Thang Nguyen 555

Long ago, Decent Interval was published and it raised a few eye-brows.

It was a play on word. There was nothing “decent” about the US slow but sudden unwinding from its once escalated war.

Throughout that time, investors like Warren Buffett were able to enrich their portfolio with decent interests.

Value-investing vs demoralized warfare.

The economy and politics of America in the last century should make for good bedtime reading.

The only time Mr Buffett’s portfolio intersected the smell of napalm was when he befriended Katherine Graham of the Post, which followed the NYT in publishing the Pentagon Papers.

Aside from that, he mostly held on to his days of delivering the Post (the only time which he lived outside of Nebraska).

As a “white Knight”, Mr Buffett came to the last-minute rescue of companies in his portfolio among them Salomon Brothers. He is today’s equivalent of “good” hackers.

BTW. Men of his generation e.g. Norman Mailer, Andy Rooney et… don’t do computers. They just had everything calculated in their heads. They “read” people, not Facebook, sign ownership documents and not loan papers, and most importantly, their ability to source for value stocks, to call things as they are (not euphemism) and befriend serious people (like Katherine Graham who hired Mr Ben Bradlee to be at the helm of Newsweek-Post Empire).

Mr Buffett He doesn’t want his children to sit on too big a chunk of change, for fear they might accumulate too much power.

I am not alone in the company of people who want to try his secret sauce (not when he completely evades the ascendancy and crash of dot.com) – and how he ended up in the company of Bill Gates, whose foundation earned a large chunk of Buffett’s donation.

The two unlikely bed fellows have tried to fan the fire of Millionaire Club, worldwide. But whether or not their plan succeeded, the world nouveau riches have come to respect American Billionaires. And how these folks have earned their wealth at a decent interval, one value stock at a time, in the best or worst of times. These are the things we all wish we had known when we were in our 20’s, when China was still a one-color country, and when the US manufacturing job base still commands a decent 20%. That’s why there were names like Berkshire, IBM and Coke. Those enduring brands carry intrinsic values and made useful products like Cherry Coke and Cotton Shirts.