Last night, Nightly Business Report aired the first part of an interview with legendary investor Warren Buffett. NBR’s Susie Gharib spoke to the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway as part of the program’s 30th anniversary on PBS. Notable excerpts from that segment included:

(On U.S. President Barack Obama and the economy)
GHARIB: What is the most important thing you think he needs to fix?
BUFFETT: The most important thing to fix right now is the economy. But there’s no magic bullet on this. They are going to throw everything from the government they can in. I said the Treasury’s going all in and they have to. And that isn’t necessarily going to produce anything dramatic in the short term at all. Over time the American economy is going to work fine.
GHARIB: There is considerable debate as you know about whether President Obama is taking the right steps so we don’t get in this kind of economic mess again. Where do you stand on that debate?
BUFFETT: The answer is nobody knows. Today the economists don’t know. All you know is you throw everything at it. And whether it’s more effective if you are fighting the fire to be concentrating the water flow on this part or that part, you are going to use every weapon you have and fight again.
GHARIB: Are they creating new problems? How worried about you about these multi-trillion dollar deficits?
BUFFETT: You can’t just do one thing in economics. Any time somebody said I’m going to do this, you have to say and then what. And there is no free lunch. So if you pour money at this problem, you do have after effects. You create certain problems. I mean you are giving a medicine dosage to the patient on a scale that we haven’t seen in this country. And there will be after effects. And they can’t be predicted exactly am but certainly, the potential is there for inflationary consequences that would be significant.

Later in the interview, NBR’s Gharib brought up the fact that Buffett had recently said the United States was in an “economic Pearl Harbor.”

GHARIB: You have said that we are in an economic Pearl Harbor so, how bad are things really?
BUFFETT: They’re bad. They’re bad. The credit situation is getting a little better now. Things have loosened up from a month ago in the corporate debt market. And but the rate of business descent is a pretty alarming pace. There is no question things have really slowed down. Peoples’ buying habits have changed; fear has taken over. And fear is a tough thing to fight because you can’t go on television and say don’t an afraid. It doesn’t work.
GHARIB: What is your view on the recession? How much longer is it going to last?
BUFFETT: I don’t know, I don’t know. It isn’t going to be short but I just don’t know, Susie. If I knew that — there is no way of knowing.

On Friday, NBR will run the next part of the interview. You can check your local listings here to see when the segment will be aired on TV.

Source:

Warren Buffett Interview
Nightly Business Report, January 22, 2009

This post is filed under Investment Outlook, Warren Buffett. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.