The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [564]
66. Bob Brown, Joe Pfifferling, “Mrs. B Rides Again: An ABC 20/20 Television News Story,” 1990.
67. “A Businessman Speaks His Piece on Mrs. Blumkin,” Furniture Today, June 4, 1984, Berkshire Hathaway 1984 annual report. Buffett used a line like this with great frequency as a tag to label a person or situation so that other parts of the bathtub could drain.
68. Linda Grant, “The $4-Billion Regular Guy: Junk Bonds, No. Greenmail, Never. Warren Buffett Invests Money the Old-Fashioned Way,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1991.
69. Interview with Louis Blumkin.
70. Harold W. Andersen, “Mrs. B Deserves Our Admiration,” Omaha World-Herald, September 20, 1987; Robert Dorr, “This Time, Mrs. B Gets Sweet Deal,” Omaha World-Herald, September 18, 1987.
Chapter 45
1. Interview with Peter Buffett.
2. Interview with Doris Buffett.
3. Witnessed by a source close to the family who described it in an interview.
4. AIDS had first been discovered among homosexual men in the summer of 1981, but it was reported as pneumonia and as a rare, fatal form of cancer. President Reagan made his first mention of AIDS in September 1985 after his friend, the actor Rock Hudson, announced that he had been diagnosed with the disease.
5. Interagency Coalition on AIDS and Development. Also see And the Band Played On (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987) by journalist Randy Shilts, who covered AIDS full-time in the early ’80s for the San Francisco Chronicle.
6. Interview with Marvin Laird and Joel Paley.
7. This story was pieced together from conversations with a number of sources.
8. Alan Levin, “Berkshire Hathaway to Close,” New Bedford Standard-Times, August 12, 1985.
9. A four-year-old loom that had cost $5,000 went for $26 as scrap. Some of the equipment went to a textile museum.
10. Buffett used the term “disaster” in the 1978 chairman’s letter, discussing NICO workers’ comp businesses’ bad performance, which he laid largely at the door of industry problems.
11. Interviews with Verne McKenzie, Dan Grossman. The man was an agent who allegedly embezzled from Berkshire.
12. Interview with Tom Murphy.
13. Interview with Verne McKenzie.
14. Interview with Dan Grossman.
15. Several reinsurance managers presided during a short-lived interregnum: Brunhilda Hufnagle, Steven Gluckstern, and Michael Palm. For various reasons, none of them stuck.
16. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of Silver Blaze. London: George Newnes, 1894. (The story in Mark Haddon’s prize-winning novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time [New York: Doubleday, 2003] kicks off with a dead poodle speared with a garden fork.)
17. Rob Urban, “Jain, Buffett Pupil, Boosts Berkshire Cash as Succession Looms,” Bloomberg News, July 11, 2006. While the author has been acquainted with Jain for years, he declined repeated requests to be interviewed.
Chapter 46
1. The Dow was sitting at 875 on the first day of 1982. It had hit that level for the first time back in September 1964.
2. Corporate profits reached what would become the second-lowest point in a fifty-five-year period in 1983 (the lowest was 1992), according to Corporate Reports, Empirical Research Analysis Partners. Data 1952 through 2007.
3. Banks lost their fear of bad credit through the combination of an emerging asset bubble, simple greed, the advent of securitization, and an eagerness to find toehold ways to fund equity transactions, a signal that the wall between commercial and investment banks erected by the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act was beginning to break down.
4. Eric J. Weiner, What Goes Up: The Uncensored History of Modern Wall Street as Told by the Bankers, Brokers, CEOs, and Scoundrels Who Made It Happen. New York: Little, Brown, 2005.
5. They started out as investment-grade bonds, but when their issuers cratered, the bonds became so cheap that they paid a higher rate; e.g., a bond that yielded 7% would yield 10% if the price of the bond dropped to 70% of par.
6. See Connie Bruck, The Predators’ Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of