Daily Journal Corp Annual Meeting Notes每日期刊公司 (DJCO) 2013 年股东会纪要

原文信息：

• 标题：Daily Journal Corp Annual Meeting Notes
• 作者：rbcpa.com
• 发表时间：2013-02-06
• 链接：Daily Journal Corp Annual Meeting Notes
• 整理：Terrellchen

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Daily Journal Corp Annual Meeting Notes (Feb 6, 2013)
2013 年每日期刊年会笔记（2013 年 2 月 6 日）

Charlie Munger: and this building, which, of course, is on a site that we cleared old buildings off of. You have the Tilmet Building (sp?). That was very cheap to construct. You can look around at how nicely it works. It’s a very inexpensive building. It has high ceilings and good lighting et cetera.

查理-芒格：还有这栋大楼，当然，这栋大楼是在我们清理旧建筑的场地上建造的。这就是蒂尔梅特大厦。建造成本很低。你可以四处看看，它是多么漂亮。这是一座非常便宜的建筑。它有很高的天花板和良好的照明等等。

First, we’ll talk briefly about the Daily Journal business. And, of course, the Daily Journal is really two businesses. It’s the traditional…Well, it’s really three businesses.

首先，我们简单谈谈《每日期刊》的业务。当然，《每日期刊》实际上有两项业务。它是传统的…嗯，实际上是三项业务。

First, it’s the traditional information-providing newspaper for lawyers.

首先，它是为律师提供信息的传统报纸。

Second, it’s the newspaper that publishes a lot of public notices that are required by law, which is where a lot of the money has been made, of course.

其次，它是一份刊登大量法律规定的公告的报纸，当然，这也是它赚取大量利润的业务。

And third, of course, we have this relatively new software business, which is really a form of venture capital since a lot of meaningful money has not been made, and a fair amount has been lost from the two businesses that are now combined.

第三，当然，我们还有相对较新的软件业务，这实际上是一种风险投资，因为还没有赚到什么大钱，而且现在合并的这两项业务已经损失了相当多的钱。

The traditional information business is suffering tremendous headwinds. This business made a lot a money out of lawyers’ subscriptions for a long time because there was no way a lawyer could get information about the recent decisions in, say, the appellate courts in California and the federal appellate courts in California except by picking up the “Daily Appellate Report,” which we included in our newspapers.

传统的信息业务正遭遇巨大的困境。长期以来，这项业务从律师的订阅中赚取了大量利润，因为律师除了购买我们在报纸上刊登的 “每日上诉报告 “之外，根本无法获得有关加利福尼亚州上诉法院和加利福尼亚州联邦上诉法院近期判决的信息。

We had something that lawyers had to have, and there was no way in the old technology for them to get it on time except through our newspaper. When the electronic stuff came, the lawyers were all trained to use electronic media to keep up with the courts.

我们的产品是律师们必须拥有的，而在旧技术条件下，除了通过我们的报纸，他们根本无法及时获得这些信息。当电子产品出现时，律师们已经学会了利用电子媒介来及时了解法庭的最新动态。

And the new lawyers coming out could hardly do anything else but pound keys on a computer. It wasn’t good for our traditional information model and our subscriptions continue to shrink year after year after year.

而新晋律师除了利用电子媒介了解信息，几乎不采用其他方式。这对我们的传统信息模式不利，我们的订阅量年复一年地减少。

The public notice business, of course, is an ancient business. The old technology where the law wanted people to have some public way of getting notice and the only way to do it was with a printing press. They passed all these laws. The people who pass laws have not been quick to change from the old printed method to the modern post ink and storage basis, accessible by computer.

公告行业，自然，是历史悠久的行当。在过去的技术条件下，法律要求必须有一种公开的通知方式，而这种方式就是通过印刷机来实现。因此，制定了许多相关法律。那些立法者在从传统的印刷方法转向现代的电子存储和计算机可访问的系统方面，并没有表现出快速的适应性。

And that has preserved revenues from the old business, and then you had the foreclosure boom, of course. There was a torrent of revenues. I don’t think there ever was a foreclosure boom — let’s call it a boom, it was a boom for us — as big as the one we’ve just been through.

这保护了我们传统业务的收入来源，接着便是止赎潮的兴起，收入如潮水般涌来。我不记得曾经有过如此规模的止赎潮——我们姑且称之为繁荣，因为这对我们来说确实是一次繁荣——规模之大，前所未有。

There’s never been anything like it. And it’s not over. There’s still a considerable pipeline of underwater homes. Of course, it’s through the press. That’s the traditional business. Of course, we’ve made an unholy amount of money out of the public notice business, which I do not regard as a business I would bet on for the next 50 years. In other words, it’s got a Sword of Damocles hanging over its head, and the traditional print business presents a very interesting problem.

这样的现象是空前的。而且，它还没有结束。仍然有大量的负资产房产积压。这当然是通过媒体进行的，也就是我们传统的业务。当然，我们在公告业务上赚了很多钱，但我并不认为这是一个我可以在未来半个世纪里持续投资的业务。换句话说，它头上悬着一把达摩克利斯之剑，传统印刷业务面临着一个非常有趣的挑战。

Of course, practically all newspapers in America have faced the same technological revolution from changing technology, and the standard result has been an enormous impairment of the business that was a total monopoly for most proprietors of the only daily newspaper in a city or community. They own the world. An idiot could make money, and a man who’s half-way competent could make an enormous amount of money.

当然，美国几乎所有的报纸都经历了由技术变革带来的技术革命，其典型的后果是对那些在其城市或社区拥有唯一日报的所有者的业务造成了巨大的损害。他们曾经主宰一切。即使是一个笨蛋也能赚到钱，而一个稍微能干点的人则能赚得盆满钵满。

The by-product that happened with that, and that with all this impregnable economic power, the people who controlled the newspapers, influenced by the ethos of the journalists that worked for them, by and large behaved pretty well. Whether they were Republicans or Democrats, and they got … the fourth estate. They helped run the country.

随之而来的这种无法撼动的经济力量，那些掌管报纸的人，在为他们效力的记者们的职业道德的影响下，大体上表现得相当出色。不论他们是共和党还是民主党，他们都构成了……第四权力。他们协助治理着这个国家。

Here was a totally independent part of the governmental system in functioning actuality that served very well. That’s why they call it the fourth estate. Nobody who created the Constitution had any thought of deliberately creating local monopolies. That we would have a separate branch of the government that just sort of arose through accident and had this enormous power, but that system which evolved by accident served this country very well.

这个在实际运作中完全独立的政府体系部分，运作得非常好。这就是为什么它被称为第四权力。制宪者们没有人故意想要创造地方性垄断。我们拥有这样一个偶然形成的政府分支，它拥有如此巨大的力量，但这个偶然发展起来的系统为这个国家服务得非常好。

The daily press with all its power is by and large civic-minded and honest all through the country, and of course, it’s horribly threatened. The country is going to pay a terrible price for losing this constructive influence. … isn’t like we don’t have any other journalism, but I think that we are losing something.

拥有巨大影响力的日报，大体上在全国范围内都是具有公民责任感和诚实的，当然，它正遭受着可怕的威胁。国家将会为失去这种建设性的影响付出沉重的代价。……并不是说我们没有其他的新闻工作，但我认为我们正在失去某些东西。

We never used The Daily Journal, which you people own part of, as a mouthpiece for our personal political opinions. For one thing, we didn’t have an impregnable monopoly. For another thing, we just didn’t want… we had very intelligent readers, judges and lawyers. Half of them were in one party, and half of them were in another. I don’t think either Rick or I felt at all comfortable telling somebody else what we thought on every subject as if we were God, and so we never did it.

我们从未将《每日期刊》——你们这些人拥有一部分的报纸——作为传达我们个人政治观点的工具。首先，我们并没有牢不可破的垄断地位。其次，我们本来就不想……我们拥有非常聪明的读者、法官和律师。他们中一半人属于一个政党，另一半属于另一个政党。里克和我都不觉得自己适合告诉别人我们对每个问题的看法，仿佛我们是上帝一样，所以我们从未这样做过。

I also think that was the best business policy. We always wanted the paper to be trusted, and I think it by and large is. I think the judges and lawyers who read it, they don’t think we’ve got some crazy personal agenda. We’re trying to tell it like it is. That’s, of course, the ultimate, correct journalistic ethos.

我也认为这是最明智的商业政策。我们始终希望我们的报纸被人信任，而它也确实在很大程度上赢得了信任。我认为那些阅读它的法官和律师不会认为我们有什么离谱的私人企图。我们努力做到报道事实。这无疑是最崇高的新闻职业理念。

How people cope with a technological revolution is interesting. A great number of the great collections of newspapers borrowed a lot of money to buy more papers. They like monopoly and they like to buy more of it on credit. When the technology changed, two or three or four of them got hung out to dry. That basically destroyed the entire common equity of the shareholder. That happened at a lot of places.

人们如何应对技术革命是一件有意思的事。许多大型报纸集团为了收购更多报纸而借下巨额债务。他们喜欢垄断，并且愿意通过借贷来扩大垄断。然而，当技术发生变革时，他们中的一些人被晾在了一边。这种情况基本上摧毁了股东们的共同股权。这样的事在许多地方都有发生。

Even places that are super-strong like The New York Times destroyed an enormous amount of equity by paying a billion dollars for the newspaper in Boston which now makes no money at all, in fact, is probably losing.

即使是像《纽约时报》这样实力雄厚的媒体，也因为花费十亿美元收购波士顿的一家报纸而损失了大量的股东权益，而那家报纸现在根本不赚钱，实际上可能还在亏损。

There’s been a lot of agony in the field. Around here, all we ever bought was other public notice rags. We bought every one that we could find, occasionally, one case at least, in another state. Did we ever buy anything except Arizona out of state?

这个行业经历了很多痛苦。在我们这里，我们购买的都是其他公告类小报。我们尽可能地收购了所有能找到的这类报纸，至少有一次是在另一个州。我们有没有在亚利桑那州之外买过其他报纸？

Jerry Lee: We bought one in Denver.

杰瑞·李：我们在丹佛收购了一份报纸。

Munger: Yes, all right, two. But we bought these public notice rags. They were slightly incremental, and they had this embedded option in case there was ever a flood of public notices and the action was for free, so to speak. That’s the way the average real estate gets rich when he does. Somewhere in his operations there’s an embedded option that he really hasn’t paid for, and the harvest in due time comes, and that’s what happened with us. Jerry was unbelievably good at dealing with all these little proprietorship, where a man and his wife to be making $60,000 a year running a little paper. We bought a lot of them.

芒格：对，一共两份。我们收购了这些发布公告的报纸。它们带来了一些小额的增长，而且如果公共公告的数量激增，我们相当于拥有一个潜在的免费选择权。这就是普通房地产商如何致富的——在他们的业务中某个环节存在一个他们实际上并未支付成本的隐含选择权，而最终的收获会在适当的时候到来，我们的情况正是如此。杰瑞非常擅长处理这些小规模的所有权事务，那些夫妻档经营的小报纸，他们一年能挣 6 万美元。我们收购了很多这样的报纸。

Lee: Plus Phoenix.

李：还有凤凰城的报纸。

Munger: Plus Phoenix, and Phoenix was just ridiculous. I don’t know how many percent per annum we made on that investment. It was thousands. I think thousands of percent per annum on the investment. I don’t know how much credit we do get for doing that, but at least…You look around these other newspaper companies which have either had this horrible contraction of earnings, or they’ve gone completely broke. Here we are with…We’re still making money out of the public notices and we’ve got all these marketable securities, which we bought using the proceeds of our public notice boom. We’re like the fellow who had a funeral parlor, and there was a plague.

芒格：对了，凤凰城的那份报纸，我们从中获得的回报简直不可思议。我不知道我们对那项投资的年回报率是多少，但肯定是非常高的。我认为是每年数千个百分点。我不知道我们因此获得了多少赞誉，但至少……你看看其他那些报纸公司，它们要么经历了收益的严重萎缩，要么彻底破产。而我们仍然在从公告业务中获利，我们还拥有所有这些有价证券，这些证券是我们利用公告业务的收益购买的。我们就像是拥有殡仪馆的人，突然遇到了一场瘟疫。

Well, you can laugh, but that’s what happened. The Texans have a marvelous saying about the people who get rich by accident and think they’re geniuses. They say, “Well,old Charlie was out in the field playing the big bass tuba the day it rained gold.” That type of saying to some extent applies to us, but to some extent we were pretty true in running around and scrambling for these minor little properties, and running them intelligently and coping with the problems. I think we can fairly say that we did not anticipate a harvest like the one that came.

好吧，你可以对此发笑，但事实就是这样。德克萨斯人对于那些偶然发了大财却自认是天才的人有一种说法。他们会说：“老查理那天在田野里吹着大号，恰好天上下起了金币雨。”这种情形在某种程度上适用于我们，但我们也确实在积极寻找并精明地管理这些小规模的资产，并妥善应对各种问题。我认为我们可以公正地说，我们并没有预料到会有这样的意外收获。

Of course, many of you are come here because you’re investment groupies. You’re not really Daily Journal shareholders.

当然，你们中的许多人来到这里是因为你们是投资迷。你们并不是真正的《每日期刊》股东。

You’re addicts. You’re addicts to a certain attitude toward life. It’s not that large a group, but you’re pretty badly addicted.

你们上瘾了。你们对某种生活态度上瘾。虽然人数不多，但你们已经严重上瘾了。

At any rate, that’s the thing. Now, the software business is something else. I think you would argue correctly if you said, “You never should have bought the first one.” It looked a little bit like a pre-op showing. Spend a few million dollars and maybe we’d get a position which enabled us to have an unusual access to data that lawyers would want and so on. We had various little theories. Of course, the theories didn’t work out, and we kept getting sucked in to perfecting a software system by paying other people by the hour to make it, and we lost quite a bit of your money in our first venture.

无论如何，这就是现状。至于软件业务，如果你说，“你们一开始就不应该涉足”，你的论点是正确的。它看起来有点像是一次预先的尝试。我们投入了几百万美元，希望或许能够获得一个位置，从而能够接触到律师们可能需要的独特数据等资源。我们有过各种各样的小想法。当然，这些想法并没有实现，我们不断地被卷入通过按小时支付他人来完善软件系统的进程中，这让我们在首次尝试中损失了你们不少资金。

Now, we’re still losing money, we’ve just doubled down. We’ve bought another company, which is about five times our size in terms of actual revenues. But it’s got a much better sales team and a much bigger installed base than we have, and we really like the people. We instantly liked and trusted the people. I don’t think you’d like and trust everybody in the modern software business.

现在，我们仍然在亏损，但我们加大了投入。我们又收购了一家公司，它的规模大约是我们的五倍。但它拥有比我们更优秀的销售团队和更庞大的客户基础，我们真的很欣赏这些人。我们立刻就对他们产生了好感和信任。我不认为你会对现代软件行业的每个人都感到喜欢和信任。

In fact somebody ran a public search recently on the name of one of the leading software titans of the world with a deep profanity attached and said, “Can you find any double hits,” and of course there were so many double hits that you couldn’t believe it. So software is not a perfect business or an easy business or anything else.

实际上，最近有人对全球领先的软件巨头之一的名字进行了公开搜索，并附加了一句粗俗的话语，说：“你能找出任何重复的搜索结果吗？”结果，重复的搜索结果多到令人难以置信。所以，软件行业并非完美无缺，也不是轻松的行业，更不是其他任何简单的事情。

You people have the declining remnants of the top tick of an old information business, the newspaper, and this pile of marketable securities, and this very interesting software play, which is like venture capital.

你们拥有的是一个旧信息产业——报纸业的衰退余波，一堆可销售的证券，以及一个非常有趣的、类似风险投资的软件项目。

Most of you did not buy the Daily Journal company to get this particular outcome, but we didn’t set out to create this outcome either. It just happened. Therein lies a lesson in life. I think most lives work best when you simply react intelligently to the opportunities and difficulties you encounter, and just take the results as they fall.

你们大多数人并不是为了得到这样的结果而投资《每日期刊》公司，但我们也没有特意去追求这样的结果。它就这样自然而然地发生了。这就是生活中的一个教训。我认为，当你遇到机会和挑战时，最理想的生活状态是，你只是聪明地做出反应，然后顺其自然地接受结果。

Some people think that by master planning, you will solve everything, but what I find is that the master plan gets a life of its own, and people believe it because they previously decided on that then, and they make all kinds of mistakes.

有些人认为，通过总体规划就能解决一切问题，但我发现总体规划有其自身的生命力，人们相信它，因为他们之前就已经决定了，结果他们犯了各种各样的错误。

(Thomas) Carlyle was a very smart man, and one of his favorite sayings was, the task of man is not to see what lies dimly in the distance but to do what lies clearly at hand.

