Warren Buffett on recession and bailouts

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Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett (pictured) spent the morning with CNBC and made some news worth noting: He thinks we are in a recession right now and the housing market is still worsening.

On recession, from the AP: ‘I would say, by any common sense definition, we are in a recession.’

On housing, from the CNBC transcript: ‘I get the figures every month. We have a number of real estate brokerage operations around the country, and I get the -- I get the figures from many markets on listings and sales, and I’ve seen something like Dade and Broward County [Fla.] go from 6,000 listings and 3600 sales a month to where they’re now, I think, 82,000 listings and about 1,500 sales a month. So unless there’s some major intervention by the government in some way, or something of the sort, home prices have not stopped going down. Now, they will at some point.’

CNBC’s Becky Quick follows up on the ‘intervention’ (read bailout) comment:

‘QUICK: Any of the intervention plans we’ve seen from the government strike you as being a good idea?

BUFFETT: Well, that -- I haven’t seen the details on many of them, but I think it’s very hard to start interfering with markets without having a whole lot of unintended consequences.’

Thoughts? Comments? E-mail story tips to peter.viles@latimes.com.
Photo Credit: Bloomberg News