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Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay were caricatures - they were easy to spot. They were almost psychopaths. But it's much harder to spot problems at companies like Royal Dutch [Shell].

Charlie Munger

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Charlie Munger
Age: 100
Born: 1924
Born: January 1
Business Person
Financier
Investor
Lawyer
Omaha
Nebraska
Charlie Thomas Munger
Charles T. Munger
Charles Thomas Munger
Harder
Dutch
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Shell
Almost
Shells
Company
Royal
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Bernie

More quotes by Charlie Munger

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As I continued through Cicero's pages, I found much more material celebrating my way of life.
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It's hard to predict what will happen with two brands in a market. Sometimes they will behave in a gentlemanly way, and sometimes they'll pound each other. I know of no way to predict whether they'll compete moderately or to the death. If you could figure it out, you could make a lot of money.
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People calculate too much and think too little.
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You're not going to get very far in life based on what you already know. You're going to advance in life by what you're going to learn after you leave here.
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If you have competence, you pretty much know its boundaries already. To ask the question (of whether you are past the boundary) is to answer it.
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Berkshireis not as good as it was in terms of percentage compounding [going forward], but it's still a hell of a business.
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The world of derivatives is full of holes that very few people are really aware of. It's like hydrogen and oxygen sitting on the corner waiting for a little flame.
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We may well have a competitive advantage buying decent businesses at decent prices. But they won't be fabulous businesses and fabulous prices. There's too much competition and money out there, with many buyout specialists.
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It's not a competency if you don't know the edge of it.
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We only want what success we can get despite encouraging others to share our general view about reality.
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In the 1930s, there was a stretch where you could borrow more against the real estate than you could sell it for. I think that's what's going on in today's private-equity world.
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Strategic plans cause more dumb decisions than anything else in America.
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It's not the bad ideas that do you in, but the good ones.
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We're the tortoise that has outrun the hare because it chose the easy predictions.
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Clever derivatives broke dozens of companies. It killed them. Bankrupt. We don't need these kinds of innovation in finance. It's OK to be boring in finance. What we want is innovation in widgets.
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We're emphasizing the knowable by predicting how certain people and companies will swim against the current. We're not predicting the fluctuation in the current.
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Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome
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To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
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The ethos of not fooling yourself is one of the best you could possibly have. It's powerful because it's so rare.
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Here's one truth that perhaps your typical investment counselor would disagree with: if you're comfortably rich and someone else is getting richer faster than you by, for example, investing in risky stocks, so what?! Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy.
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