托马斯·卡莱尔是一个非常明智的人，他最喜欢的一句话是，人的任务不是去遥望远方模糊不清的事物，而是去做眼前清晰可见的事情。

(Ed: actual quote: “Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what clearly lies at hand.”)

（编辑注：实际引用：“我们的主要任务不是去遥望远方模糊不清的事物，而是去做眼前清晰可见的事。）

It was that message from Carlyle that caused Sir William Osler to create the medical school, which became a model or revising all the medical schools of the world, which was Johns Hopkins.

正是来自卡莱尔的启发，促使威廉·奥斯勒爵士建立了一所医学院，这所学院最终成为了全球医学院改革的典范，那就是约翰霍普金斯大学医学院。

He didn’t have a master plan for Johns Hopkins. He just reacted to the opportunities and hazards of his time as best he could. And lo and behold, we got the leading medical school in the world.

对于约翰霍普金斯大学医学院，他并没有一个既定的总体规划。他只是根据当时的机会和挑战，尽其所能地做出了最好的应对。然后，令人惊叹的是，我们拥有了世界上顶尖的医学院。

Incidentally, that wouldn’t have happened without money from Carnegie and Rockefeller. So the robber barons of old, when they set out to do charity, were some of the most effective givers in the history of philanthropy. Rockefeller’s $50 million, in the course of two or three years, completely changed medicine in America.

顺便提一句，如果没有卡内基和洛克菲勒的资金支持，这一切都不会成为现实。因此，当这些昔日的所谓“强盗大亨”投身慈善事业时，他们实际上是慈善史上最高效的捐赠者之一。洛克菲勒投入的 5000 万美元，在短短两三年的时间内，彻底改变了美国的医学面貌。

They drove all these charlatans out that had one pill for everything from cancer to impotence, and none of it worked. They drove out a lot of people who should have been driven out, and they caused modern education and research establishments to be created.

他们清除了所有那些自诩拥有包治百病的灵丹妙药的江湖骗子，从癌症到性功能障碍无所不包，然而这些所谓的万能药并无实效。他们把许多本就应该被淘汰的人赶出了行业，并且促进了现代教育和研究机构的诞生。

There’s interesting precedent given the strength of the Johns Hopkins system and Carlyle’s basic idea, and based on that we have a certain modest prosperity in spite of being through an enormous headwind. And our basic business I think demonstrates that Carlyle might not have been wrong at all. To the extent that any of you have problems in your life, this enlightened opportunism and this resolute desire to fix problems as fast as they come up, which Jerry’s a genius at.

鉴于约翰-霍普金斯大学系统的实力和卡莱尔的基本理念，我们有一个有趣的先例。基于此，尽管遭遇了巨大的困境，我们仍然取得了一定的、适度的成功。我认为，我们的基本业务表明，卡莱尔可能根本没有错。如果你们在生活中遇到问题，这种开明的机会主义和解决问题的坚定信念，杰瑞是这方面的天才。

Jerry’s fixes what’s wrong quickly, and he runs down opportunity quickly.

杰瑞能够迅速地纠正错误，并迅速地把握机会。

That’s what we’ve been through with the Daily Journal, and it’s interesting to us. Neither (J.P “Rick”) Guerin nor I have taken one penny out in all the years we’ve been invested, and you can see this is the ultimate…What would you call it? Are we misers? I don’t think so. Guerin was like a prince.

这就是我们在《每日期刊》的经历，我们觉得这很有意思。无论是 J.P “Rick” Guerin 还是我，在投资这么多年后，我们都没有从中取出过一分钱，你可以看到这是最终的……你会怎么说呢？我们是守财奴吗？我不这么认为。Guerin 就像一个贵族。

I don’t look too badly myself. But we’re certainly willing to go through a lot of self-denial, and we really want people we scarcely know who just happened to buy this stock to do well and that isn’t true at a lot of places.

我自己看起来也不差。但我们确实愿意忍受很多自我牺牲，我们真心希望那些我们几乎不了解、只是偶然买了这只股票的人能够做得好，而在许多其他地方，这种情况并非如此。

They talk the talk, but they don’t really walk the walk. I don’t think many people who work in the executive ranks of General Motors or have served on its board of directors have any feeling of guilt that they destroyed 100 percent of the common equity, starting with the strongest company in the world.

他们说得好听，但实际上并不付诸行动。我不认为在通用汽车高管层工作或曾在其董事会任职的人中，有多少人会对完全摧毁了普通股股东的权益感到内疚，尽管他们起初是世界上最强大的公司。

But we’re not like that. We would feel terrible loss, but we don’t mind taking you through a little hell on the way. But we want you to come out all right if you keep the faith. That’s the culture, and I don’t think that’s going to change.

但我们不是那种人。如果我们完全摧毁了股东的权益，我们会深感痛失，但我们不介意在这个过程中让你经历一些艰难时刻。我们希望你如果坚持下去，最终能够安然无恙。这就是我们的企业文化，我相信这一点不会改变。

Anyway, that’s the Daily Journal. Jerry, do you want to say anything to this group?

总之，这就是《每日期刊》的情况。杰瑞，你想对大家说些什么吗？

Lee: No, I’m fine.

李：不了，我没什么要说的。

Munger: All right. Now we’ll open the meeting to questions. Yeah.

芒格：好的。现在我们开始提问环节。请说。

Shareholder: Why double down now?

股东：为什么现在选择加倍投资？

Munger: That’s a very good question. You could argue if we were poorer and meaner, we wouldn’t have done it, but we admire the people whose firm we’ve just bought. We admire the people running it. We feel it’s at least a decent gamble. I have no feeling I’m just deliberately wasting money. I’m just taking a gamble I might not have taken if it was the last money I had on earth. I think that’s probably what we should do. We employ a lot of people. We’re located in the state, and it would be very helpful. There is some chance of it working into a bonanza. Now it may be a small chance, but there is some chance.

芒格：这是个非常好的问题。你可以说，如果我们更加贫穷和吝啬，我们可能就不会这么做了，但我们非常钦佩我们刚刚收购的公司及其团队。我们认为这至少是一个值得尝试的投资。我并不觉得我在故意浪费金钱，我只是在赌一把，如果这是我在这个世界上的最后一笔钱，我可能就不会赌了。我认为这很可能是我们应当采取的行动。我们雇佣了许多员工，我们在这个州有业务，这对我们非常有帮助。这件事成功的可能性虽然不大，但还是存在的。

What is interesting about this, for legal information, those of you are students of capitalism, it was a duopoly in the legal information field, including the electronic stuff.

对于法律信息行业，特别是电子化的部分，如果你对资本主义有所了解，就会知道这是一个双寡头垄断的局面。

One was Reed-Elsevier, and the other was Thompson-Reuters. These are two very powerful places.

一个是里德-艾尔斯维尔，另一个是汤普森-路透社。这两个都是非常有影响力的公司。

Reed-Elsevier got rich on one of the greatest business models ever created.

里德-艾尔斯维尔通过也许是有史以来最伟大的商业模式之一发了大财。

They published scientific journals. They didn’t pay a dime for the content, because people want to be published. Didn’t pay a dime for the reviewing and editing, because the people wanted to do the reviewing and editing as part of their duty to science.

他们出版科学期刊，却不需要为内容支付任何费用，因为人们渴望发表自己的研究成果。他们也不需要为审稿和编辑支付费用，因为科学家们愿意为了科学的进步而做这些工作。

With content totally free, they published the journal and every library had to buy them, and every leading scientist. It was just a total racket, and every year they raised the price by 15 percent. Of course, they could then buy all these other papers. You could say, “Why didn’t we start in scientific publishing?” Well, the accidents of life didn’t present us with that opportunity.

他们的内容完全是免费的，他们出版的期刊每个图书馆都会订阅，每位顶尖科学家也都会阅读。这完全是一个垄断的生意，而且他们每年都将价格提高 15%。当然，这样他们就可以购买其他的论文。你可能会问，“我们为什么不进入科学出版领域？”嗯，生活中的偶然事件并没有给我们提供这样的机会。

But what’s happened there is that duopoly has suddenly gotten a new entrant, which is Bloomberg. Bloomberg is worth tens of billions of dollars and drowns in money, and has a total monopoly of its own with which it can use to do what it damn pleases to try and take territory. It can behave a lot like Amazon if it wants to, where it just takes territory from incumbents by brute force.

但现在的情况是，双寡头垄断突然迎来了一个新的竞争者，那就是彭博。彭博价值数十亿美元，资金充裕，拥有自己的完全垄断地位，可以用来做它想做的任何事情，试图夺取市场份额。如果它愿意，它可以表现得很像亚马逊，通过强大的资金实力从现有企业那里夺取市场份额。

Now we have a three-way race, and it’s interesting. You guys are professional investors. It’s hard to predict which nice, comfortable two person duopolies will suddenly become a gas leak and competitive miasma. It just happens. Who would have predicted that Bloomberg would have charged into legal publishing? It has, and it’s no fun for the incumbents. You do have this unpredictability in American competition, and it causes weird results.

现在我们面临三方竞争，这非常有趣。你们都是专业的投资者。很难预测哪些原本舒适的双寡头垄断会突然变成一场竞争灾难。这种情况就是这样发生的。谁会预料到彭博会闯入法律出版行业？它已经这么做了，这对现有企业来说并不好玩。你们确实会在美国的竞争中遇到这种不可预测性，它导致了一些奇特的结果。

You give me that question, but I think our chances were good enough to justify the investment, but I don’t think we would have made it, if it was the last dollar we had on Earth. We’re not ashamed of it. We’re glad we did it. We may win. We’re certainly going to try. Of course, when I say, “We’re going to try,” I mean, “They’re going to try.”

你提出了那个问题，但我认为我们成功的可能性足够大，可以证明这项投资是合理的。不过，如果那是我们在地球上仅剩的最后一美元，我想我们不会那样做。我们并不后悔这个决定。我们很高兴我们做出了投资。我们可能会成功。我们肯定会尽力而为。当然，当我说到“我们会尽力”时，我的意思是“他们将会尽力”。

Munger: Any other questions?

芒格：还有其他问题吗？

Shareholder: Do you have any thoughts on how the legal challenges to the ratings agencies will work out?

股东：关于评级机构所面临的法律挑战，你有何见解？

Munger: That’s a very interesting question and very topical. Up till now, the rating agencies have avoided any big loss from judgments. Their attitude is that they know how to sell guarantees that securities would be paid off and they weren’t selling guarantees. They were selling opinions. Their attitude is, you want a guarantee, you would have to pay for it but a lot more. All we gave you is an opinion and as long as we believe their opinion and weren’t deliberately lying to you, you can’t recover.

芒格：这是一个极具意义且紧贴时事的问题。到目前为止，评级机构还没有因为评估失误而遭受重大损失。他们的观点是，他们懂得如何销售确保证券得到偿付的担保，但他们实际上并没有提供担保。他们所提供的，仅仅是意见。他们认为，如果你需要一个担保，你得为此支付更高的价格。我们所提供的仅仅是意见，只要我们的意见是基于诚信的，并没有故意欺骗你，你就无法要求赔偿。

That’s probably a correct explanation of the law, but if you ask for a jury in their embarrassing emails and so on, this can be quite expensive. There isn’t any doubt.Both of the rating agencies have admitted to serious mistakes in judgment. Of course, those mistakes in judgment were undoubtedly contributed to by the fact that they’re re-paid to do all this.

这或许是对现行法律的正确解释，但如果你要陪审团展示他们的一些令人难堪的电子邮件等证据，这可能会代价高昂。毫无疑问，两家评级机构都承认在判断上犯了严重错误。当然，这些判断错误在很大程度上是由于他们的收费模式所导致的。

I personally don’t think they were consciously lying. I’m not saying there wasn’t a one person there somewhere in our organization that may not have liked his company’s product, but I don’t think they were consciously doing it.

我个人观点是，他们并非故意撒谎。我不是说在我们组织中没有任何人可能对他的公司产品不满，但我认为他们并没有故意这么做。

They were stupid and one of the reasons they were stupid is the self-conscious selected their own interest. It’s a serious bit of legal trouble. All I can tell you that I don’t think anybody’s ever paid any big money on this area before, but you do have embarrassing emails and so forth.

他们的失误在于愚蠢，部分原因是他们选择了自身利益。这是一个严重的法律问题。我能告诉你的是，此前在这个领域，我不记得有人为此付出过巨大的金钱代价，但确实有一些令人尴尬的电子邮件等证据。

Generally speaking, the emails are great for lawyers. The record is permanent. You have an army of people. Somebody’s going to say some dumb thing and you can get that dumb thing before a jury. Maybe you can make some money or browbeat somebody into a big settlement.

通常来讲，电子邮件对于律师而言是极具价值的。记录是永久性的。你有一大批人。总会有人说出一些愚蠢的话，你可以将这些愚蠢的话呈现给陪审团。也许你可以赚些钱或者迫使某人达成一笔巨额和解。

Which gets into the question of should young people be creating these permanent paper records on Facebook, and so on of the dumbest thing they ever did or thought, so it’s immortal. I think it’s insane. I would hate to have to read the dumbest things I ever said at fifteen years of age — it would be embarrassing for all of us, at least it would be embarrassing for me.

这就引出了一个问题：年轻人是否应该在 Facebook 等社交平台上留下这些永久性的记录，记录下他们做过或想过的最傻的事情，让这些记录永存。我认为这样做是疯狂的。我可不愿意去回顾我十五岁时说过的最傻的话——那对所有人来说都是尴尬的，至少对我来说是尴尬的。

I don’t like the way the world evolved on that. I do think the rating agencies use very poor judgment. I think the people that were issuing the bonds, these are really smart people, much smarter people than the people in the rating agencies.

我不喜欢这个世界的发展方式。我确实认为评级机构的判断力非常差。而那些发行债券的人，他们非常聪明，比评级机构的人要聪明得多。

Of course, they paid tremendous penalties. Some of them have gone broke. Others have given them millions and millions in settlement. You’ll reach impairments in reputation, so on and so on.

当然，他们已经支付了巨额的罚金。有些人甚至因此破产。其他人则不得不支付数百万的和解费用。你的名誉会受损，等等。

What happened in the boom and the lousy credit and market spiels, packaged up into lousy securities, mis-rated by mistakes by jerks who believed in mathematical formulas instead of common sense. It was not pretty. People paid a terrible price for it, and the country has paid a terrible price for it. I can’t predict what’s going to happen in the litigation.

在那个繁荣时期，糟糕的信贷和市场宣传被打包成糟糕的证券，被那些迷信数学公式而非常识的笨蛋错误地评级。这种情况并不美好。人们为此付出了沉重的代价，整个国家也付出了沉重的代价。我无法预测诉讼的最终结果会是怎样。

I can say one thing, the rating agencies would have been way better off if they’d made less money, had been more careful, and thorough, so the extent any of us have decisions to make. Foregoing money, because it’s sort of tainted, or too close to tainted, or too close to gaming, is a very good thing. Sol Price (founder of Price Club) used to say, success in business came from deciding which business you could intelligently do without.

我能肯定地说，如果评级机构能够不那么贪婪，更加审慎和细致，它们的情况会好很多，这对我们所有人在做决定时都是有益的。放弃那些可能有问题、或者接近有问题、或者接近于操纵的脏钱是非常明智的。索尔·普莱斯（ Price Club 的创始人）过去常说，商业上的成功来自于决定你可以明智地不做哪些生意。

He had a list of business he didn’t want. Those things he didn’t want — he didn’t want business from people who wrote bad checks. He didn’t want business of people who shoplifted. He didn’t want business of people who clogged-up his parking lot without buying very much. He carefully invented a system where he kept those people out, and succeeded by deciding what he would be better off without and avoiding it. This is a very good way to think, and it’s not all that common. It’s, perfectly, obvious, isn’t it? And it has been of enormous help to the people sitting at this head table. But most people just aren’t trained to do that — if it’s more business, they tend to want it.

他有一份不为清单。他不想要跟那些开空头支票的人、那些在商店行窃的人，以及那些在停车场占位却不怎么消费的人做生意。他精心设计了一个系统来排除这些人，并通过明智地选择避免某些业务而取得了成功。这是一种非常好的思维方式，但却并不常见。这不是很明显的道理吗？这种方法对于管事的人来说帮助极大。但大多数人并没有养成这样的习惯——对他们来说，更多的生意总是好的。

There’s enormous money and happiness, and better service to be gained, by just deciding, “I’m going to do without that.” Warren used to say, when we were brokers at Solomon, “I’m waiting for a list of the business that we have declined because it was morally beneath us even though it was legal.” People are just so competitive they just want to do every damn thing that can be done, profitably, whereas, we need something beyond that. I’d imagine, he’d behave, just slightly better, than what would take him to prison, in order to get money.

