On the U.S. Business
“We have, as you know, more than 70 businesses and some of those businesses have many businesses. So we've really got a cross section of American business. Of the 70 plus businesses, all but about five are doing considerably better than was the case a year ago, and they were doing better than two years ago. They've been in a steady recovery. if you take our five largest businesses outside of insurance...Every one of those companies will set a record for earnings this year. And if you look at many of our smaller businesses, our recreational vehicle business, our farm business, you name it, they're all doing well. I think in this non-housing segment, we have a pretty healthy economy. Just look at profits thorough industry after industry after industry.”
On the U.S. Economy
“Right now we have six times the GDP per capita, in real terms, as when I was born. Now, I don't know whether people are happier now or more discontent or what than they were in 1930. But people have a way of adjusting very quickly to things becoming better, and then any little tiny adjustment downward they can get quite unhappy about. So they—they'll have—they'll have plenty of strains in their society, we'll have plenty of strains in our society.
We're going to have to bring our expenditures down to 21 percent or so of GDP, and that's going to require a lot of sacrifice around the country, a lot of breaking of promises we've made.
What has really happened in the last two years, and I'm seeing it in every bit of data I look at, is that the economy has generally kept moving forward. Business after business, you know, Dairy Queens to jet airplanes, it gets better. Except housing is in a depression. Now, you take housing and put it in a depression, not a recession, a depression, and that has a big impact
We don't—the nice thing about it is we're not Japan. We're not Italy.
Italy has no population growth. We are a country where households are formed daily in significant numbers. There was a slowdown in 2009 because of the first impact of the recession, but households are getting formed every day faster than houses are being constructed. That solves itself. Now, it doesn't solve itself as fast as people would like...
...but it does solve itself. And the economy, which is good in many areas, will be very good when that—when that imbalance is worked off.”
On Europe
“…they have a situation that where they found a kind of a fundamental flaw, which is that they can't print money. And when you have a loss of confidence, that begins a run, which has occurred to some degree on both sovereign debt and banks over there. And it's in 2008 we had our own run in the United States, and it took -- it took the full power of the United States and some very strong action…And stopping a run is tough. It's very, very tough to stop a run. It takes —it takes a belief, widespread belief, that the people in authority will do whatever it takes to stop it and they have the ability to do whatever it takes….Europe is not going to go away. Ten years from now we will be selling more goods and buying—to Europe and buying more goods from Europe, and they will have more GDP per capita. But getting from here to there may be a problem.”
On European Banks
“European banks are losing US funding, and therefore they're disposing of US assets. European banks need more capital, and the sooner they get it, the better. And the government could always say, `Look it, you raise capital or we'll supply the capital, and we'll put it in at one euro per share so you better do it at two Euros per share.'”
