decision-making

Warren Buffett

The great joke is that the next time is never like the last time, and yet we can't help readying ourselves for it anyway.

This all reminds me of the Mayan conception of the universe.

In Mayan mythology the universe was destroyed four times, and every time the Mayans learned a sad lesson and vowed to be better protected - but it was always for the previous menace. First there was a flood, and the survivors remembered it and moved to higher ground into the woods, built dikes and retaining walls, and put their houses in the trees. Their efforts went for naught because the next time around the world was destroyed by fire.

After that, the survivors of the fire came down out of the trees and ran as far away from woods as possible. They built new houses out of stone, particularly along a craggy fissure.

Soon enough, the world was destroyed by an earthquake. 1 don't remember the fourth bad thing that happened - maybe a recession -but whatever it was, the Mayans were going to miss it. They were too busy building shelters for the next earthquake.

Two thousand years later we're still looking backward for signs of the upcoming menace, but that's only if we can decide what the upcoming menace is. Not long ago, people were worried that oil prices would drop to $5 a barrel and we'd have a depression. Two years before that, those same people were worried that oil prices would rise to $100 a barrel and we'd have a depression. Once they were scared that the money supply was growing too slow. Now they're scared that it's growing too fast. The last time we prepared for inflation we got a recession, and then at the end of the recession we prepared for more recession and we got inflation.

Someday there will be another recession, which will be very bad for the stock market, as opposed to the inflation that is also very bad for the stock market. Maybe there will already have been a recession between now and the time this is pub-lished. You're asking me?

Warren Buffett