通过决定“我将放弃那个”，可以获得巨大的财富、幸福感和更优质的服务。我们还在所罗门兄弟公司做经纪人时，沃伦曾说过：“我期待有一天能看到一份我们因为道德标准而拒绝的业务清单，即使那些业务是合法的。”人们往往过于争强好胜，他们想要做所有能盈利的事情，然而，我们需要的不仅仅是盈利。我猜，为了赚钱，他不会去做任何可能会导致坐牢的事。

You should have personal standards that are way better than the criminal law requires. Why should the criminal law determine your behavior? It would be crazy. Who would behave that way in marriage, or in partnership, or anything else? Why should you do it in your general dealing?

你的个人准则应该远远高于刑法所规定的标准。为什么刑法应该成为你行为的准绳？那太荒唐了。谁会在婚姻、合伙关系或其他任何事情上那样做？你在一般的交易中为什么要这样做？

I think this mess, and, of course, it’s a little dispiriting to find that many of the people who are the worst miscreants don’t have much sense of shame and are trying to go back as much as they can to the old behavior.

我认为，这种混乱，当然也有点令人沮丧，因为我发现许多最不检点的人并没有多少羞耻感，而且还试图尽可能地恢复他们以前的行为。

The truth of the matter is, once you’ve shouted into the phone, “I’ll take x and y,” and three days later, you have an extra 5 million, once that has happened, the people just become hopeless addicts, and they lose their bearings. You can argue we shouldn’t allow a system where that can happen.

事实情况是，一旦你在电话中大喊，“我要 x 和 y”，然后在三天后，你额外得到了 500 万美元，一旦这种情况发生，人们就会变得无可救药地上瘾，他们会迷失方向。你可以争辩说，我们不应该允许这样的系统存在。

Look at the people who get addicted to poker, both online poker and gambling parlor poker. A huge crowd of people, 50, 60 hours a week and grinding away at these tables, of course somebody who’s making croupier’s profit off the top, and the very shrewd people are taking away money from the less shrewd people. Is this really in the public interest? I don’t think so.

看看那些沉迷于扑克的人，无论是网络扑克还是赌场里的扑克。一大群人，每周花 50、60 个小时在赌桌前苦战，当然，有人在从中赚取庄家的利润，而那些非常精明的人正在从不那么精明的人那里赢钱。这真的符合公众利益吗？我不这么认为。

Even if it were in the interest to allow this recreational poker, to turn the public securities markets into a very effective gambling house for the people who think like the poker addicts and behave like the poker addicts — if I were running the world, I would put a lot of people out of business, including several in this room. In other words, I don’t think you necessarily want a huge class of people getting rich in software by being a little cleverer than other people.

即使这样做符合某些人的利益，将公众证券市场变成一个高效的赌场，让那些想法像扑克瘾君子、行为像扑克瘾君子的人去赌博——如果我是掌管世界的人，我会让很多从事这种业务的人失业，包括在座的一些人。换句话说，我认为你不一定希望一大批人通过比其他人聪明一点而在软件方面发财致富。

Shareholder: Two questions, if you don’t mind. From 2000 to 2008, Daily Journal seemed to reinvest nearly all of its profits into US Treasury notes and bills. In the last two years, after February 2009, Daily Journal has invested over $30 million into common stock of three companies. Can you discuss the difference between the investment landscape over the last few years versus 2000 to 2008?

股东：不介意的话，我有两点想问。从 2000 年到 2008 年，每日期刊似乎将其几乎所有的利润重新投入到了美国国债和短期国库券中。而在最近的两年里，也就是 2009 年 2 月之后，每日期刊已经向三家公司的普通股投资了超过 3000 万美元。你能解释一下最近几年的投资环境与 2000 至 2008 年期间相比有何不同吗？

Munger: Well, when we’re engaged in something difficult, as we were with our declining main business, we tended to want extra reserves of strength. As we got so much extra money and the opportunities in marketable securities got more extreme, we changed our point of view as the facts change.

芒格：好的，当我们面临挑战，比如我们主要业务的衰退时，我们总是希望拥有额外的实力储备。随着我们手头的额外资金越来越多，以及有价证券的机会也越来越多，我们的观点也随之改变，以适应不断变化的实际情况。

Keynes used to say, “When the facts change, do you change your opinion?” (Keynes actual quote was: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?“)Well, of course you do. That’s what we did. Our circumstances were different and our opportunities were different, so we behaved differently. What would you do?

凯恩斯曾说：“事实变了，你会跟着变吗？”（凯恩斯的原话是：“事实变了，我就改变我的想法。先生，你怎么办呢？”） 你当然会，我们就是这么做的。我们的处境不同，我们面对的机会也不同，所以我们的行为也不同。你会怎么做？

Shareholder: Is it any reflection of the investment climate, or purely…

股东：这是否反映了投资环境的变化，还是纯粹是……

Munger: Yes, of course, that was part of it. The price you pay for some of those securities was ridiculously low. In fact some of that stuff was something that happens once in 40 years or something. Who in the hell keeps money sitting around waiting for one of those opportunities? (A) It might come and go and you may not recognize it, and (B) what do you do during the 40 years you’re waiting?

芒格：是的，当然，这是其中的一部分原因。你为某些证券支付的价格简直低得荒谬。实际上，有些机会可能是四十年一遇的。谁会把钱闲置着，等着这样的机会出现？（A）机会可能来了又去，你也许无法识别它，而且（B）在等待的四十年里你该怎么办？

So I don’t think you should be terribly encouraged by what has happened. It doesn’t indicate that suddenly a recurring stream of money going from people in their 90s. It just means that for one reason or another, we behaved pretty sensibly, and reacted pretty intelligently to opportunities. Other people didn’t do it.

所以我不认为你应该对所发生的事情感到特别振奋。这并不表明 90 多岁的人突然会有源源不断的钱。这只是意味着，出于某种原因，我们的行为相当合理，对机会的反应相当明智，而其他人没有这样做。

General Motors, out of the profits of their good years, they could have bought, every year, for many years, a big company. They could have bought Eli Lilly one year and Merck the next, and United Technologies. General Motors could own the world. Instead, what they declared to their shareholders was a goose egg. They took the common equity to zero. And they would say it was all somebody else’s fault. The climate was bad, the unions got powerful. Those damn Asians and Europeans were too competitive.

通用汽车公司，凭借他们好年景的利润，他们本可以每年购买一家大型公司。他们可以在一年内收购礼来公司，下一年收购默克公司，再下一年收购联合技术公司。通用汽车本可以拥有整个世界。相反，他们却没有赚到钱。他们将普通股权益降至零。他们会说这都是别人的错。气候不好，工会过于强大。那些该死的亚洲人和欧洲人太有竞争力了。

The truth of the matter is, their very prosperity made them weak. The dealerships got in the hands of inheritors, and the executives on the sales field, they go around and drink martinis with inheritors, and didn’t pay enough attention to defects in their vehicles. And one thing led to another, and when they were all done the shareholders’ equity went to zero.

事实的真相是，他们自身的繁荣反而使他们变得脆弱。经销权落入了继承人手中，而销售领域的高管们，他们与继承者们应酬畅饮，却没有足够重视他们车辆的缺陷。一个问题接着一个问题，最终导致了股东们的股本化为乌有。

And that was in a company that at its peak was one of the most admirable companies in the world. Take the stuff that Boss Kettering (Charles Kettering - head of research at General Motors from 1920 to 1947) had invented in the early days. Kettering was one of the most useful citizens that ever lived in America.

这发生在一家在其巅峰时期堪称世界上最受人尊敬的公司之一。想想老板凯特林（Charles Kettering——1920年至1947年担任通用汽车研究部门负责人）在公司早期所发明的那些东西。凯特林绝对是美国历史上最有价值的人之一。

A self-starter on a car is a wonderful thing. Under the old system, you frequently broke your arm. You would give it a crank and it would answer back by spinning backwards and breaking your arm. I would much rather push a button than have my arm broken. Nor do I have the opportunity to go and crank in the sleet and snow.

汽车上的自动启动器是一项很棒的发明。在老式的启动方式中，人们常常因此而弄伤手臂。你转动曲柄，它却反向旋转，结果可能就会让你的手臂骨折。我宁愿按一个按钮，也不愿自己的手臂受伤。我也不需要冒着雨雪去转动曲柄。

Kettering did a lot of inventions like that. In the early days of General Motors, they really made some enormous contributions to civilization. And they are still making contributions, but it is so competitive.

凯特林进行了许多类似的发明。在通用汽车的早期，他们确实为文明做出了巨大的贡献。他们至今仍然在做出贡献，但竞争实在太激烈了。

I should tell you people a story, because you are groupies for stories. I talked recently to a man who shall go nameless. But his company was one of the great growth stocks of America.

我得给你们说个故事，因为你们是故事迷。我最近和一个人谈了谈，他的名字我就不说了。但他的公司曾是美国最伟大的成长股之一。

And they had armies of PhDs in there who had mastered very difficult disciplines. And they had patents, and technology, and know-how, what have you — and hard-to-replace plants. What they make is difficult to make in a lot of different categories.

他们公司里有许多拥有博士学位的人才，他们精通极其复杂的学科。他们手握专利、技术和专业知识——还有那些难以替代的工厂设施。他们生产的产品，在许多不同的领域里都是制造难度极高的。

And the profits in the business are very mediocre, to put it mildly. And it isn’t that it has been that badly run. It’s just that everybody’s learned how to make these difficult things, and there are too many of them trying to make them. It just gets terrible. And what happens then is, you’re now the CEO of the place and you see it’s getting tough. Your duty, your acquired self-image is a guy that knows how to fix things. You never have a category in your mind of, “It’s too tough to fix,” which is a really stupid idea. You can recognize all kinds of things that are too tough to fix.

当然，说句公道话，这个行业的利润实在是平庸得很。这并不是因为管理不善。而是因为大家都学会了如何制造这些复杂的东西，而且有太多的人试图去制造它们。结果就是变得非常糟糕。接下来的情况是，你作为这家公司的 CEO，发现形势变得严峻。你的职责，你的自我认知，是一个能够解决问题的人。你的头脑中从来没有“有些问题太难了，无法解决”的东西，这其实是一个非常愚蠢的想法。你完全能够识别出哪些事情是太难解决的。

But if you don’t, then you are a sucker for some narrative to say, maybe there’s some company in your industry that makes something really complicated that other people can’t match. And you say, “Well, I’ll buy that. That solves my problem.” But your friendly investment banker and your friendly management consultant want you to buy it at 30 times’ earnings and 12 times’ book. Of course, at that price, it won’t solve your problems. And you do it anyway. After all, you’ve got consultants, and it gives you hope.

但如果你不去这么想，你就会容易被某些说法所左右，比如，也许你所在行业里有一家公司制造了一些其他公司无法比拟的复杂产品。然后你会说，“好吧，我会收购那家公司。那样就能解决我的问题了。”但你的投资银行家和管理咨询顾问会希望你以 30 倍的市盈率和 12 倍的市净率去收购它。当然，以这样的价格，它无法解决你的问题。但你还是这么做了。毕竟，你有顾问团队，他们给了你希望。

Many of these people buy things the way that people used to go Mexico and ingest apricot pits when they had pancreatic cancer. They wanted something that provided hope, and so they believed in apricot pits. A lot of American industry helped by their friendly investment bankers and consultants of other kinds, they want to believe that in this terrible, tough business, there’s an easy solution. It just requires listening to the siren song and writing the check. Of course, usually it doesn’t work.

很多人买东西的方式，就像过去人们去墨西哥，当他们患有胰腺癌时会去吃杏仁核。他们想要一些能带来希望的东西，所以他们相信杏仁核。很多美国产业，在他们友好的投资银行家和各类顾问的推动下，他们愿意相信在这个困难重重的行业中，存在一个简单的解决方案。只需要听从诱人的建议，然后开出支票就行了。当然，通常情况下，这不管用。

The ordinary acquisition in corporate American does not work for the shareholder. In other words, on average all the acquisitions together are anti-shareholder. Only occasional ones work, and work well, and it is rather interesting that Berkshire, on average, they work pretty well.

在美国企业界，普通的并购行为并不符合股东的利益。换句话说，平均来看，所有并购行为总体上是对股东不利的。只有偶尔的一些并购能够成功，并且效果不错，而伯克希尔·哈撒韦公司的平均并购效果却相当好，这是相当有趣的。

What is the difference? Why are Berkshire’s acquisitions, why are they averaged out so well when we pay the prices for whole companies, and the standard experience in America is that the acquisition doesn’t work that well.

差异何在？为何伯克希尔的并购案在我们为整个公司支付价格时，平均效果如此出色，而美国的标准经验却是并购效果往往不尽人意。

There are a number of reasons. Partly they’re that people like buying in their own field? As to a field that is prosperous like newspapers? They keep buying up higher, and higher prices to encourage everybody wants to buy the same thing, so you get in a very bad daisy chain that is anti-shareholder.

原因有多个。部分原因在于人们倾向于在自己熟悉的领域内进行购买，比如像报纸这样看似繁荣的行业。他们不断地以越来越高的价格购买，以激发每个人都想购买相同的东西，结果却陷入了一个非常糟糕的连锁反应，这对股东是不利的。

In its places where you want to believe that there is a simple way to buy your way out of trouble. Why should it be simple to buy your way out of trouble? You get a little pancreatic cancer, are you going to buy your way out of trouble?

在某些情况下，人们倾向于相信总有一种简便的方法可以通过金钱来解决问题。为什么解决问题会是容易的呢？比如说，你患上了胰腺癌，难道就能花钱摆脱这个麻烦吗？

I don’t think so. There are all kinds of things you can’t buy your way out of. You have to adapt to them. Part of Berkshire’s secret is that, less than most people, we don’t pour endless treasure into losing hands, on the theory that we’re going to win and do it fast.

我不这么认为。有很多事情是你无法通过花钱来解决的。你必须适应它们。伯克希尔的一个秘诀在于，我们不像大多数人那样，无休止地将大量资金投入到失败的事业中，幻想着我们会快速取胜。

Berkshire got though this helpful reputation among their group of addicts over a long period of time. It took a long time. It’s a very useful, useful thing to have. Two, I think Berkshire’s been blessed with these big insurance companies. It’s got two things to do. It can buy companies or it can buy securities as insurance companies. Aren’t you going to make better investments, if you can get two reasonable options at all times instead of one? Doesn’t that make sense? That’s another of the reasons.

伯克希尔在很长一段时间内在一群忠实拥趸中建立了有益的声誉。这需要很长时间。这是非常有价值的东西。第二，我认为伯克希尔有幸拥有这些大型保险公司。它有两种选择。它可以购买公司，或者它可以像保险公司那样购买证券。如果你始终有两个合理的选择而不是一个，难道你不会做出更好的投资决策吗？这难道不合理吗？这是另一个原因。

I don’t see why Berkshire isn’t more copied, except I think people look at it and they look at their culture with its own traditions. They came to power at 58 they’re going to be gone at 63. They don’t see any way of getting from where they are to where we are.

我不明白为什么伯克希尔没有被更多人模仿，可能是因为人们审视它时，会考虑到他们自己的文化和传统。他们在 58 岁时获得权力，计划在 63 岁时退休。他们看不出有什么办法能从他们目前的状况达到我们的水平。

How would you change DuPont into Berkshire Hathaway, if you were the CEO of DuPont? It’s addicting. I’ve got right to give up on the problem and not even think about it. At any rate, I do think of it as peculiar. This acquisition business — It’s generally a tough game.

如果你是杜邦的首席执行官，你会如何将杜邦改造成伯克希尔·哈撒韦呢？这让人着迷。我完全可以选择放弃这个问题，不去思考它。不管怎么说，我确实认为这是一件不同寻常的事情。这种并购业务——通常来说，都是一项艰巨的挑战。

Shareholder: I had a second question. The second question was you had mentioned talk about doubling down on the New Dawn acquisition. In 2012, the company also added a supplemental addendum to management incentives, where management should be compensated should Sustain be sold or IPO. I was curious if there’s anything that we should think about if Sustain were a standalone business, if it could have value to another owner that exceeds what’s currently being suggested by the current financials?

股东：我还有一个问题。你之前谈到了对新黎明收购的加码投资。2012 年，公司还增加了一个补充的管理激励条款，规定如果 Sustain 被出售或者进行 IPO，管理层应当获得报酬。我想知道，如果 Sustain 作为一个独立的业务，它是否可能对其他潜在买家具有超出当前财务状况所显示的价值？

Munger: Well, of course Sustain could eventually…Sustain and New Dawn, I’m a total convert to the new product, of course, I think if we’ve succeeded, that would be valuable to other people.

