In a chat with Fortune magazine’s Poppy Harlow (available here), Warren Buffett noted that he is not seeing any green shoots in the seventy-odd businesses that Berkshire Hathaway is involved in. But he isn’t seeing any deterioration either. Still, Buffett says he is buying stocks: “We are buying stocks this morning, I can tell you that… I’m not buying based on whether we are coming out of the recession in three months or six months or a year. I’m buying them because I think we are getting good value over time. And I think it’s a mistake for investors to focus on business forecasts instead of looking at the intrinsic value of a business.”
Asked if even the Oracle of Omaha has learned an investment lesson in all this, Buffett replied: “Well, it’s always a terribly interesting thing obviously to watch… but, the dangers of leverage, the dangers of everybody getting a belief of some huge asset class that can do nothing but go up… you know… the dangers of joining the crowd just because the crowd made money yesterday and the week before… all of those things they just recur throughout history. So, you’ve seen an extreme version in certain aspects of the economy but there is really nothing new”.
