different ways to apply it from time to time, but that is the framework.

GHARIB: Can you describe what it is? I mean, what is your most important investment lesson?

BUFFETT: The most important investment lesson is to look at a stock as a piece of a business, not as some little thing that jiggles up and down, or that people recommend, or people talk about earnings being up next quarter, something like that. But to look at it as a business and evaluate it as a business. If you don’t know enough to evaluate it as a business, you don’t know enough to buy it. And if you do know enough to evaluate it as a business and it's selling cheap, you buy it and you don’t worry about what it does next week, next month, or next year.

GHARIB: So if we asked for your investment advice back in 1979, back when Nightly Business Report first got started, would it be any different than what you would say today?

BUFFETT: Not at all. If you’d ask the same questions, you’d have gotten the same answers.