芒格：当然，Sustain 最终可能会……我对 Sustain 和新黎明的新产品完全信服，我当然认为如果我们成功了，那对其他人来说将是宝贵的。

As it is now, it’s not like ordinary software. The people like Oracle and Microsoft, and never wanted to be a mixed businesses too awful. The RFP, the consultants, the bureaucracy, it’s just agony squared, agony cubed. And they like easy money, and they’re right, too.

目前来说，它不像普通的软件业务。像甲骨文和微软这样的公司，他们从未想过要涉足那些糟糕的混合业务。征求提案、咨询顾问、官僚体系，这些都让人感到极度痛苦，痛苦得无以复加。他们喜欢轻松赚钱，这也是对的。

We generally chose this hair shirt, and it is agony and it is hard, but it’s challenging.

我们选择了这条艰难的道路，虽然它让人痛苦，艰难，但却极具挑战性。

Eventually, if we succeed, it will do a lot of good in terms of service and efficiency and so on. We went the unusual incentive program, because everybody in software expects some carrot so we were just bending to the wind in the field, really. That explains that.

最终，如果我们成功了，这将极大地提升我们的服务水平和工作效率等。我们采取了这种不同寻常的激励计划，因为软件行业的每个人都期待得到一些激励，所以我们只是在顺应这个行业的潮流。这就是为什么我们会这样做。

Shareholder: As a fellow addict, I wanted to comment and then a question, and that has to be why so many people gathered to hear a 90-year-old. I’m reminded of the difference between knowledge and wisdom. We’re here for wisdom. Knowledge is knowing the tomato is a fruit, but wisdom is knowing not to put it in the fruit salad.

股东：作为同道中人，我想先说几句，然后问一个问题。这也许就是为什么这么多人来听一位九十岁老人讲话的原因。我想到了知识与智慧之间的区别。我们来这里是为了获得智慧。知识是知道番茄是一种水果，而智慧是知道不应该把它放入水果沙拉中。

Munger: Well, I think there’s some truth in that.

芒格：嗯，我觉得这话确实有几分道理。

Shareholder: So we hear from the liberals that have commented on had to do with paradigm shifts in management styles and is that the goals in management should be… I’d like you to apply that to the government, because I think the elephant in the room that I haven’t heard that, is all of us share a concern for the leadership … and the consequences of the decisions.

股东：我们听到一些自由派人士谈论管理风格中的范式转变，以及管理的目标应该是什么……我想让你将这些观点应用于政府层面，因为我认为我们大家都对领导力……以及决策的后果感到担忧。

Munger: Well, of course, if you take the whole history of government in the world, it’s a pretty sad story. Think of all those years of crazy kings, crazy theocrats, the holy inquisition, populist mobs — Imagine the French mob that cut off the head of the greatest chemist in the world, Lavoisier (Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier – the father of modern chemistry).

芒格：当然，如果你纵观世界各国政府的整个历史，那是一个相当令人沮丧的故事。想想那些年的疯狂君主、狂热的神权统治者、宗教裁判所、民粹主义暴民——想象一下法国暴民斩首了世界上最伟大的化学家拉瓦锡（安托万-洛朗·德·拉瓦锡——现代化学之父）。

If you look at the history of government in the world, you see just a lot of crazy — Think of Mao killing 20 or 30 million people on some dumb idea about farming. There’s been a lot of horrible… Think of the whole Soviet Union getting so they provide perfect job security. Everybody had a job. The way they described that was, “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” And despite what’s been working for every else the Soviet Union (didn’t want to use that.)

如果你检视世界各国政府的历史，你会看到许多疯狂之举——想想 Mao 因为一些愚蠢的农业观念而导致 2000 万到 3000 万人”走了”。历史上充满了许多可怕的事件……设想一下，如果整个苏联都实现了完美的就业保障，每个人都能拥有工作。他们描述这种情况的方式是，“他们假装给我们发工资，我们假装工作。”尽管有些工作方式对其他国家来说可能有效，但苏联（并不打算采用）。

The whole history of the government has been bad. Of course, our founders realized there were dangers buried in democracy. It was Ben Franklin who put it in “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” he says, “When citizens of the Republic learn they can vote money, the end of the Republic is nigh.”

政府的整个历史记录并不光彩。当然，我们的开国元勋们认识到民主体制内潜藏着风险。本·富兰克林在《穷理查年鉴》中提到：“如果共和国的公民们发现他们可以通过投票来瓜分财富，那么共和国的末日即将到来。”

Well, not that near, but it’s a very dangerous thing that you learn you can vote yourself money. What’s safe unless everybody’s working their way toward productivity and success. Just ganging up to vote yourselves, money is dangerous. When it’s carried to excess like Greek culture where A), everybody tried to vote themselves money instead of doing anything else or B), so they succeeded from paying taxes or anything else, you’re talking about a very dysfunctional society.

嗯，末日尚未到来，但你们意识到可以通过投票给自己分钱是一件极其危险的事。除非每个人都在朝着提高生产力和取得成功的方向努力，否则何谈安全。仅仅为了给自己投票分钱而联合起来是危险的。当这种情况像希腊文化中那样走向极端，A) 每个人都试图通过投票给自己分钱而不是去做其他事情，或者B) 他们成功地逃避了缴税或其他义务，你所描述的是一个功能严重失调的社会。

It’s not as dysfunctional as the Soviet Union. After all, the sheep farmer in Greece probably was pretty efficient at tending the sheep. In the Soviet Union, nothing was efficient, except the high science. Get a bunch of high IQ people together and give them problem sets — why, you can do that as well in the gulag as you can do it somewhere else.

它不像苏联那样功能失调。毕竟，希腊的牧羊人可能在放羊方面相当高效。在苏联，除了高科技领域外，没有什么是高效的。把一群智商高的人聚集在一起，给他们一系列问题——嘿，你可以在劳改营里做到这一点，就像你可以在其他地方做到的一样。

But short of that, why…I can’t fix the problems of government. There’s so much that’s good, including in government, but I think it’s probably a mistake to concentrate too much on what’s awful but certainly a lot of intelligent people are a bit discouraged by a lot that’s happened.

但除此之外，为什么……我无法解决政府的问题。有很多好的方面，包括在政府中，但我认为过分专注于糟糕的事情可能是错误的，尽管许多聪明人对已经发生的事情感到有些沮丧。

But you wouldn’t have liked the politicians of yesteryear. They built the transcontinental railroads with Congress taking cash bribes from people like Huntington and Stanford. They got the railroad built but it wasn’t pretty.

但你也不会喜欢过去的政治家。他们在国会接受像亨廷顿和斯坦福这样的人的现金贿赂来建设横贯大陆的铁路。他们确实建成了铁路，但手段并不光彩。

People were cheating the government way back. The Civil War was full of lousy products sold to the soldiers. I can’t think of any much more heartless. Remember the local druggist who diluted all the cancer drugs so they could make more money. Imagine doing that — That was routinely done in the Civil War by respectable manufacturers. They just cheated the government troops.

自古以来，人们就在欺骗政府。南北战争时期，充斥着向士兵出售的劣质商品。我想不出还有什么比这更冷酷无情的了。还记得那个为了赚更多钱而稀释所有抗癌药物的当地药剂师吗？想象一下做出这种事情——这在南北战争时期是那些体面的制造商们司空见惯的行为。他们就是这样欺骗政府军队的。

There’s a lot of unhappy occurrences in the history of man, and there’s a lot of peculiar government…If you go back to where government was simpler and more honest, then 85 percent of the people were on farms doing backbreaking labor and they could never leave the farm or leave the farm or read anything or see any athletic events. I’d rather have a little sin and not be doing brute labor on the farm.

人类历史上不乏悲伤的事件，也存在许多不寻常的政府形式…如果你回到政府结构更简单、更正直的时代，那么有 85% 的人在农场上从事着艰辛的体力劳动，他们无法离开农场，无法接触外面的世界，无法阅读任何书籍，或者观看任何体育活动。我宁可生活中有些小瑕疵，也不愿意在农场上做苦力。

But at any rate, I can’t solve your problem. You’re right to be concerned about it. But if you also look around, you’ll find example after example of fabulous good government and various institutions, both private corporations and public. I’m very much impressed with the way they run the University of Michigan. It’s a tough hand at the state when there’s nothing but economic squeeze for all a long time. That University has gone up, up, up, better loved, better respected, better serving. If you look around, you’ll find much that’s good in human governments, as well as bad.

但无论如何，我无法解决你的问题。你对此事感到担忧是正确的。但如果你也四处看看，你会发现一个又一个政府和各种机构做得非常好的例子，无论是私营企业还是公共机构。我对密歇根大学的运营方式印象深刻。在经济长期紧缩的情况下，该州的处境非常艰难。密歇根大学不断发展壮大，得到了更好的爱戴、尊重和服务。如果你环顾四周，你会发现人类政府有很多优点，也有很多缺点。

Shareholder: what is the company doing today different from yesterday and that could be reflected in the picking of the right software?

股东：公司今天相较于昨天有哪些变化，这些变化是否能够在选择正确的软件方面体现出优势？

Munger: We bought New Dawn, which has a way better sales culture than we have and a bigger installed base and we like the people. That is very different.

芒格：我们收购了新黎明，它的销售文化比我们出色，拥有更大的客户基础，而且我们欣赏公司的团队。这是一个很大的不同。

Shareholder: Is that proprietary?

股东：那是独有的技术吗？

Charlie: Well, meaning is it a cinch that we will win? The answer is no. Is it quite possible that we will win? The answer is yes. But it’s quite different. Yeah?

芒格：你的意思是我们能否轻松获胜？答案是否定的。我们是否有可能获胜？答案是肯定的。但这确实与众不同。对吗？

Shareholder: If you’re design a proxy statement and you’re trying to think about a couple simple long term metrics to incentivize management. What would you think about?

股东：如果你在起草一份代理声明书，并且你想要思考一些简单而长期的指标来激励管理层，你会考虑哪些指标？

Munger: Well, if you want to talk about that subject, which is really interesting from your point of view… you have touched a real nerve. What has happened, of course, is that institutional money management has been hooked with the aid of these consultants, whom I can’t stand.

芒格：嗯，如果你想要讨论这个话题，这确实是一个从你的角度来看非常有趣的话题……你确实触及了一个敏感的问题。显然，机构投资管理已经与这些顾问紧密相连，我对他们并不感冒。

So everybody wants to raise the indexes and they’ve got 50 different indexes, but everybody’s racing an index. The monthly statement shows how you performed that month in relation to the index. Your shareholders who’ll make the decision as to whether or not to buy the stock are institutional money managers and they’re worried about not losing assets and fees that are related to the assets from getting behind the other people?

因此，每个人都希望超越指数，他们有 50 种不同的指数，但每个人都在努力超越某个指数。月度报告展示了你当月的表现与该指数的对比情况。你的股东，即那些可能会决定购买或不购买股票的机构投资者，他们关心的不是资产的损失，而是担心自己的资产和与资产挂钩的费用会因为落后于同行而受到影响。

That is a dysfunctional, stupid system and it gets stronger and stronger with every passing day. That is a serious problem.

这是一个功能失调、愚蠢的系统，它每天都在不断增强。这是一个严重的问题。

I don’t think little changes in governance are going to fix something so awful. These people are locked in this horrible system, all the participants, and they can’t do much about it. They have to live there. They’ve got a wife and children and a mortgage, but they have to live in the system they’re in.

我不认为在治理上做些小改变就能解决如此糟糕的问题。这些人被困在这个糟糕的系统中，所有的参与者都是如此，他们对此无能为力。他们必须在这个系统中生存。他们有家庭和孩子，还有抵押贷款，但他们必须生活在他们所在的这个系统中。

It’s not a pretty system. The people who are profiting from it like it the way it is. It does cause extra action in terms of brokers’ commissions, and so on and so on, and more fees and more different kinds of investment vehicles.

这个体系并不令人满意。从中获益的人满意于现状。它确实增加了额外的经纪佣金，以及更多的费用和不同类型的投资工具。

It’s the same thing like the apricot pits for the cancer sufferer, or the guy who acquire his way to wealth, having failed in his basic business. If it doesn’t work, there’s a new investment vehicle, a new technique. There’s a bunch of Pied Pipers who are always selling some new thing that everybody can try.

这就像是癌症患者尝试吃杏核，或者是那些在主营业务上失败却试图通过收购来致富的人。如果某种方法不起作用，总会有新的投资工具，新的技巧出现。总有一群领头的推销者在不断推销一些新鲜事物，让每个人都跃跃欲试。

It’s a crazy, dysfunctional system. In a better world, we wouldn’t have all those incentives to make money on a short-term basis. To have everybody engaged in trying to out-think everybody else about what’s going to be bought next or be fashionable next, is a very dysfunctional system.

这是一个疯狂的、功能失调的体系。在一个更理想的世界中，我们不会有那么多短期赚钱的激励措施。让每个人都试图超越其他人去预测下一个交易的热点或下一个流行趋势，是一个非常不正常的体系。

I don’t think you are going to have great improvements in governance by tinkering with the rules about proxies, when the whole damned system is fundamentally flawed, when people have these perverse motives.

当整个该死的系统本质上就有问题，人们又有着这些扭曲的动机时，我不相信通过微调代理规则就能在治理上取得重大进步。

I look at the votes on these. Everybody votes with ISS (all these institutions) and they’ve got formulas, and what they are is pro-takeover. If you’re a money manager, and you get four takeovers in a year out of your portfolios, that may be the difference between fired and not being fired.

我审视这些投票情况。每个人都跟随 ISS（所有这些机构）的投票指导，他们有一套公式，而这些公式实际上是倾向于支持接管的。如果你是一名资金管理人，你的投资组合一年内发生了四次接管，那可能就会决定你是被解雇还是保住工作。

So, the institutions like takeovers, but I’m not sure we want everything in America taken over by Carl Icahn.

因此，这些机构喜欢接管，但我不确定我们是否希望美国的一切都被卡尔·伊坎接管。

Would that be a great outcome for the country? I don’t think so.

这对国家来说会是一个好结果吗？我不这么认为.

I think the whole subject of proper governance is a really important subject, but I would argue that the compensation system is crazy, the institutional money-management system is crazy, and the rewards system is quite unfair in many cases. People are voting themselves money they’re not entitled to.

我认为适当的治理是一个非常重要的议题，但我会说薪酬体系是疯狂的，机构资金管理体系是疯狂的，而且在很多情况下，奖励体系是非常不公平的。人们在为自己投票，以获取他们本不应得的资金。

It’s not a good system, and I don’t think there’s any easy fix. Well, there is an easy fix, but it’s not one that would be easy to get through by vote.

这不是一个好的体系，我不认为有简单的解决方案。好吧，有一个简单的解决方案，但它不是那种可以通过投票轻易通过的。

Shareholder: Markets are making five year highs, what do you think …

股东：市场正在达到五年来的高点，你对此有何看法？

Munger: Well, I’m not shocked that the market goes up after a long period after which it has gone down, particularly with long-term interest rates that are practically zero. I’m not surprised. That’s one of the reasons that they would journalize a bunch of securities and whatnot. That doesn’t mean that we’ve reached the hog-heaven condition for the investor.

芒格：市场在经历了长时间的下跌之后出现上涨，我并不感到意外，尤其是在长期利率几乎为零的情况下。我并不感到惊讶。这也是他们持有大量证券等资产的原因之一。但这并不意味着投资者已经进入了理想的投资环境。

It just may mean that common stocks are a better bet than long-term bonds, but that doesn’t guarantee wonderful results for everybody in common stocks.

这可能只是表明，相较于长期债券，普通股可能是一个更好的选择，但这并不保证所有普通股投资者都能获得出色的回报。

I think the idea that everybody is going to have wonderful results from investing is inherently crazy. Nobody thinks everybody is going to have wonderful results from playing poker.

我认为，认为每个人都能通过投资获得好收益的想法本身就是不切实际的。没有人会认为每个人都能在玩扑克牌时获得好结果。

In the end, the wealth of the country is based on the productivity of the country, which only advances so fast. Of course, if you pay more and more people for not working, it’s hard to see how that grows the productivity of the country.

归根结底，一个国家的财富是建立在其生产力之上的，而生产力的提升速度是有限的。当然，如果给越来越多不工作的人发工资，就很难看出这如何能够促进国家的生产力增长。

Shareholder: You talked about modern institutional money management. How would you contrast that system with what you were doing in the late 1960s, your mindset and how you went about your business?

