Madoff...Stanford...so is there any chance the next name on the list is...

My original point was not to say that Warren Buffett is running a Ponzi scheme; it was to point out that we've learned thanks to people like Barry Bonds and A-Rod and Stanford and Madoff and Floyd Landis and Roger Clemens (and some would argue Lance Armstrong and even Tiger Woods) that if someone is head-and-shoulders above the rest in the world of finance or the world of sport, then their amazing success must be met with a raised eye-brow or two.

Does that mean Berkshire's a fraud? No. But nor does it mean that the company and Buffett must be taken at face value. The transparency of Wall Street that "is available 24 hours a day" didn't do much to protect shareholders of Lehman Brothers or Countrywide or a whole host of other companies that proved to be not what we all thought they were.

 

I appreciate Buffett's candor in admitting his mistakes.

I laughed at him during the dot-com boom when he refused to buy in because of the out of whack P/E ratios. My buddies and I said "what a tool, who cares about P/E (notwithstanding our undergrad Econ classes) when the stock is going up 10 pts today?" Then the bubble burst and with the amounts I salvaged, I promptly bought the Berkshire/Hathaway B stock and made some fantastic gains for a couple of years. If you cannot beat them, join them.