Wall Street’s Nudist Beach
Glad I turned up the sound Friday for Warren Buffett on CNBC, as the teasingly brief clip from the interview he granted Becky Quick yielded a gem. Buffett prefaced it by repeating one of his great aphorisms about the truth of companies’ financial conditions: “You don’t know who’s swimming naked till the tide goes out.”
Then he added, referring to the current huge write-downs: “We found out Wall Street is kind of a nudist beach.”
Bravo Buffett!
I put if slightly differently: “The emperor is ALWAYS wearing new clothes.” This wardrobe is Wall Street’s renewable resource. It is the “tailoring” of promises of better returns—the constant allure that keeps money moving. And the movement of money is how the banks and brokerages keep themselves so well dressed.
The current melt-down of mortgage-backed assets is only another reminder of what I wrote in my book:
RULE #13: There Is No Ump On the Field. Remember that before you place a bet. On Wall Street the plays aren’t called until the game is over. Long over, and by then there’s never much, if anything left to collect.
—–Bronoff’s Rules, page 196
Read all of my rules and my own comic adventure in Bronoff’s Rules.
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Read, laugh, be savvy at Bronoff.com.