股东：你提到了现代的机构投资管理。你如何将当前的系统与你在 1960 年代末期所采取的方法、你的思维模式以及你处理业务的方式进行对比？

Munger: Well, there were some delusions we avoided. Other people thought that you hired very intelligent people, who’d worked very hard to learn their trade and taken tests making them certified whatevers, and then you organized them into specialties. One guy would study chemicals, one would study autos, one would study this and that. So, you had 100 different specialists in 100 different fields, all with high IQs and all working very hard, that they could invest in big common stocks using this wonderful system, and gain an advantage over other people.

芒格：我们避开了一些幻觉。其他人认为，你聘请了一些非常聪明的人，他们非常努力地学习了他们的专业，通过了各种测试，成为了认证的专家，然后你将他们按照专业进行分组。一个人研究化工，一个人研究汽车，一个人研究这个，另一个人研究那个。所以，你有了 100 个不同领域的 100 个专家，他们都有很高的智商，都非常努力地工作，他们可以使用这个出色的系统来投资大型普通股，获得比其他人更多的优势。

There’s only one trouble with this idea. It doesn’t work. It’s just too competitive. Too many people are trying to do the same thing. We had a different idea. We always thought that a good investment idea was hard to get, usually, and that by working hard, you might get a few of them.

这个想法只有一个问题。它不奏效。竞争太激烈了。太多的人在做同样的事情。我们有不同的想法。我们总是认为，一个好的投资点子通常很难得到，通常情况下，只有通过勤奋工作，你才可能捕捉到少数几个。

We never had the idea that just by hiring smart people, we could be good at understanding 5,000 different securities or even 100 different securities. I just had the idea that maybe we could find a few, often enough so it would serve our lifetime needs, and we were patient and we waited and we occasionally made a few investment decisions.

我们从未认为，仅仅通过聘请聪明人，我们就能擅长理解 5000 种不同的证券，那怕是 100 种不同的证券。我只是认为，也许我们可以找到一些，这足以满足我们一生的投资需求，我们保持耐心，我们等待，我们偶尔会做出一些投资决策。

In my personal accounts, guess how many securities transactions I had last year.

在我的个人账户里，猜猜我去年进行了多少次证券交易。

Zero

零次。

We are not normal.

我们不是普通人。

Can you imagine trying to run an investment management operation with transactions of zero? Anyway, we do have differences, a few decent places. What do the Munger’s own?

你能想象在没有进行任何交易的情况下经营一家投资管理公司吗？无论如何，我们确实有一些不同之处，一些值得称道的地方。芒格家族拥有什么？

They own Berkshire, they own Costco, and they own a bunch of Asian securities with a guy who’s like Charlie Munger born again, except he’s younger (presume he’s talking about Li Lu). Do I need more diversification. But if you went to the average school in your district and said, “Is this a suitable investment decision?, they’d say the man who made that decision is crazy. That is not the way to intelligently invest money. I guess I just give all the money back. I didn’t do it in the right way.

他们持有伯克希尔·哈撒韦的股份，他们持有好市多的股份，还握有一堆亚洲的股票，这些证券由一个像是年轻版查理·芒格的人管理（这里他可能在谈论李录）。我需要更多的多元化吗？但是如果你走进你所在地区的任何一所学校，问：“这是一个合适的投资决策吗？”他们会说做出这个决定的人疯了。这不是一个明智的投资方式。那么我猜我最好把投资的钱全部退还。我没有以正确的方式进行投资。

But it is the right way. It’s the other people who are wrong. If you want to get rich, you’ll need a few decent ideas, where you really know what you’re doing. Then you’ve got to have the courage to stick with them and take the ups and downs. Not very complicated, and it’s very old fashioned. Haven’t I described (Rudyard) Kipling’s poem, “If?” “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs,” and so on and so on, and if you do this, “You’ll be a man, my son.” I think Kipling’s poem, If, is a great poem, even if it did come from a man who has somewhat irritated the English departments of the world by also saying, “A woman’s only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.” He’s not politically correct. He was right — So, I’m saying what still works is “if.”

但其实这是正确的方式。其他人才是错了。如果你想变得富有，你需要一些你真正了解的好点子。然后你必须有勇气坚持这些想法，无论市场如何波动。这并不复杂，而且非常传统。难道我没有引用过鲁德亚德·吉卜林的诗《如果》吗？“如果你能在周围人都失去理智的时候保持冷静，”等等，等等，如果你能做到这一点，“你将是一个真正的男子汉，我的孩子。”我认为吉卜林的《如果》是一首伟大的诗，尽管它出自一个因说过“女人只是女人，但一支好雪茄是一次享受”而让全世界的英语簇系感到不悦的人。他在政治上不正确。但他是对的——所以，我说的是“如果”仍然有效。

Shareholder: Quick follow-up there…

股东：接着刚才的话题……

Munger: It’s very old-fashioned. How could you teach it in business school? They teach that you have to have reverse rotation, sector rotation, God knows what in the hell they were teaching. I never paid any attention. Zero.

芒格：这很传统。你怎么能把它放在商学院的课程里？他们教的是要进行逆向投资，行业轮动，天晓得他们还教了些什么。我从来没关注过。完全没有。

Shareholder: You talk about patience and long periods of dullness.

股东：你谈到了耐心和长时间的无所事事。

Munger: Yes.

芒格：没错。

Shareholder: What did your process look like back then at Pacific Coast Stock Exchange on a daily basis?

股东：在太平洋海岸证券交易所，你那时候的日常操作是怎样的？

Munger: Oh, we had specialist but somebody else was doing that. I wasn’t making those decisions. That was just grunt work to make a little money, making a market. In those days, we were opportunistic and needed a few things. When we had a good idea, we went at it rather heavily. Sometimes we would actually trust an individual.

芒格：哦，我们有专门的人员，但那是其他人的职责。我并没有参与制定那些决策。那仅仅是为了赚取些许收入而做的辛苦活，即市场交易。在那个时候，我们很会把握机会，需要一些特定的资源。一旦我们发现了一个好机会，我们就会全力以赴。有时候，我们确实会信任某个人。

When I went into that deal with Diversified Retail, that was one of the dumbest things that Warren and I ever did. We both went in on four department stores in Baltimore below the liquidating value of the company, Ben Graham style. We bought it half using bank loans from local people. I remember my share. I had 10 percent. It was $600,000.

当我参与到多元零售的交易时，那是我和沃伦做过的最愚蠢的事情之一。我们都投资了巴尔的摩的四家百货商店，价格低于公司的清算价值，这是典型的本·格雷厄姆风格。我们用当地银行的贷款购买了一半股份。我记得我的份额，我占了 10%，那是 60 万美元。

As the ink dried on the papers, we realized how ghastly the competition was, and how much capital to operate a department store, and that we were not that much better or different from the other stores, and that maybe department stores did not have the world’s greatest future. At least we had enough sense to quickly change our minds and managed to scrabble out of that having lost a few hundred thousand dollars out of $6 million we put up.

当我们签署的文件上的墨水还没干的时候，我们就意识到了竞争的残酷，以及经营一家百货商店需要多少资本，我们认识到，与其他商店相比，我们并没有太多的优势或独特之处，而且可能百货商店的未来并不是世界上最光明的。至少我们足够明智，能够迅速改变我们的想法，并设法从中脱身，我们投入 600 万美元，损失了几十万美元。

But in the course of doing that, other opportunities had come to us, and we borrowed the $6 million with no covenant. Now we had a huge panic. So we use all this capital, including the borrowed covenant, to buy all these ridiculously-priced securities, including some of our own. And so that failed, stupid investment, if you traced it through, it’s so many billions of dollars of Berkshire stock, you can hardly believe it.

但在那过程中，其他机会也出现了，我们没有附加任何条件就借到了 600 万美元。现在我们面临了巨大的恐慌。所以我们利用所有这些资本，包括没有附加条件的借款，去购买所有这些定价荒谬的证券，其中也包括我们自己的一些股份。所以，如果追溯那个失败的、愚蠢的投资，它现在变成了价值数十亿美元的伯克希尔公司股票，这简直令人难以置信。

To some extent, it requires scrambling, it requires the ability to change your mind. At least I’d chosen my associate. I thought that I had an associate that thought he could fix this department store. Warren never had one second — The minute he recognized what we were in, we both wanted out, which was the correct solution.

在某种程度上，这需要你灵活应对，需要你有能力改变想法。至少我选择了我的合作伙伴。我以为我有一个合作伙伴能够解决这家百货商店的问题。沃伦从来没有犹豫过——他一意识到我们陷入了什么境地，我们都想要退出，这是正确的解决方案。

So all these things are lessons to you, but it’s this old-fashioned stuff that really works. Now, I don’t say it works to create a Money Minute, unless you have one like Mohnish’s (Pabrai), which is a copy of the Berkshire Hathaway system down to the last comma.By the way, he’s rich and happy. Look at him.

这些经历都是宝贵教训，但真正起作用的还是那些传统的智慧。现在，我并不是说这种方法能迅速创造财富，除非你拥有像莫尼什·帕布莱那样的模式，他几乎完美复制了伯克希尔·哈撒韦的体系，细致到每一个标点。顺便提一下，他既富有又幸福。看看他就知道了。

He copied a good system. How many people do? There are not that many Mohnish’s. The system still works. You can even use it to create a money management business. You’ve got a man right in the front row who demonstrates it can be done.

他采用了一套出色的体系。但有多少人会这么做呢？莫尼什这样的人并不多见。这套体系依然奏效。你甚至能够利用它来开展资产管理业务。在前排就座的这位男士就是最好的证明。

Shareholder: Could you give an example of an investment decision

股东：你能分享一个投资决策的例子吗……

Munger: Well, I don’t want to rehash the old investment decisions, but I’ll rehash a failure, because I believe in rubbing my noses in failure. Some of this is in Poor Charlie’s Almanac. This is one of the dumbest investment decisions I ever made. After I’d wound up (the Munger investing partnership), I was a well to do fellow, but I wasn’t, which I really wanted to do. I had enough so I didn’t really have to work, but I didn’t have enough so I could do any damn thing I pleased.

芒格：嗯，我不想重复过去的投资决策，但我会说一个失败的例子，因为我相信我们应该正视失败。《穷查理宝典》里有些内容就是关于这个的。这是我做过的最愚蠢的投资决策之一。当我结束了（芒格投资合伙企业）后，我算是个富裕的人，但并不是真正意义上的富有，那并不是我真正想要的。我的钱足够我不用工作，但还不够我随心所欲地做任何事情。

A guy called me offering me 300 shares of Bell Rich Oil and I had the cash and I said, “Sure, I’ll take the listing.”

有个人打电话给我，想卖给我 300 股贝尔里奇石油公司的股票，我手头有钱，我就说，“当然，我会买。”

It was selling there maybe a fifth of what the oil companies were. They owned the oil field. So I bought it. Then he called me back and said, “I’ve got 1,500 more.” I didn’t have the money on hand. I had to sell something. I think about it and I said, “Hold it for 10 minutes and I’ll call you back.” I thought about it for 10 minutes and called him back and didn’t buy it. Well, Bell Rich Oil sold about for 35 times the price I was going to pay within a year and a half.

它的售价可能只有其他石油公司价格的五分之一。他们拥有油田。所以我买了。然后他又打电话给我，说，“我还有 1500 股。”我手头没有那么多现金。我得卖掉一些其他资产。我想了想，然后对他说，“等 10 分钟，我再给你回电话。”我思考了 10 分钟，然后回电话给他，决定不买。结果，不到一年半的时间里，贝尔里奇石油的售价竟是我当初打算支付价格的 35 倍。

If I had made the different decision, the Mungers would be ahead by way of more than a billion dollars, as I sit here now. To count the opportunity cost, it was a real bonehead decision. There was no risk. I could have borrowed. There wasn’t the slightest in borrowing money to buy Bell Rich Oil. The worst that would happen was I would get out with a small profit. It was a really dumb decision.

如果我做了不同的决定，芒格家族现在可能会多出十几亿美元的财富。考虑到机会成本，那真是一个愚蠢的决定。其实没有任何风险，我本可以借钱的。借钱买贝尔里奇石油公司没有任何问题。最坏的情况也不过是我小赚一笔退出。那真是一个愚蠢的决定。

You don’t get that many great opportunities in a lifetime. When life finally gave me one, I blew it. So I tell you that story to say you’re no different from me. You’re not going to get that many really good ones — don’t blow your opportunities. They’re not that common, the ones that are clearly recognizable with virtually no downside and big upsides.

人的一生中不会有太多这样的机会。当生活给了我这样一个机会时，我却错过了。所以我讲这个故事是为了告诉你们，你们和我没什么两样。你们不会遇到太多真正好的——不要错过你们的机会。那些几乎没有任何下跌风险还有着巨大上行空间的机会并不常见。

Don’t be too timid, when you really have a cinch. Go at life with a little courage. There’s an old word commonly used in the south that I never hear anybody use now, except myself, and that’s gumption. I would say what you need is intelligence plus gumption.

当你确信无疑时，不要太胆怯。要有点勇气去面对生活。南方过去常用一个词，我现在很少听到别人用，除了我自己，那就是“胆识”。我认为你们需要的是智慧加上胆识。

Shareholder：question on BYD

股东：关于比亚迪的问题……

Munger: BYD, Li Lu is in the back standing up. Li Lu, come up here. This is the man who got me into the BYD.

芒格：比亚迪，李录现在就站在后面。李录，请上前来。就是这位先生引导我投资了比亚迪。

Li Lu: What do you want me to say?

李录：你想要我谈些什么？

Munger: Like it is. Why did you buy BYD when you did?

芒格：实话实说。你当时为什么要买比亚迪？

Li Lu: It really is a quite unusually talented group of people who were able to manage, to solve a problem like no other group of people I’ve ever seen. Like all other talented people, they have their ups and downs. But in the first 15 years since BYD was founded, he has 15 years uninterrupted period of time of compounding at about 75 percent annually. It’s nearly doubled every year for the 15 years in a row, for the first 15 years, with very, very little capital. They originally maybe $300,000 US, and these money twice, and altogether a few hundred million by the time they reached multiple billions in revenue.

李录：这真的是一群非常罕见的才华横溢的人，他们管理和解决问题的能力是我前所未见的。就像所有才华横溢的人一样，他们也有高潮和低谷。但在比亚迪成立的前 15 年里，他们连续 15 年实现了大约 75% 的年复合增长率。在最初的 15 年里，他们的业绩差不多每年翻一番，而且几乎不需要什么资本。他们最初可能只有 300,000 美元，这些资金翻了一番，到他们达到数十亿美元的收入时，总共是几亿美元。

Of course, that growth was accumulated with all sorts of different problems. Some of you who follow the stock, you have seen that in the last few years. And just like they have always done, they have dealt with it just the way it is.They have put their heads in the sand and solve the problem, one-by-one, and slowly but surely, after three years, they solved most of your problem. They’re now back on their feet and strong.

当然，这种增长伴随着各种各样的问题。一些关注股票的人，你们在过去几年里已经看到了。就像他们一直以来所做的那样，他们直面问题，一个接一个地解决，虽然缓慢但确定无疑，在三年后，他们解决了大部分问题。现在他们重新站稳脚跟，变得更加强大。

And the speed of which, they really mastered the technology. It’s just unprecedented. I’ve never seen anybody like it. For example, they got into the auto business in 2003, and produced their first car in 2005. That’s only seven years ago.

他们真正掌握技术的速度是空前的。我从未见过像他们这样的人。例如，他们在 2003 年进入汽车行业，在 2005 年生产了他们的第一辆汽车。那是七年前的事了。

Munger: And they did this with almost no capital.

芒格：他们几乎没花什么资本就做到了。

Li Lu: Little capital.

李录：资本非常少。

Munger: And over our objection.

芒格：而且还是在我们反对的情况下。

Li Lu: They competed with everybody. The Chinese auto market is about as open a market as any market in the world, better than US. Every auto maker on the whole planet is really competing there. They all have much richer capital base, longer history, well recognized brand name and superior technology. Yet this little company was able to really stand on its feet, and now they’re probably selling 500,000 cars a year. But more importantly, they have a mastery of the state of the art technology from the traditional auto while really pioneering all the technology know how’s of the new cars and electric cars.

李录：他们与所有人竞争。中国的汽车市场是世界上最开放的市场之一，比美国的市场还要开放。全世界的每一个汽车制造商都在那里真正地竞争。它们都有着更雄厚的资本、更长久的历史、更知名的品牌和更先进的技术。然而这个小公司却能够真正地站稳脚跟，现在他们可能每年销售 50 万辆汽车。但更重要的是，他们掌握了传统汽车的最新技术，同时也在真正地引领新能源汽车和电动汽车的所有技术。

In a few years, all of the BYD cars are likely to be either hybrid, or platinum hybrid or electric, and also equipped with the state of the art technology from the traditional combustion engine, and also promising efficiency.

