If I were the treasury secretary or head of the Fed, you know, I would try to scare the hell the out of the private sector and say, you better save this because you're going down with the ship.
Businesses always have opportunities to improve service, product lines, manufacturing techniques, and the like, and obviously these opportunities should be seized. But a business that constantly encounters major change also encounters many chances for major error
Time is the friend of the wonderful business. It's the enemy of the lousy business. If you're in a lousy business for a long time, you're going to get a lousy result, even if you buy it cheap. If you're in a wonderful business for a long time, even if you pay a little too much going in, you're going to get a wonderful result if you stay in a long time.
I wouldn't want to manufacture cigarettes. But if I owned - we do own Costco. Do they sell them? Yes. So I don't have a problem owning stock in that. But I just wouldn't want to - I wouldn't want to do it myself. I basically think, if anything is sufficiently antisocial, society should do something about it. But that's a separate question. But - and I don't think there's any company that I have seen that's 100 percent pure.
The ideal business is one that earns very high returns on capital and that keeps using lots of capital at those high returns. That becomes a compounding machine.