How Americans' stupidity benefits Berkshire · Transcript · BuffettMungerGPT

WarrenYou're going to have people doing very foolish things with money. I remember on my honeymoon, I was 21, and my wife was 19, and we drove west. I'd never been west, and we went through Las Vegas. It was 1952, and we stopped at the Flamingo, and people were better dressed in the casinos then, but I looked around at that casino, and I saw all kinds of well-dressed people who had traveled thousands of miles to do something very dumb, And I thought this is a country where you're going to get very rich. If people are going to get on a plane in New York and fly a couple thousand miles to stand there and do things with a mathematical expectation that's negative on every action they take, that is, it's a world of opportunity. Well, a world where legalized gambling is now conducted by a great many states in the form of lotteries, where people are encouraged to bet against the odds and a world where we have a vast overuse of high-cost credit card debt. It needs a lot more financial literary. I would argue literacy. I think we've been going in the wrong direction. So I don't think you can teach people high finance who can't use a credit card, intelligent. But, yeah, if you're working. I talk to students about that. If you're willing to pay 18 or 21% on a credit card, and the credit card companies need it, incidentally, currently, because you have losses running close to 10%. So with the expenses, they may need that, but there's no way that you're going to financially come out borrowing money at those kind of rates. And I wouldn't know how to do it. And, you know, it's too bad. On the other hand, it's probably good for our business. I mean, that one of, you know, we are looking for things that are mispriced, and the more people think that borrowing money on credit cards is intelligent, they probably will not think that doing equity, long-term equity-put contracts is intelligent. We'll go our way and they'll go their way.