几年之内，所有的比亚迪汽车可能会是混合动力车、白金混合动力车或纯电动汽车，并且配备了传统内燃机的最新技术，同时确保了出色的能效。

It is not a normal feat. I cannot find it in any other group in this field.

这不是轻易能做到的。我在这个行业中找不到其他任何团队能够做到这一点。

Munger: The Korean’s did the same thing.

芒格：韩国人也做到了同样的事情。

Li Lu: The Korean’s did it primarily on the traditional auto, and in a term, in a way to catch up with the traditional auto, but they have not, in a sense, pioneered a new technology pointing in a new direction. They just basically matched everybody else, that surpass in a certain area, but it’s no kind of making a new path. They also have a whole bunch of other driven areas that have creditable promises. That was really the reason we’re all quite enthused about it.

李录：韩国人主要在传统汽车领域做到了这一点，并且在某种程度上，是为了赶上传统汽车的发展步伐，并没有真正引领新技术的潮流。他们基本上只是模仿了其他人，可能在某个特定领域超越了别人，但并没有真正走出一条新路。他们也有许多其他有潜力的领域。这正是我们所有人都对比亚迪感到非常兴奋的真正原因。

Munger: These are very unusual people. This is the son of pheasant who got through engineering school, what with the aid of a brother, and got a PhD in engineering at a young age, and so is a very talented human being. Of course, they are hiring young talented Chinese engineers. They are hiring them by the thousands. How many employees does BYD have now?

芒格：这些人非常不平凡。这位是农家子弟，依靠兄弟的帮助完成了工程学院的学业，并在很年轻的时候就获得了工程学博士学位，是一个非常有才华的人。当然，他们正在招聘年轻的中国工程师。他们正在大量招聘。比亚迪现在有多少员工？

Li Lu: About 180,000 people.

李录：大约有 180,000 人。

Man 4: They are young Chinese. I don’t want to compete with 180,000 young Chinese.

第4人：他们是充满活力的中国青年。我可不想与 18 万名这样的年轻人竞争。

I’d rather bet with them. Anyway, you ask a question, I think? You’ll have it direct from the horse’s mouth.

我宁愿选择站在他们这边。不管怎样，你想提个问题，不是吗？你将亲耳听到第一手的信息。

Shareholder Question: I was wondering when the electric car might make it to the United States. Can you expand on that?

股东：关于比亚迪，您能否阐述一下电动汽车何时可能进入美国市场？

Li Lu: Well, they have basically, I think correctly, chosen to focus, and going to treat the car effort into public transportation. Transportation rather than probably the largest contribution across the emission of pollution, and also they really would utilize the data on the battery, because they are on the road all the time. As far as I can tell, their battery probably has the longest hours on the road as we are speaking. There are probably tens of millions of hours accumulated on the road. Therefore the longer they run, if their batteries are good enough to run for a long time and of course after 30 million miles on the road,they have proved that point.

李录：他们基本上已经正确地决定专注于公共交通领域，而不是私家车，这可能对减少污染排放有更大的贡献。他们能够充分利用电池数据，因为这些车辆几乎一直在运行。据我所知，他们的电池可能是目前运行里程最长的。已经有数千万小时的运行积累。因此，随着运行时间的增加，如果它们的电池足够好，能够持续运行很长时间，在经过 3000 万英里的行驶之后，它们已经证实了这一点。

The longer you ride, the better and superior economics of the electric car has really become. At least in China, the differences of the electricity and the gasoline is about 80 percent off. That actually is here too, and in Europe, the economics are even more superior because of the surplus taxes on gasoline.

你行驶的时间越长，电动汽车的经济性就越好。至少在中国，电力和汽油的成本差距大约是 80%。美国也是，而在欧洲，由于对汽油征收额外税费，经济性更加显著。

Who is the 80 percent of the savings operation? The longer you’re on the road, the more savings you have. In fact, if you use for public transportation, for taxis or electric buses, just the saving itself within the several years could’ve produced multiple cars, given the expectancy of the battery life.

谁将从这 80% 的节省中受益？你使用的时间越长，你节省的就越多。实际上，如果你用于公共交通，比如出租车或电动公交，仅仅几年的节省就足以购买多辆这样的车，这是基于电池寿命的预期。

At least the company believes that the battery would last longer than the car itself. If that were the case, they would be able to make multiple…the savings itself would pay for multiple cars within the life. So much so that the Chinese Development Bank recently have committed about 30 billion Chinese dollars in loan to finance a package that people can really pay to zero down. No down payment, to purchase cars and use only the equivalents of gas free cost to pay for the entire mortgage.

至少公司相信电池的寿命会比汽车本身更长。如果是这样，他们将能够在汽车的使用寿命内，通过节省的资金购买多辆汽车。因此，中国开发银行最近已经承诺了大约 300 亿元人民币的贷款，用于资助一个计划，人们可以真正地无需首付购车，仅使用相当于汽油费用的资金来偿付整个贷款。

They calculate, in the end, they will still make a profit, a large profit. If that becomes successful, it would really lay out a new business model for electrifying public transportation.

他们得出结论，最终他们仍将获得利润，而且是巨额利润。如果这一模式成功，它实际上将为公共交通的电动化开辟一种全新的商业模式。

Given the air quality of Beijing and all the other cities in China, China has 7 of the 10 worst polluted cities on the whole planet. Public transportation contributes roughly a third of the emission. Electrifying the public transportation with BYD has proved A) doable, B) profitable, and C) actually good and providing enormous social benefit.

考虑到北京以及中国其他城市的空气品质，中国有7个城市位列全球污染最严重的10个城市之中。公共交通产生的排放约占总量的三分之一。比亚迪推动的公共交通电动化已经证明是A）可行的，B）有利可图的，以及C）实际上对社会有益的。

This is a line they’re correctly pushing in that direction, not only in the US, but not only in China, but all over Europe and all over South and North America. They have several dozen trials going on all over the major capitals of the world, as we’re speaking.

这是他们正确推进的方向，不仅在美国，也不仅在中国，而是遍及整个欧洲，以及南美和北美。就在我们谈话的此刻，他们正在全球的主要首都进行数十项试验。

Munger: Yes, but tell them about Beijing, because this is very interesting. Beijing probably has the worst air pollution in the world. People are dying from pollution. Of course, it’s a huge metropolitan area. And the net purchases of BYD electric taxis and buses in Beijing is zero.

芒格：是的，但是跟他们讲讲北京的情况，这非常有意思。北京可能拥有世界上最严重的空气污染问题。人们因污染而死亡。当然，北京是一个庞大的都市区域。而比亚迪在北京的电动出租车和公交车的净采购量为零。

But we like that, because that leaves a lot to be done. Of course, what happens is the Chinese local governments have enormous autonomy. They favor the people that are providing jobs in Beijing, making standard automobiles.

但我们对此感到满意，因为这意味着目标市场还很大。实际情况是，中国的地方政府拥有极大的自主权。他们倾向于支持那些在北京提供就业机会、生产传统汽车的公司。

Yet if more and more people are dying, is that going to last forever?

但如果死亡人数不断增加，这种情况会一直持续下去吗？

Our bet would be that one way or another, China will get a lot more electric transportation and public vehicles in its heavily polluted cities. BYD is better at that than other people, and they may have quite the market. There are quite a few Chinese in some big polluted city.

我们的猜测是，无论如何，中国在其严重污染的城市中将会有更多的电动交通工具和公共交通车辆。比亚迪在这方面比其他公司做得更好，他们可能会占据相当大的市场份额。在一些污染严重的大城市中，人口数量很大。

It’s a lot like the Daily Journal. It’s an upside that you’re really not paying for. We bought those little public notice rags, we got an upside that we weren’t paying for. That’s what we’re doing. But that’s more than you probably anticipated when you asked the question of BYD, and you had the man in America, who probably knows more about BYD than anybody else, to tell you what you want to know.

这有点像《每日期刊》。这是一个你实际上并未兑现的潜在增值。我们购买了那些小型的公告报纸，我们获得了一个我们并未兑现的潜在增值。这就是我们的策略。但这可能比你提问比亚迪时预期的要多，你面前的这位先生，他可能比任何人都更了解比亚迪，能够告诉你你想知道的一切。

(missed a chunk here… )

That reminds me very much of a man I knew when I first came to California. The name was B. B. Robinson. In the pool operations of the late 1920s, he was a very young man.

这让我回想起我刚到加州时认识的一个人。他的名字是 B. B. Robinson。在 20 世纪 20 年代末的股市投机操作中，他还是个相当年轻的人。

He scrambled out of the ruin of the great crash with about $10or$11 million in cash and came out to California, where he spent his life doing heavy drinking and chasing young movie stars. Those days the banks were quite serious about the kind of clients they had.

他带着大约 1000 万到 1100 万美元的现金，从那次大崩溃的废墟中脱身而出，并来到加州，过上了追女明星、酗酒无度的生活。那时候，银行对于他们客户的行为非常严格。

The leading banker took him out to lunch and said, “We’re terribly concerned about all this drinking and chasing movie stars and so forth.” B. B. Robinson looked this banker in the eye and he said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t worry.” He said, “My municipal bonds don’t drink.”

一位杰出的银行家请他共进午餐，并说：“您整天酗酒、寻欢作乐，我们很担心。” B. B. Robinson 直视着这位银行家的眼睛回答说：“你放心吧。”他说：“我的市政债券不喝酒。”

In the sense the Daily Journal is like B. B. Robinson, we may have had a little flurry here of venture capital type investment, but we might actually succeed at it, and if we don’t, we still have a lot of municipal bonds that don’t drink.

在这个意义上，每日期刊公司就像 B. B. Robinson 一样，我们可能在这里尝试了一些风险投资，但我们实际上可能会在这方面取得成功，即使我们没有成功，我们仍然拥有许多不会饮酒的市政债券。

We have assets that if this fails, we’re not alone in the world without resources. Yes?

我们有资产，即使这次尝试失败了，我们也不会一无所有。对吗？

Shareholder: Charlie, you mention this idea of gumption — also have the courage to take advantage of things. Can you help us understand just a little bit more about how you balance those two, because from that example — obviously, it would to be aggressive, but there’s also the sense that Berkshire’s always been much more prudent and cautious than others.

股东：查理，你谈到了“胆识”这个概念——也就是抓住机会的勇气。你能不能再向我们解释一下你是如何在这两者之间取得平衡的，因为从那个例子来看——显然需要主动出击，但同时伯克希尔也一直比其他公司更加审慎和谨慎。

Munger: Well, yes. That’s an interesting example. Berkshire, of course, if we behaved like Rupert Murdoch or somebody — that is, we used all the credit we could get all the way — Berkshire would now own the world.

芒格：当然，这是个有趣的例子。如果我们像鲁珀特·默多克那样行事——也就是说，我们尽可能地利用所有可用的信贷——伯克希尔现在可能已经掌控了整个世界。

We have achieved what we’ve achieved with our hands tied behind our back. The reason for that is, of course, is that we have a fiduciary gene. We know the human faces. We trusted Warren when he was young and trusted me when I was young and so forth. In many cases, it’s their main asset in life. We’re just not interested in taking a substantial chance of taking a lot of very decent people back to “Go” so we can have one more zero on our net worth at the time, and they put us under the ground where we can’t come back anyway.

我们所取得的成就，是在自我设限的情况下实现的。这样做的原因，当然是因为我们有一种受托责任的基因。我们了解人性。当沃伦年轻时我们信任他，当我年轻时他们也信任我。在许多情况下，这是他们生活中最重要的资产。我们就是不愿意冒险，就为了在我们的净资产上多添一个零而让许多非常体面的人失去一切，而最终我们也可能颜面扫地，再也无法翻身。

We’re just not going to do it. We are not maximizes in the world of capital — aggrandizement through aggression. But what I did had no risk.

我们就是不打算这么做。我们不是那种在资本世界中通过侵略性行为来最大化利益的人。我不冒险。

There are real risks. We didn’t know the whole damn world was doomed — implode in something really serious in the last crisis. Berkshire was not buying hand over fist with its available resources. It was making sure that Berkshire remained through it no matter how awful the conditions got.

真正的风险是存在的。我们不知道在上一次危机中整个世界是否注定要遭受严重的问题而彻底崩溃。伯克希尔并没有用其可用资源毫无节制地购买。它确保了无论条件多么糟糕，伯克希尔都能度过难关。

Berkshire is a conservative way to face the world. If you want real aggression, why it doesn’t play its hand with that much aggression. It does in cinches. But if there’s real risk, even though the odds are in our favor, we’re not going to play too hard. And that’s just the way it is.

伯克希尔始终保守行事。如果你寻求真正的激进，那么为何它不以那样的激进姿态来行动。在十拿九稳的情况下它会这么做。但如果存在真正的风险，即使胜算在我们这边，我们也不会太拼命。事情就是这样。

What I’m telling you is when it’s virtually a cinch, or it’s in a gamble you can easily afford, and the odds are way in your favor and you know it for sure — I’m just saying don’t be timid. Gurin never needed that advice. He was never timid.

我要告诉你的是，当事情几乎十拿九稳，或者是一场你轻易承受得起的赌博，而且胜算明显在你这边，你对此确信无疑——我只是说不要胆怯。古林从来不需要这样的建议。他从不胆怯。

Shareholder: When Bell Rich Oil goes up 35 times, it’s pretty…I imagine myself have a lot of regret or debilitating. How does one recuperate from something like that? A big missed opportunity?

股东：如果贝尔里奇石油的股价上涨了 35 倍，那真是……我想象自己会感到很遗憾或者很沮丧。一个人怎样才能从这样的失误中恢复过来？一个巨大的错失良机？

Munger: Yeah.

芒格：是的。

Shareholder: How does one recover from that? How do you end up not dwelling on that?

股东：一个人该如何从这样的失误中恢复过来？你如何避免一直对此耿耿于怀？

Munger: You know what Kipling said? Treat those two imposters just the same — success and failure. Of course, there’s going to be some failure in making the correct decisions. Nobody bets a thousand. I think it’s important to review your past stupidities so you are less likely to repeat them, but I’m not gnashing my teeth over it or suffering or enduring it. I regard it as perfectly normal to fail and make bad decisions. I think the tragedy in life is to be so timid that you don’t play hard enough so you have some reverses.

芒格：你知道吉卜林是怎么说的吗？对成功和失败这两个变幻莫测的伙伴一视同仁。当然了，在做出正确决策的过程中难免会遭遇失败。没有人能够百发百中。我认为审视自己过去的错误是很重要的，这样你就不大会重蹈覆辙，但我并不会为此而痛苦不堪或者感到煎熬。我认为失败和做出糟糕的决策是人生常态。我认为人生真正的悲剧是过于胆怯，以至于你不敢全力以赴去争取，这样你就不会遭遇挫折。

Shareholder: You commented on the challenges that the newspaper industry and other forms of print media. Can you comment on Berkshire’s investments in the newspaper industry as of late?

股东：您对报业和其他印刷媒体所面临的挑战提出了看法。您能否就伯克希尔近期在报业的投资情况发表一些评论？

Munger: Well, sure. I’m glad to. The papers that have the best hands economically are the ones that have a real community acceptance, that are part of the warp and woof of the community, like in the small towns. Those are going down slower and are proving to be better investments than the big city dailies, with the expensive difficulty of carrying great heavy stuff through big cities and so on and so on.

芒格：当然可以。我很乐意讨论这个问题。经济上最稳定的报纸是那些真正得到社区支持的报纸，它们是社区生活的一部分，比如在小城镇中。这些报纸的衰退速度较慢，并且相较于那些在大城市中发行的大型日报，它们被证明是更好的投资选择。大型日报面临着在大城市中分发大量报纸的昂贵成本等问题。

That’s by and large what Berkshire is buying — the entrenched, small, local papers.

总的来说，伯克希尔购买的正是这些深植于地方的小型报纸。

We’re trying to buy them, and we don’t mind something that is declining. After all, everybody that buys an oil field is buying something he expects to decline in due course to zero. They just expect to make enough money out of it to compensate for the money they’re employing.

我们正在尝试购买这类报纸，我们并不介意它们正在经历衰退。毕竟，每个购买油田的人都明白，他们预想到最终产量会逐渐减少到零。他们只是希望从中获得足够的回报，以补偿他们的投资。

That’s the way we feel about most small newspapers. We think we’re very likely to get our money back with a modest rate of return at the worst. And the stuff we’re buying. The reason it’s available is other people just — the idea of a lousy investment. Doesn’t appeal to them. But — we like newspapers.

