“Fear is contagious,” he said. “You can’t run an economy” when people worry about whether their money is safe in the banks.
Buffett also warned of growing “tribalism” in Washington, where partisanship makes people talk too much. “We have to sort of hone our democracy along the way,” he said.
Buffett was speaking hours after Berkshire reported a quarterly profit of $35.5 billion and said it had repurchased $4.4 billion of its own shares, a sign he views the shares as undervalued. Instead, he sold $13.3 billion of shares in other companies.
The world’s sixth-richest person has run Berkshire since 1965, and among his dozens of businesses are auto insurer Geico and the BNSF railroad. Berkshire also owns $328 billion in stock, about half of which is in Apple.
Buffett, 92, said regulators were right to guarantee Silicon Valley Bank depositors their money, saying not to “would have been catastrophic.”
He added that shareholders and bank executives should bear the risks of mismanagement.
“A lit match can become a conflagration or it can go out,” Buffett said. “You have to punish people who do things wrong.”
Buffett also said he couldn’t imagine politicians or regulators being willing to “disrupt the global financial system” even if Washington fails to break its deadlock over raising the debt ceiling.
