Charlie Munger
speaker
204 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Nov 2022
last heard 6 Feb
Charlie Munger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So they're making smaller and smaller profits on more and more volume, which gives them this big peak leverage risk, which I would not run myself. And that's the only way they make these big returns is to have this huge leverage. It would make you crazy if you were already rich.
He knows a lot about it. He's been there all his life.
Rod Hills somehow knew Saul Price and knew what he was doing. He said, you have to go down and meet him, he said. So I drove down and went through his store and talked with Saul. And, of course, Saul was a very intelligent man. Saul was an ordinary lawyer until he was 39 years of age. Then he went out and formed a government employees discount company or whatever. Was this in the Fedco days?
He was no longer with Fedco. He sold Fedco to the Germans.
Yeah.
Yes, I did. But I just bought my stock in the market.
Well, Sanigo asked Warren to become a director of Costco. He was looking for somebody with a financial reputation. As an independent? Yes, and Warren wouldn't do it. He said, well, get Charlie to do it. I want shorter plane rides to director's meetings and so on. So that's how that happened.
They tried to get Warren to buy out the French when they left Carrefour. And Warren wouldn't do it. Warren doesn't like retailing.
He's afraid of retail. Practically everything that was Monty Mighty in retail is gone. Cesar Roebuck is gone. The big departments are gone, you know. It's just too damn difficult as far as he's concerned. And he had a bad experience with diversified retail, right? No, we made nothing but money in diversified. We didn't exactly make it in retailing, but we made a lot of money.
We bought this little pissant department store chain in Baltimore. Big mistake, too. As the ink dried on the closing papers, we realized it would be a terrible mistake. So we decided just to reverse it and take the hits to look foolish rather than go broke. He just told us how to get us out of this. By that time, we'd already financed half of it on covenant-free debt and so forth.
And they had all this extra cash. And our own stocks got down to selling in enormous. We just, in the middle of one of those recessions, we just bought and bought and bought and bought. And all that money went right into those stocks. And of course, we tripled and just sitting on our ass. And that led to Blue Chip? Yeah, it was part of the early success of Blue Chip.
It's something else that people don't know about. Yeah. We bought a little piss-ant savings and loan company for maybe $20 million. And when we left that thing, we had taken out of our little $20 million investment. over $2 billion in marketable securities, which went into Nebraska insurance companies as part of their bedrock capital. So we had some wonderful early years.
And that's what everybody needs is wonderful early years. Wow.
Warren got tired of me kind of reminding him. Yeah, yeah.
No one was kidding me for being so repetitive on the subject. But there aren't many times in a lifetime when you know you're right and you know you have one that's really gonna work wonderfully. Maybe five, six times in a lifetime you get a chance to do it. And people who do it two or three times early all go broke because they think it's easy.
Well, they really did sell cheaper than anybody else in America. And they did it in big, efficient stores. And all the parking spaces were 10 feet wide instead of 8 feet 9 or whatever they normally are. They did it all right. And they had a lot of parking spaces. And they kept out of their stores. All these people didn't do big volumes, you see.
And they gave special benefits to the people who did come to the stores in the way of reward points.
Yeah.
They make the suppliers wait until they've been paid, and then they're scheduled to pay only after they're scheduled to sell.
That's correct.
Showing 41–60 of 204 · page 3 of 11
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