我们对大多数小型报纸的看法也是如此。我们认为，即使在最坏的情况下，我们也很可能会收回我们的投资，并获得适度的回报。我们购买的这些报纸之所以值得，是因为其他人认为它们是糟糕的投资——这种想法对他们没有吸引力。但我们喜欢报纸。

Who can tell? They have such a wonderful history and make such a wonderful contribution to civilization. I think if you buy them on the basis where you’re very unlikely to get hurt very much. We’ve got a system for managing a lot of very high-grade people, namely the world of people. Let us note. The people were buying you’re perfectly decent people who stay on, so we’re glad to buy newspapers.

谁能预知未来呢？报纸有着辉煌的历史，对文明做出了巨大的贡献。我认为，如果你基于不太可能遭受重大损失的原则来购买报纸，我们有一套系统来管理很多高素质的人才，也就是报纸行业的人才。值得注意的是，我们购买的报纸背后的人们都是相当体面的人，他们会留下来，所以我们很高兴投资报纸。

But it’s not that newspapers have some fabulous growth, high growth future. Of course, they’re an object lesson of the hazards of leverage if you get a big technical development that goes against you. When this alternative technology came in, it just destroyed capital values like you can’t believe.

但这不是因为报纸有着某种神话般的增长前景。当然，如果出现了对你不利的重大技术发展，它们就会成为杠杆风险的警示案例。当这种替代技术出现时，它摧毁资本价值的能力将超出你的想象。

Even the New York Times — for which you’ll soon be paying four dollars or five dollars at an airport if you’re not already — has a pretty modest prospect. I think it will continue to make pretty good money as far ahead as you can see, but I don’t it’s going to gallop to the heavens or anything like that. There are very few New York Times, just in terms of that a niche, where people won’t four dollars or five dollars for it in an airport.

即便是《纽约时报》——你不久后可能就得在机场为它支付四美元或五美元，如果你还没有这么做的话——它的前景也是相当有限的。我认为它将能够持续赚取相当可观的利润，至少在可预见的未来是这样，但我不认为它会突飞猛进或有类似的表现。在这样一个细分市场中，很少有像《纽约时报》这样的报纸，人们愿意在机场为其支付四美元或五美元。

I think newspapers as economic entities have way worse prospects than they used to.

我认为，报纸作为经济实体的前景比以往任何时候都要暗淡。

Believe me, Berkshire’s not buying these things expecting some bonanza. I don’t think there’s any foreclosure boom to create a sudden ton of lovely money for all of Berkshire’s newspapers. It’s a decent investment and it’s responsible behavior. We have tons of money. It’s just costing us zero to borrow. I don’t think there’s anything useful to you in our newspaper purchases.

相信我，伯克希尔购买这些报纸并不是期望会有意外的大丰收。我不认为会有任何突然的繁荣为我们所有的报纸带来大量的财富。这是一项稳健的投资，是负责任的行为。我们有大量的资金，而且我们的借款成本几乎为零。我不认为我们购买报纸的行为对你们有太多价值。

Shareholder: Yeah. Two quick questions about the investment portfolio of Daily Journal. Who’s going to manage your investment portfolio when you’re not managing it? And the second question is how come you’ve chosen not to tell us what’s in the investment portfolio?

股东：是的。关于每日期刊的投资组合，我有两个问题。首先，一旦你不再亲自管理，将由谁来负责管理这个投资组合？其次，你为何决定不向我们公开投资组合的具体构成？

Munger: Well, look. You can figure it out anyway, but we have a general attitude that, we will tell people what we hold and why we do it, because we don’t want to buy more.

芒格：嗯，反正你迟早会弄清楚的，但我们通常的做法是，我们会告诉人们我们持有什么以及我们为什么这么做，因为我们不想再买入。

We don’t want to sell. We don’t want to be talking about our investments any more than we have to. Berkshire does the same thing. You shouldn’t be surprised.

我们也不想卖出。我们不想过多谈论我们的投资。伯克希尔也是这么做的。你不应该对此感到惊讶。

End of the day, it is not…If I thought that portfolio needed a lot of management, we wouldn’t be having it. Like B. B. Robinson’s mom said, “Don’t drink.” That portfolio’s like to do well when all of us are dead.

最终，如果我认为那个投资组合需要大量的管理，我们就不会持有它。就像 B. B. Robinson 的母亲所说，“不要喝酒。”那个投资组合即使在我们所有人都不在了之后，也会表现得很好。

Shareholder: In spite of your comment about not knowing who competes with BYD employees, can you share or do you have to respect the manufacturing …

股东：尽管你谈到了不清楚比亚迪的竞争对手是谁，你能分享一些相关信息吗？或者你是否需要遵守制造业的某些保密规定？

Munger: Manufacturing what?

芒格：制造业什么？

Shareholder: Just the manufacturing industry in this country.

股东：我指的是这个国家的制造业。

Munger: Well, of course, manufacturing has gotten way more competition than it used to have — a lot of it from China. It’s been devastating. One of Berkshire’s greatest mistakes was when we gave two percent of Berkshire for a wonderful shoe business in Maine, which was the wonderful, most trusted supplier of J. C. Penney and so on and so on. Basically I would say we gave two percent of Berkshire. What we got was hardly anything.

芒格：当然，制造业现在比过去面临更多的竞争——很多竞争来自中国。这种竞争是毁灭性的。伯克希尔曾经犯过一个巨大的错误，那就是我们用公司 2% 的股份换取了缅因州一家出色的鞋业公司，它曾是 J. C. Penney 等公司非常信赖的供应商。基本上，我们给出的是伯克希尔的 2%，但我们得到的几乎一文不值。

It was a big mistake. On the other hand, it just impaired Berkshire’s performance by two percent once in one year out of many, so while we remember the mistake we made in the hope of not repeating it. In the hope of not repeating it, it wasn’t that they could deal in terms of the outcome, even though it was a true opportunity cost loss was enormous.

这是一个重大的失误。然而，这只在很多年中的某一年里一次性地影响了伯克希尔 2% 的表现，所以我们记得我们犯的这个错误，希望以后不会再犯。希望不再重蹈覆辙，并不是说他们能够根据结果进行交易，尽管这确实是一个巨大的机会成本损失。

Berkshire got clobbered on a Chinese competition in shoes. Chinese had armies of young people engaged in subsistence agriculture. They were disciplined, organized young people. Sort of a Confucian family ethic and so on. They’re not a crazy bunch of hippies.

伯克希尔在鞋类业务上受到了中国竞争的严重打击。中国人有大量的年轻人从事基本的农业劳动。他们是有纪律、有组织的，有着某种儒家家庭伦理的年轻一代。他们不是一群疯狂的嬉皮士。

They came into these factories and they learned rapidly how to do a lot of complicated stuff.

他们进入工厂，迅速学会了如何制造许多复杂产品。

The Chinese are very entrepreneurial. For years, they were called the Jews of the Orient.

中国人非常有创业精神。多年来，他们被称为东方的犹太人。

That was a compliment to both people. You take these people who’ve been hobbled by crazy rulers and a Malthusian trap where they had to just keep working like a goat just to stay alive in terms of calories. And unleash them on modern capitalism. You’ve got a very powerful force.

这是对那些人的称赞。他们曾被疯狂的统治者和马尔萨斯陷阱所困扰，不得不像山羊一样辛勤劳作，只是为了维持基本的生存需求。然后，你让他们投身于现代资本主义的洪流中。这就形成了一股非常强大的力量。

Of course, that’s an interesting force. It’s not easy to make a lot of money in China, just because you have that one insight. After all, all kinds of crazy things can happen. China has its fair share of corruption. It takes talent to do well, but there are powerful forces there that were operating, and that are operating.

当然，这是一种有趣的力量。但仅仅因为你有这样的洞察力，并不意味着你就能轻易在中国赚大钱。毕竟，各种稀奇古怪的事情都可能发生。中国同样存在一定程度的腐败问题。要想做得好，需要有才能，但那里确实有一些强大的力量在运作，并且正在发挥作用。

I don’t think, BYD, anyplace else in the world could have done what it did. To go from no capital and no knowledge, except basic engineering, not related to automobiles. To go from no cars to 600,000 cars a year, I don’t they could have done it any place on earth except China. For the right kind of an operator, China creates some remarkable opportunities. But of course, there are never enough of what I call the right kind of an operator.

我不同意，比亚迪在世界其他地方无法复制它在这里的成就。想想看，从没有任何资本和知识，除了基础的工程原理，而且这些原理还与汽车制造无关，到现在能够年产 60 万辆汽车，除了中国，我想世界上任何地方都做不到。对于合适的经营者来说，中国创造了一些非凡的机会。当然，我所说的 “合适的经营者 ”永远是不够的。

I don’t think Wang Chuanfu hardly ever has worked a week that doesn’t have 70 hours of labor in it in his whole life. These are not normal people that make these unusual achievements.

我不认为王传福有哪一周的工作量少于70小时，他这一生都是如此。这些不是普通人，他们取得了非凡的成就。

American manufacture. Well, American manufacturing, of course, doesn’t sound like Wang Chuanfu, does it?

美国制造业。嗯，美国制造业当然听起来和王传福不一样，对吧？

Not that it isn’t good and doesn’t have some talent. It hasn’t had such hardship. It’s a more affluent culture. It’s not the same. I do think there’s a lot of talent in American manufacturers. I looked at some of these companies; take the Otis Elevator company. They are good at the elevator business. The elevators work. They’re serviced and that would be a hard business for somebody to nudge them out of. There’s some great imagination in American manufacturers. I don’t think we’ve lost all of our manufacturing business. Even Boeing, which has made some really stupid mistakes will recover and do well.

并不是说它不优秀，缺乏才华。它没有经历过那样的困难。它是一种更为富足的文化，情况不同。我确实相信美国制造业中有很多才华。我审视了其中一些公司；以奥的斯电梯公司为例。 他们精通电梯业务。电梯运行可靠，并且得到了良好的维护，这使得其他人很难取代他们的地位。在美国制造商中，有一些极具想象力的创新。我不认为我们已经失去了所有的制造业优势。即便是像波音这样犯了一些真正愚蠢错误的公司，也会恢复过来并表现良好。

You’re doing something that’s difficult. It’s creating new airliners from scratch. It’s easy to have the first in, but I don’t think Boeing is dead as a major manufacturer. They’ll solve all their problems.

你正在从事的是一项艰巨的任务。这是从零开始制造全新的客机。成为行业的先行者很容易，但我不认为波音作为一个主要制造商已经倒下。他们会解决他们面临的问题。

If you stop to think about it, Boeing has presided in America over a culture that has created whole years, whole series of years, without a single fatality for a passenger on a commercial airliner. That’s a huge technical achievement. The achievement part of Boeing hasn’t gone away, because they got one big glitch (speaking, I believe, of the recent battery problem).

如果你仔细想想，波音公司在美国引领了一个文化，这个文化创造了连续多年商业航班乘客零死亡率的记录。这是一个巨大的技术成就。波音公司的成就并没有因为一次重大的故障（我相信是指最近的电池问题）而消失。

There’s been a lot of renewals in American manufacturing. You’ve even had some that come back from abroad. It’s a great civilization and it has a lot of achievement still in it.

美国制造业经历了许多复兴。你甚至看到了一些从海外回归的案例。这是一个伟大的文明，它仍然拥有许多成就。

But I don’t think we’ll be making many shoes in America.

但我认为我们不会在美国大量生产鞋子。

Shareholder: I’m just wondering what your thoughts might be on California politics and the propositions and maybe the marginal tax rates that we face here.

股东：我想知道您对加州政治、提案以及我们面临的边际税率有什么看法。

Munger: Well, I think California’s policies have been insane. For a state in the United States not to be user friendly to the elderly rich is a massively stupid thing to do. It’s a mistake that’s not made by Hawaii. It’s not made by Georgia. It’s not made by Florida. It’s not made by lots of other places. They want to be very user friendly to the elderly rich.

芒格：嗯，我认为加州的政策是疯狂的。对于美国的一个州来说，不对富裕的老年人友好，这是极其愚蠢的做法。夏威夷、乔治亚、佛罗里达或其他许多地方不会犯这样的错误。他们希望对富裕的老年人非常友好。

Elderly well to do aren’t committing any crimes. They don’t fill your prisons. They have terrible health, for which the United States government pays. So, you have wonderful employment opportunities for people. They’ve got money that comes in for sure, which they have to spend. They don’t burden the schools, which are very expensive to run.

富裕的老年人不会犯罪，不会被判入狱，他们的健康状况往往不佳，而这部分医疗费用通常由美国政府承担。因此，老年人群体为人们提供了很好的就业机会，他们有稳定的收入来源，而且他们必须消费。他们不会给学校增加负担，而学校运营成本很高。

You’re out of your mind to drive out the elderly well to do and California just keeps thinking that the ideal way for the taxes to drive out the elderly rich. This is insane. I live amid the elderly rich, as you can well imagine. I want to tell you that a lot of them are self-centered and lot of them will leave. They’ve got options. Other elderly rich won’t come. A lot of people won’t come to open manufacturing plants.

驱逐富裕老年人的想法是疯狂的，加州却持续认为通过税收政策驱逐富裕老年人是理想的。这太疯狂了。我也是老年富人，你可以想象。我想说的是，他们当中许多人只关心自己，很多人会选择离开。他们有其他选择。其他富裕的老年人也不会来。很多人不会来这里开设工厂。

California has insane tax policies in a world where other people are smart. You take this room. How many people realize California operated more like Florida in terms of being friendly? I don’t like young people committing a lot of crimes. I don’t like huge costs. By and large, I like the elder generation. They behave pretty well so far. I don’t want to force out the elderly rich.

在一个其它州政策都非常明智的时候，加州的税收政策显然非常愚蠢。看看在座的人，有多少人认为加州政府运营的像佛罗里达州一样的友好？我不喜欢在一个年轻人犯很多罪的环境，我也不喜欢很高昂的税收。大体上，我喜欢年纪大的一代人，他们行为得体。我也不会想把有钱的老年人赶出去。

I think our policies are stark raving mad. This idea of constantly having people game the system to get money without effort, which happens in workman’s compensation insurance and lots of other places, just massive fraud. I believe all that stuff should have been squeezed out and un-encouraged. But the people making money out of the system have huge political power. So, a lot is wrong in California.

我认为我们政策是彻底疯狂的。这种让人不断利用制度而不劳而获的想法，在工人赔偿保险和许多其他地方都存在，这是大规模的欺诈。我认为所有这些都应该被清除并受到遏制。但是，通过体制获益的人有很大的政治权力。所以，加州有很多问题。

On the other hand, a lot is right. I wouldn’t move across the street to save my children $50 million. They’re entitled to what’s left over, so I’m not going to be chased out by California taxes.

另一方面，也有很多是对的。我不会仅仅为了给我的孩子们节省 5000 万美元而搬家。他们有权获得剩余的遗产，因此我不会因为加州的税收而被迫离开。

I recommend that same course of action to all of you. Let the little darlings have what’s left over. But I don’t think we should torture our whole life to make our children’s life as easy as we can possibly make it. This room, the main difficulty’s going to be we make the children’s lives too easy, not that we make it too hard.?

我对你们所有人的建议是，让孩子们享受我们留下的一切。但我不认为我们应该为了让我们的孩子生活尽可能舒适而牺牲我们自己的生活质量。大家主要的问题是我们可能过于溺爱孩子，让他们的生活过于轻松，而不是我们对他们要求太高了。

Shareholder: Charlie, in the past the board has offered some book recommendations. I wonder if they might have books that they might recommend. And yourself?

股东：查理，过去董事会曾推荐过一些书籍。我想知道他们是否有新的书籍推荐，以及您自己有什么推荐？

Munger: Well, I’m reading a physics book that I recommend to everybody. It’s called “Something Out of Nothing,” which is a…It’s one of the most remarkable books I’ve ever read, and something we all ought to know and practically know. But it’s basically…The recent history and outcome in astronomy and astrophysics, and it’s utterly fascinating, at least to me. I think some of you will find it interesting. It is the most remarkable story, and it’s all happened while we were just sitting around securities.

芒格：当然，我正在读一本我推荐给大家的物理书，名为《无中生有》。这是我读过的最杰出的书之一，大家都应该了解并掌握其中的内容。它主要讲述了天文学和天体物理学的近期历史及其成果，至少对我来说，这非常引人入胜。我相信你们中的一些人会觉得它很有趣。这是一个非常了不起的故事，而这一切都发生在我们闲坐讨论证券的时候。

When I was young, they didn’t know why the sun shone. It was Hans Bethe who figured that out. When he did, he figured it out one afternoon. He took his wife out to dinner, and he said, “You’re having dinner with the only guy in the world who knows why the sun shines!”

