Starting as warm-up a little information about Warren Buffett. The meat comes afterwards. So if you want to skip the 'colourful intro' you can continue right below.
Bonne appetite...
Warren Buffett’s determination and creativity have made him who he is now: the chairman of a long-term investment company which has more than $2 billion in holdings.
As a child, Buffett was already ambitious. He was an enthusiastic and industrious paper boy for the Washington Post, and tried to cover more than one route at the same time. He also made money by collecting and selling lost golf balls.
Buffett’s interest in finance was clear extremely early on in his life. He started playing the stock market with one of his sisters when he was eleven. At twelve, he was betting on horses, and by high school he had started a business (pinball machines) with a friend, which earned him fifty dollars a week. Not only did he own a business by graduation, but he also had bought himself forty acres of Nebraskan farm land with his profit.
Graduate school was a formative time for Buffett. It was there that he met Benjamin Graham, an economic scholar whose work Buffett had begun studying in college. Buffett believed strongly in Graham’s theory that it is wise to look for stocks of companies which are undervalued, which will most probably prosper with a little time. Thus began Buffett’s untraditional approach to portfolio management. After working for his father’s investment banking company for the three years after business school, Buffett returned to Graham and worked as a security analyst at Graham’s company for two years until 1956. In that year, at the age of twenty-five, Buffett started his own investment company, the Buffett Partnership, using $5,000 of his own funds and collecting $100,000 from interested friends and family. One of the smartest moves made by Buffet’s company at that time was to invest in American Express. In 1963, a scandal surrounded AmEx, and Wall Street believed the company was near the end. But Buffett, always with his wits about him and his thinking cap on, noticed when in restaurants and shops that customers were still using the card to buy. He went ahead and bought 5 percent of the stock, which by 1961 had risen from 35 to 189 market points. Buffett is now chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., which makes the long-term investments which Buffett is so adept at choosing.
From: www.surferess.com, by Berkshire Hathaway
So, that's the official line. Let's take a little trip and look deeper in the next piece written by Glen Kealey.
The so-called Oracle of Omaha has made many people very wealthy over the course of his five-decade career. Buffet's own 38 percent stake in Berkshire Hathaway gives him a net worth of more than $36 billion, making him the second-wealthiest man in the world, behind his friend Bill Gates, and one of the few who has amassed such astonishing riches solely through stock market investments.
Yet in many ways, Buffett reportedly remains more like Ralph Nader than the super-rich. With his tousled white hair and thick, tortoise-shell glasses, his appearance and countenance is most often described as grandfatherly. His annual salary as Berkshire Hathaway's chairman and CEO is $100,000. At the age of 68, he continues to live on Farnam Street in Omaha, in the same gray stucco house he purchased four decades ago for $31,500. He eats burgers or steaks for lunch and dinner, always washing down his meals with Coca-Cola -- a company in which he has invested since 1988. His sole extravagance seems to be a fondness for luxury air travel. In typically self-deprecating style, the frugal Buffett calls his Gulfstream IV-SP jet 'The Indefensible.'
If Buffett's lifestyle seems out of step, so is his investment strategy. At a time when day traders bid up stocks based on nothing but rumor and momentum, when bond investors place pricey and complex bets on such arcane financial instruments as interest-rate futures, it's hard not to think of Buffett as a kind of museum piece. His approach is simple, even quaint. Ignoring both macroeconomic trends and Wall Street fashions, he looks for undervalued companies with low overhead costs, high growth potential, strong market share and low price-to-earning ratios, and then waits for the rest of the world to catch up.
As often as not, Buffett's business instincts become conventional wisdom. Consider Coca-Cola Co. In 1988, when Buffett started buying the global soft-drink giant, it was a Wall Street wallflower, trading at $10.96. But Buffett saw two things that were not reflected in the balance sheet: the world's strongest brand name and untapped sales potential overseas. As Coca-Cola's earnings grew, so did investor interest. In less than five years, the stock soared to $74.50. Buffett's current stake is valued at some $13 billion.
Americans tend to revile their billionaires as much as they respect them (just look at Gates or Michael Eisner). But somehow, Buffett has managed to emerge as a kind of American folk hero. His famously literate dispatches in Berkshire Hathaway's annual reports -- in which he is as likely to quote the Bible and John Maynard Keynes as Yogi Berra and Mae West -- are read as much for their gee-whiz Midwestern wit as they are for their business insights. Berkshire's Web site is a modest affair, with a few links to some Berkshire-owned businesses and a message from Buffett, a self-described 'technophobe,' asking for suggestions how the site might be improved. Dozens of books and hundreds of Web sites dissect his investment decisions. And then there are Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meetings in Omaha, which Buffett's biographer Ron Lowenstein compares to 'an Elvis concert or a religious revival,' and which Buffett himself calls 'Woodstock for Capitalists.' Investors have been known to purchase a single Berkshire share just for the opportunity to pick the master's brain each spring.
More than 14,000 people crowded into Omaha's Aksarben (as with Etidorhpa, 'Nebraska' spelled backward) Coliseum for a six-hour question-and-answer session with Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charles Munger.
