But 300 million Americans, their lending institutions, their government, their media, all believed that house prices were going to go up consistently. And that got billed into a $20 trillion residential home market. Lending was done based on it, and everybody did a lot of foolish things.
The best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something quite similar today to what they were doing five or ten years ago.
Like most trends, at the beginning it's driven by fundamentals, at some point speculation takes over. What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end.
You have to be able to communicate in life and probably schools underemphasize that. If you can't talk to people or write, you're giving up your potential.
I've read about all the sales today. If you're an auto dealer, you're feeling it. If you're a furniture retailer like we are, you're feeling it. If you're a jewelry retailer, you're feeling it. I know some of these businesses because we're in them. Yeah, it's being felt, but it will be felt big time more if we don't do something about it, what's going on.
Over the years, a number of very smart people have learned the hard way that a long string of impressive numbers multiplied by a single zero always equals zero.
I have this complicated procedure I go through every morning, which is to look in the mirror and decide what I'm going to do. And I feel at that point, everybody's had their say.
Anything can happen anytime in markets. And no advisor, economist, or TV commentator-and definitely not Charlie nor I-can tell you when chaos will occur. Market forecasters will fill your ear but will never fill your wallet.
I mean, they were getting the mortgage of some guy in Omaha, you know, securitized a couple of times. I mean he had all these - they had all these types from Wall Street, you know, and they had advanced degrees, and they look very alert, and they came with these - they came with these things that said gamma and alpha and sigma and all that. And all I can say is beware of geeks, you know, bearing formulas. They've heard that in Europe.
Observing that the market was FREQUENTLY efficient, EMT Adherents went on to conclude incorrectly that it was ALWAYS efficient. The difference between these propositions is night and day.