Buffett offers $100000 to employee with best NCAA bracket

Those occasions included the dot-com bubble, when no one wanted Warren Buffett’s old-fashioned investing philosophy; the financial crisis of 2008-2009; and the Europe-inspired market turmoil of 2011-2012. Yet Buffett said that the benefit for the vast majority of Americans trickles in slowly every time they fill up their gas tanks.

The ratio of deaths per driven miles from auto accidents for the first nine months in 2015 went up – bucking a long trend – Mr. Buffett noted in an interview Monday with CNBC.

“That view is dead wrong”, Buffett says. “I think IBM will be worth more money, but, like I said, I could be wrong but we’ll accept that”, he said.

Buffett said Berkshire would likely not own Dow Chemical’s common stock, but that he liked the company’s preferred shares.

He said Berkshire Hathaway’s portions of 2015 earnings from these four companies was $4.7bn.

Buffett did not address that issue in his annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter, published over the weekend, but CNBC asked him about it.

In his letter to shareholders, Buffett points out it is an election year in the United States and candidates “can’t stop speaking about our country’s problems”. “As a result of this negative drumbeat, many Americans now believe that their children will not live as well as they themselves do”, he said.

Considering the low 1.9% odds of anyone actually winning, and a payout of $45 million (if the average employee age is 40 and lives to 85), insurance would cost something like $1 million.

Mr Buffett describes American children born today as “the luckiest crop in history”, dismissing the pessimism pedaled by the current Presidential candidates.

“In a single generation of, say, 25 years, that rate of growth leads to a gain of 34.4 percent in real GDP per capita”, he said. “America’s golden goose of commerce and innovation will continue to lay more and larger eggs”. Berkshire’s annual report showed the conglomerate had lost $2.6 billion on the investment at the end of a year ago.

PCC CEO Mark Donegan and IMC CEO Jacob Harpaz “transform very ordinary raw materials into extraordinary products that are used by major manufacturers worldwide. No”, Buffett said. “I mean, we’ve got 330,000 employees at Berkshire, and I will guarantee you somebody is doing something they shouldn’t do today”.