Kevin Carpenter✓

Exactly one year after Lehman Brothers collapsed and set the global financial system ablaze, Warren Buffett stepped onto the stage at Fortune’s “Most Powerful Women” summit in California. On September 15, 2009, with the economic wreckage still smoldering, he sat down with close friend, Fortune editor-at-large Carol Loomis, to reflect on the year that nearly broke Wall Street. The conversation takes us back to that fateful weekend in 2008, when the biggest names in finance came knocking on Berkshire Hathaway’s door, hat in hand, looking for a lifeline. Buffett recounts what it was like to sit at the center of the storm — and how the panic furiously rippled through markets and the broader economy. What struck me most is how little Buffett changes. Whether the sun is shining or the sky is falling, his message and demeanor stay the same. Here was a man speaking in the middle of an economic upheaval, one that, by his own admission, was still far from over — and he sounded exactly like he did at the peak of the greatest bull markets.

Li Lu: "Why do you have this speculative side of [markets]? Well, it's just part of the human condition. Warren [Buffett] always describes the stock market as a church with a casino attached to it." "This is really where you make a choice as a student. Do you want to be in the zero-sum game or do you want to be in the value-creation game? As a society, you also have a choice. You don't want the casino side to be so out of proportion as to overwhelm the primary objective of why the market exists in the first place." (Columbia University || 2026)

Charlie Munger: "I was just automatically [thinking about] what was working, what was failing, why was it working, why was it failing? If you have that temperament, you are gradually going to learn. And if you don't have that temperament, I can't help you."

Costco co-founder Jim Sinegal: "Culture is not the most important thing in a company — it's the only thing. It dictates every action that you take. Your culture is going to determine how you respond to any situation." "The way our employees describe it is 'Do the right thing.' And that's the way we try to run the business."

What did Warren Buffett look for when hiring investment managers for Berkshire Hathaway? (1) Do they only invest well in certain types of markets? "It isn't just an investment record that impresses me. It's how that investment record was achieved. There are people who are just in tune with given kinds of markets and, when the market changes, they really can't adapt." (2) Do they view stocks as pieces of businesses to hold or pieces of paper to trade? "[Todd Combs and Ted Weschler] look at stocks not as stocks, [but] as pieces of businesses. They are really business analysts, when you get right down to it, and then they translate that into investment decisions." (3) Do they think enough about potential risks? "They think about things that haven't happened yet — in terms of problems, not in terms of dreaming about great projects that are pie in the sky. They are always thinking about the downside."

Warren Buffett: "People both who have made the promises and the electorate generally have not understood what they were doing when they were making pension promises. There's a long tail to the problem so it doesn't catch up for a while, but it's inexorable over time."

Warren Buffett: "By definition, intrinsic value is the present value of the stream of cash that's going to be generated by any financial asset between now and doomsday. That's easy to say and impossible to figure."

Warren Buffett: "We run our business so that we don't depend on everything being hunky-dory always. We run it so that we will be the last man standing." "If we don't make as much money as we might have if we leveraged more or done other policies, so be it."

Warren Buffett: "We have to quit having our debt grow as a percentage of GDP." "We can have a deficit which creates more debt, but not at a rate that grows faster than GDP grows." "The trend is wrong. There is a danger if that goes on — although a lot of countries have gone far beyond where we've gone — but I don't like seeing it go up as a percentage of GDP." (CNBC || 2014)

Apple CEO John Ternus: "I've been working hand-in-hand with industrial designers at Apple since I started." "Design means everything to us. Our designers, both on the software side and the hardware side, they really understand the engineering. And the engineers have a very deep appreciation for design. It's not [like] a designer sketches something up and then throws it over the wall and says, 'Go make that.' From the very beginning, the teams are collaborating." (TIME || 2026)

Charlie Munger: "Try to go to bed at night a little wiser than you were when you got up. If you keep doing that for a long time and accumulate some experience — good and bad — as you try to master what you're trying to do, people who do that almost never fail utterly. They may have a bad period when luck goes against them or something, but very few people have ever failed with that [approach]. If you have the right temperament, you may rise slowly — but you're sure to rise."

Warren Buffett: "Fiscal policy scares me more than monetary policy." "It is easier to obtain votes if you give people money. Just like I want to keep my job at Berkshire, [politicians] want to get elected next year." "My dad was in Congress and I got to view how it behaved then — and I don't think its behavior has improved since 1942 when I first went there." (CNBC || 2023)

If you need a Sunday evening read, why not catch up on all of last week's Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway news. Including new info on the Bending Spoons investment, Berkshire hitting all-time highs, the iPhone Duo launch, and more!

Tim Cook: "We know that you can only do it really great on a few things, so the other part of our model is to focus." "We would not be able to be really great if we had to do many, many different products. We couldn't do that. We know we couldn't do it, so we don't even try."

Warren Buffett: "Think about the businesses in your own hometown. Which would you like to buy into? Which do you think you could understand their economics? Which do you think will be around 10-20 years from now? Which do you think would be very tough to compete with? Just keep asking yourself questions about businesses, talk with other people about them, [and] you will extend your knowledge over time."

What did Greg Abel tell Taylor Morrison CEO Sheryl Palmer after Berkshire Hathaway acquired the homebuilder? "You get to do exactly what you've been doing — run a responsible, good business — but you get to do it with real patience and a long-term lens," she recalled Abel telling her. "Don't make any decisions for next quarter. Don't even make decisions for next year. Do what's right for the business as far out as you can see."

Warren Buffett: "You can disrupt an economy a lot easier than you can put it back together again." "We don't want to mess up our economic machine — and it can be done by inflation." (CNBC || 2023)

Warren Buffett: "You'd be amazed at how many businesses I don't feel that I understand well." "The biggest thing is not how big your circle of competence is, but knowing where the perimeter is."

Warren Buffett: "If we went into some very major war, the value of money would go down. That's happened in virtually every war that I'm aware of. The last thing you'd want to do is hold money during a war." "You're going to be a lot better off owning productive assets over the next fifty years than you will be owning pieces of paper (cash)." (CNBC || 2014)