我年轻的时候，人们还不知道太阳为什么会发光。是汉斯·贝特找到了这个答案。当他搞清楚的时候，是一个下午，他带着妻子去吃晚餐，并说：“你正在和世界上唯一一个知道太阳为什么发光的人共进晚餐！”

But there have been dozens of those achievements. “Something Out of Nothing.” It’s absolutely fascinating. Of course, what’s happened is fascinating, of how something — how could you have a Big Bang and a whole damn universe appear? I guarantee ya some won’t like this book;

这本书里面记载了很多这样类似的发现。《无中生有》真是令人着迷。当然，发生的事情也很吸引人，比如如何从一次大爆炸中出现整个宇宙？我敢保证，有些人可能不会喜欢这本书；

Munger: Well, we ordinarily let these things go on way too long, even though we have a board meeting, because some of you have come a long way, and we’ll do that some, but it won’t be endless.

芒格：我们通常的这个问答环节会持续时间非常长，虽然我们还有一个董事会要开，因为你们中的一些人不辞辛劳地远道而来，我们会适当延长讨论，但不会无休止地进行下去。

Shareholder: Lawrence Krauss (author of the book)

股东：劳伦斯·克劳斯（这本书的作者）

Charlie: Lawrence Krauss, yeah.

芒格：是的，劳伦斯·克劳斯。

Shareholder: I have a question about the government involvement in the economy. It’s obvious that with continuation of QE that government’s doing a lot to support the economy and the market and the stock market. What do you think the right role … and involvement, and what do you ?

股东：我有一个关于政府参与经济的问题。很显然的，由于持续的量化宽松政策，政府一直在支持经济，市场包括股票市场。你认为政府的正确的角色应该是什么，应该在多大程度上介入经济？

Munger: Well, you just asked one of the most complicated and interesting questions and one of the most important questions in the whole world. Of course, nobody knows the answer — just when too much is too much. We know you can’t just start printing money to run the whole economy and stopping taxation. At some point on that road, you get a backlash, which causes anguish you don’t want to get to. But how far you can go in having these Keynesian benefits and get by with it without risking that backlash, nobody knows for sure. If you’re like me, I believe in giving big trouble a wide berth, so I would try and stop a little short on this. Solving my problems by printing money.

芒格：嗯，你提出了一个极其复杂、极其有趣且极其重要的问题。当然，没人能确切回答——究竟何时才算是过度。我们知道，你不能仅仅通过印钞来驱动整个经济并停止征税。在实施过程中的某个阶段，你会遭遇强烈的反对，这会带来你不愿面对的痛苦。但你能在多大程度上利用凯恩斯主义的好处而不冒引发这种反对的风险，没人能确切知道。如果你和我一样，我会倾向于避免大麻烦，所以我会在这个问题上稍微保守一些。通过印钞来解决我的问题。

Somebody like Paul Krugman, who’s overdosed on mathematics, and uses the king’s English better than practically anybody alive, so he’s very dangerous. He just thinks there’s no limit to the amount of — he wouldn’t say that, but he thinks the limit is so far away you don’t need to worry about it at all. That is not my view. But nobody knows the answer to that.

像保罗·克鲁格曼这样的人，他对数学的依赖程度过高，而且他运用英语的能力几乎无人能及，这使得他颇具影响力。他可能不会直接说没有限制，但是他认为这个政策的风险边际足够远，完全不用为之担忧。我不同意这种观点。但没有人知道这个问题的答案。

Shareholder: I wanted to see how you see the retail landscape. The future of retail from your Costco lens, and how it might be affected…?

股东：查理，我想听听你对零售业现状的看法，特别是从 Costco 的角度来看，以及它可能面临的变化……

Munger: Well, that’s a very good question. I think retailing is going to get tougher and tougher and tougher. I don’t think Costco is making it easier on others. I think Costco is one of the winners. I’ll give you an example. I just got a new tube of toothpaste. I didn’t buy it. The man who helps me with the house — a very nice man — bought it for me at Costco. I’ve used the major brands of toothpaste all my life. The brand on this toothpaste is Kirkland.

芒格：这是个很好的问题。我相信零售业将变得越来越具有挑战性。我认为零售业会越来越艰难。我不认为 Costco 会让别人好过。实际上，我认为 Costco 是赢家之一。让我给你举个例子。我最近得到了一支新牙膏。不是我买的。帮我打理家务的人——一个很好的人——在 Costco 给我买的。一辈子都在用大品牌的牙膏。这一支牙膏的品牌是 Kirkland。

Costco got one of the major toothpaste manufacturers of the world to make their toothpaste in Costco’s tube at a very low price.

Costco 让世界上某个主要的牙膏制造商以非常低的价格帮他们贴牌生产牙膏。

This is not good for the Proctors and Gambles and Unilevers of the world, and the Colgates of the world. So, generally speaking, that’s one threat.

这对像宝洁、联合利华和高露洁这样的公司来说是个坏消息。所以，总的来说，这是对它们的一个威胁。

Then you add the Amazon threat.

然后，你还要考虑到亚马逊的威胁。

Then you add the fact that we have too damn many stores that are the natural over-optimism of both lenders and real estate developers and merchants and so forth.

然后你再考虑到由于房地产开发商，投资人和零售商的天然的过分乐观，我们已经有太多的零售商店。

So, I would say retailing looks tough and dangerous to me. Now, that isn’t to say there aren’t some people in it that are so good they’re going to succeed in spite of everything, like Costco, but I think for ordinary people engaged in retailing, it’s a business that’s going to have a lot of head winds.

所以，我认为零售业对我来说看起来是艰难和充满风险的。当然，这并不是说在这个领域中没有一些非常优秀的公司能够克服一切困难取得成功，比如Costco，但我认为对于普通零售商来说，会很艰难。

That Amazon system, where you just punch a button and it comes the next day. Don’t have to drive through traffic; you don’t have to look for a parking spot. You don’t have to wait in line.

亚马逊的模式，你只需点击一下按钮，第二天商品就会送到。不需要开车穿过拥挤的交通；你不需要寻找停车位。你不需要排队等候。

It’s pretty damn simple, so if you got something expensive. I think the Amazon thing is a big cloud, and I think the rise of the Costcos and the Sam’s Clubs and so forth, so the Proctor and Gambles of the world keep losing . I think retailing is tough. Don’t you?

这非常简单，所以如果你的商品价格昂贵。我认为亚马逊的崛起是一个巨大的阴影，而且随着 Costco、山姆会员俱乐部等的兴起，像宝洁这样的公司不断失去市场份额。我认为零售业是艰难的。你不这么认为吗？

That’s why you asked the question.

这就是你提出这个问题的原因。

Shareholder: I think it’s really tough, and it’s …

股东：我觉得这真的很难，而且它…

Munger: Yeah.

芒格：是的。

Shareholder: I’m almost running out of…

股东：我快顶不住了…

Munger: He wanted to hear somebody else say what he already believes. He should go to the Catholic Church.

芒格：他想要听到别人确认他已经相信的事情。他应该去参加天主教会。

Shareholder: You described what seemed to me is an unsustainable situation.

股东：从你描述的情况来看，是无法持续了。

Munger: We know there’s some limit, don’t we? Everybody in the room knows it. Keep pushing that forward and it will eventually blow up in your face.

芒格：我们明白总归是有个极限的，对吧？在座的各位都心知肚明。如果一直这样逼迫下去，最后它可能会反噬你。

Shareholder: Most of us admire is how resolute you’ve been with your investment philosophy. Can you talk a little bit on that?

股东：我们大多数人所钦佩的是你在投资哲学上的坚定。你能稍微谈谈这一点吗？

Munger: I don’t think I’ve changed my views on any of those subjects in a long, long time. It isn’t like the first time I’ve seen collapses, opportunities, craziness, disappointment.

芒格：在很长很长的时间内，我从来没有改变过我的观点。这不是我第一次经历崩溃、机遇、疯狂和失望。

No, I think one of the reasons — we in our old catechism — use your head. Of course, we have nothing but contempt for modern portfolio theory and all of this stuff they teach in business schools. One of the blessings that I have. I never went near those crazy people.

不，我认为其中一个原因是——正如我们在古老的教义中所说的——要运用你的智慧。当然，我们对现代投资组合理论和商学院教授的所有这些东西都嗤之以鼻。我感到庆幸的是，我从未接触过那些思维疯狂的人。

By the way, I’d be glad to have any one of them marry into my family. They’re nice people. They just have the wrong ideas.

顺便说一下，我会很乐意看到他们中的任何一个与我的家人结婚。他们都是好人。只是他们的想法不对。

By the way, all their ideas aren’t wrong. It’s just the ones that are related to portfolio management are wrong.

顺便说一下，他们的所有想法并不都是错误的。只是那些与投资组合管理相关的是错误的。

Being a professional money manager is not so easy. It shouldn’t be easy. You’re complaining about not having egg in your face; you say you had. Furrow your brow a little bit, and your plan worked.

成为一个专业的资金管理人并不容易。这本就不应该容易。你刚才还在抱怨没有臭鸡蛋扔在你的脸上；你说你有。那就皱皱眉头，你的计划就成功了。

Shareholder: Hey, Charlie. That gentleman back there on the book recommendation.

股东：嗨，查理。刚才那位先生谈到了书籍推荐。

Munger: Yeah.

芒格：对。

Shareholder: I have a book recommendation, but the story — it has both humor and mystery attached to it. In effect, you’re going to get a Warren Buffet book recommendation here. I’ve got this email the other day from Todd Combs. He said, “Warren gave me a copy of this book yesterday, and I just finished it. And would recommend you read it as well.” The name of the book is The Outsiders. I had a member of my staff buy that. I’ll get to that. Give me a moment. I had a member of my staff buy the book from Amazon, and the book arrived.

股东：我也有一本书推荐，但这个故事——它既有趣又神秘。实际上，是沃伦·巴菲特推荐的。我前几天收到了托德·库姆斯的一封电子邮件。他说，“沃伦昨天给了我这本书，我刚刚读完。我也推荐你读一读。”书的名字是《局外人》。我让我的一个员工去买那本书。我稍后会拿到的。给我一点时间。 我让我的一个员工从亚马逊订购了这本书，书到了。

Rather — how unusual a book for Warren Buffet to recommend, but I thought maybe he’s getting more like Charlie. Charlie is always reading very interesting, unconventional non-business books.

诚然——对沃伦·巴菲特来说，推荐这样一本书真是不同寻常，但我觉得他可能越来越像查理了。查理总是阅读非常有趣、非传统的非商业书籍。

Well, this is really an unconventional book. This is about a group of lower class students who are being bullied by very high-class rich students. I thought, Wow! Warren Buffet’s really branching out in his reading. But two days later in the mail, I got a book from the author, Mr. Thorndike. A book called The Outsiders. It’s a book about Henry Singleton and Warren Buffett.

嗯，这真是一本非传统的书。这是关于一群低年级学生被有钱的高年级学生欺负的故事。我想，哇！沃伦·巴菲特的阅读范围真的在拓宽。但两天后，我收到了作者桑代克先生寄来的书，《商界局外人》。这是一本关于亨利·辛格尔顿和沃伦·巴菲特的书。

All these different business people who operate outside the normal conventional approaches to business. So the mystery was solved. I emailed back the author of the book and I said, “There may be other people who are going to make the same mistake I did. Maybe you should get with your publisher and figure out how to make sure Amazon makes it clear to people looking for The Outsiders that they don’t get confused; By the way, would anybody like this?

所有这些不走寻常路的商界人士，他们的经营方式都超出了常规的商业方法。所以谜团解开了。我回邮件给书的作者说，“也许还会有其他人和我一样弄错。 也许你应该和你的出版商协商，想办法确保亚马逊让顾客清楚地知道他们在找《局外人》时不要混淆；顺便问一下，有人对这本书感兴趣吗？”

Munger: That book by Thorndike is quite an interesting book, because he describes companies and their CEOs who had utterly remarkable records and there’s some common threads.

芒格：桑代克写的那本书非常有趣，因为他描述了公司和他们的首席执行官们，他们有着非常出色的记录，而且有一些共同点。

They were a very unusual bunch of people, many of whom I knew personally.

他们是一群非常不寻常的人，其中许多人我私下都认识。

These were not normal people. They were Henry Singleton and Tom Murphy and so on.

这些人并非寻常之辈。他们是亨利·辛格尔顿、汤姆·墨菲等人。

That is a very good book for you investment types. It’s really very, very interesting. I think that there’s one category that’s not — no, it’s too much, but most people. The ideal investment in many respects is one where anybody who owned it could make a lot more money with no risk simply by raising prices. You say that there can’t be such opportunities lying around anymore than there’d be lots of $100 bills lying around unpicked up on the streets. How could there be?

对于你们这些搞投资的人来说，这本书非常适合。它确实非常、非常有趣。我认为，对于大多数人来说，理想的投资是那种，任何拥有它的人都能通过简单地提高价格而无需承担任何风险就能赚更多的钱。你会说，这样的机会不可能再有了，就像街上不可能再有大量未被捡起的 100 美元钞票一样。怎么可能还会有呢？

But if you read that book, you’ll realize that in the early days of network television, it was a cinch. All they had to do was sit there and keep raising the prices. Then you make huge amounts of money.

但是，如果你读了那本书，你就会意识到，在网络电视的早期，赚钱是轻而易举的。他们所需做的只是坐在那里，不断地提高价格。然后，你就能赚得盆满钵满。

But the main thing was you were sitting in a place where all you had to do was sit there with your network television station, keep raising the prices. And there are such opportunities, and you may find a few of them in your lifetime. If you can identify them, it’s some of the easiest money that there is.

关键是你处于一个只需稳坐不动，依靠你的网络电视台，不断地提高价格的位置。这样的机会确实存在，在你的一生中，你可能会遇到一些。如果你能识别出它们，那将是最轻松赚钱的方式之一。

That happened to us with See’s Candy. When we bought See’s Candy, we knew it was a marvelous business — well run and made a nice candy, but we had no idea it was selling at $1.95 a pound. And we had no idea that we could just keep raising the prices, year after year after year by large amounts. And the earnings would keep going up or staying the same.

我们购买 See’s Candy 就是这样的。当我们买下 See’s Candy 时，我们知道它是一家很棒的企业——管理良好，制作的糖果很美味，但我们并不知道它的售价是每磅 1.95 美元。我们也没有预料到，我们可以年复一年地大幅提高价格。而且收益会持续增长或至少保持不变。

And See’s Candy grew — many years it’s yielded more than 300 percent per annum than what we paid for the whole company. Partly, people just don’t care if it goes up an extra 25 cents a pound, because it’s a gift item and they love the candy. There’s no price reference. Warren and I did not realize that pricing power existed. We found out by having a little gumption and doing.

See’s Candy 的增长——多年来，它的年收益率比我们为整个公司支付的价格高出 300% 以上。部分原因是人们不在乎每磅价格上涨 25 美分，因为这是一种礼品，他们喜欢这种糖果。没有价格参照。沃伦和我并没有意识到定价权的存在。我们通过一点胆识和实践发现了这一点。

There again, other factors made the company worth what we paid for it, and this extra opportunity we didn’t pay for. It was these little public notice rags that Jerry bought.

同样，其他因素使得这家公司值得我们投资，而这种额外的机会是我们没有为之付费的。这些是杰瑞购买的那些不起眼的小型公开刊物。

There was a possibility of having a bonanza if certain things happen. And a given fact that thing had no price resistance to speak of. We could have a bonanza and lo and behold, we did.

如果某些条件成熟，就有可能带来巨大的财富。而且一个明显的事实是，这东西几乎没有定价阻力。我们可能会因此获得一笔意外之财，而事实上，我们确实做到了。

And of course, I would argue that we wouldn’t have bought Coca Cola as early as we did if we hadn’t had the experience with See’s Candy. We just learn through doing how powerful some brands were. And so, I recommend to you people the same idea.

当然，我会说，如果不是因为 See’s Candy 的经验，我们不会那么早就购买可口可乐。我们正是通过亲身经历学到了品牌力量的重要性。所以，我向你们推荐这样的思维方式。

It probably took some gumption to buy See’s Candy. We didn’t know anything about the candy; we didn’t have anybody that knew how to run it for sure. But the gumption to think of the bonanza that’s been brought.

购买 See’s Candy 可能需要一些胆识。我们对糖果一无所知；我们也不确定有谁能稳操胜券地经营它。但敢于设想它未来可能带来的丰厚回报，这本身就是一种胆识。

OK, We are going to have a director’s meeting. I have done my duty for you groupies.

好吧，我们要开董事会了。我已经为你们这些粉丝完成了我的任务。