Buffett informed shareholders that he was sticking with companies like Coca-Cola and Gillette. 'I think it's much easier to predict the relative strength that Coke will have in the soft drink world than Microsoft will in the software world,' Buffett said.
That's Buffett in a nutshell. Amazingly, the world's savviest investor has sat out the entire stampede over technology stocks, backing away even from proven players like Microsoft or Hewlett-Packard. As for Internet stocks, forget it. Buffett says he won't invest in a company unless he can 'SEE' IT, unless he can imagine what its balance sheet might look like in a decade or two -- a shockingly long view, especially at a time when many investors hold stocks for just days, or even minutes, at a time. Such behavior would get many contemporary fund managers fired, but it's hard to argue with a man whose own holdings have outpaced the Dow Jones Industrial Average for more than 40 years...
From Glen Kealey at http://www.kealey.net
Let's continue now on our own...
As reported, Warren Buffett hosted an golf charity event with celebrities, athletes and a selected group of business leaders in which one woman among these really was a very lucky one...
This woman is Ann Tatlock, the CEO of Fiduciary Trust Co. Intern., situated in the WTC2, with her office right at that place where Flight 175 would crash into the building....
Now why was Mrs.Tatlock being invited to this charity event on that very morning of the 911 and what was this 'event' about at all?
"...WARREN BUFFETT'S CHARITY CLASSIC Sept. 11, an event that draws celebrities, professional athletes, and CEOs to Omaha, Nebraska will be the last. It has raised nearly $9 million for four charities in its nine-year run while bringing to the event such notables as composer Marvin Hamlisch, investing guru Peter Lynch of Fidelity Management, then-Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt and actor Chuck Norris. Another $1 million is expected to be raised at the last of the one-day Classics, scheduled for Sept. 11..." - [From: Broadway To Vegas, Sep.01 ]
Back to Ann Tatlock's company, Fiduciary Trust Co.: What does it mean that Prezi Bush's nomination for the head of the 'investigation panel' to investigate the 911 terror attacks was nobody less than Thomas Kean who did serve as director at Fiduciary's? Kean had to 'replace' CFR Mr.Deepthroat, Henry Kissinger, who didn't feel very comfortable to run THIS job and had resigned shortly after his public nomination - for reasons of 'interest collisions' with his 'clients‘. Wondering which 'clients‘ he thought about...
We do find Kean serving on several more corporate boards, as the international petrol company Amerada Hess, Aramark and the Pepsi Group.
Kristen Breitweiser, who is a leader of September 11th Advocates and whose husband died in the trade center - working for Fiduciary - said about Kean, "...Assuming he has no conflicts, I hope he can do the job that needs to be done..." She stated moreover that Fiduciary was a leaseholder of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which would be later part of the investigation...
Ann Tatlock is a trustee of the HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Inst. - see as well Don C. Wiley - just search for 'dead microbiologist'...) together with former Secr. of State (under George Bush), secretary of the treasury under Ronald Reagan and Carlyle Group advisor - James A. Baker who owns a law firm as well.
Baker Botts LLP - Baker's law firm - is defending Saudi Arabia against the megalawsuit filed by the families of 911 victims right now.
And, why was this going to be the 'last' annual golf charity event that Warren Buffett was about to host? And - look at the fact that Buffett‘s company Berkshire Hathaway bought NetJets Inc., who is doing business with Boeing and Raytheon...
That brings us back to the 911 and Flight93, together with the many reports of sightings of a 'small civil plane' near the shootdown-location (yes I know this is merly conspiracy...) in Pennsylvania.
From the http://www.hollandsentinel.com/stories/080902/new_080902020.shtml
"...An official for NetJets, a company that sells shares in private business aircraft, confirmed that the plane tracking Flight 93 belonged to the company.
The official, who asked not to be identified by name, said the company was asked not to comment on the Sept. 11 flight but would not say who made the request..."
OK, let’s get this straight - We have here a private jet owned by one of Warren Buffett's companies "tracking" Flight 93? Is here somebody trying to 'play military‘?
But it doesn’t stop here. FlightSafety International Inc. – one of the world's largest provider of aviation services – is another subsidiary company of...
... Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway!
FlightSafety is running over 40 Learning Centers in the U.S., Canada, France, and the U.K
Now, Abdel Aziz Al-Omari – one member of the circus of ‘Ali Atta and the 19 pilots‘ allegedly flying Flight 11 – is reported to have trained with...
... FlightSafety!
It will be further no surprise that another company of Warren Buffett – this time a Bank – was also involved in another 'coincidence' related with 911: "The September 11 hijackers were able to open several U.S. bank accounts using illegitimate Social Security numbers, FBI officials said Wednesday. Officials said the hijackers appeared to have relied most heavily upon SunTrust Banks for the movement of funds through accounts opened in Florida." – [Source: CNN on 7/01/02]
What a tangled web. Can somebody connect the dots and provide an explanation? It looks as there is really a Nation inside the nation inside the Nation inside...
War on Error, Part 911.662020: "Bufét with Buffett at Offutt"
Far Sight 3
