More praise and idolatry for Buffett and Berkshire

I'd been thinking about expanding on my recent post on Buffett and Berkshire, and then along comes BlogginWall Street with the Piggybackers and Are Buffett followers in Denial; and then, whaddya know, I find out Jaloti is one of the bloggers who "continued to praise and idolize Buffett"!

First off, let's get one thing straight--I am all about the goal. When I trade, I want to make money--easy, rough, ugly, pretty, I'll take it any way I can get it. When I blog, I'm all about the traffic, so BlogginWall Street, I don't care what you say about me as long as you get the URL right. (You did, thanks.)

On a more philosophical note, however, I don't disagree with the comments that some part of Buffett/Berkshire's success is marketing and PR; in fact, I advocated that very point here. I said it then, I say it now, Warren Buffett has a gift for sales. However, I maintain that he's a mighty fine value investor and capitol allocator, as well. He makes mistakes, sure, but I think his long track record is pretty good.

As far as my post, showing my "idolatry" for Buffett, as I stated, I was actually mentally expanding on it this morning prior to Bloggin Wall Street taking notice of me. When I said that the whole system as we know it would be in trouble, if in fact Warren Buffett is over the line, I meant it, on a couple different levels. First, Buffett's integrity has never before been seriously questioned. He has a 40+ year public record of doing his duty to his partners and shareholders in an honest and ethical way. If he has been dishonest/unethical, then, wow, he's fooled a lot of people for a long time, and basically, you can't trust anybody. And maybe you can't. And again, if that's the case, I'll never read another 10-K or SEC filing, I'll look at charts exclusively, and even those I'll take with a grain of salt.

The other level I was referring to is the legal one. I have to admit I'm not that smart about a lot of these investigations, but I have a concern sometimes that the fine points of the law are used as a bludgeon by overzealous governmental officials to trap well-meaning individuals who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Again, Buffett has been very good about knowing just where the legal lines are; if, in this case, he's inadvertantly stepped over the lines that Eliot Sptizer drew after the fact, then no one is safe from crusaders in the government, and this "Spitzer risk" needs to be priced into every publically traded entity in some way. (Note--I realize Spitzer isn't the only one interested in Buffett; I'm using him as an example and for convenience' sake.)

In summary, I think I have my eyes open about Warren Buffett; he's got strengths and weaknesses. However, no one has ever seriously suggested his ethics were a weakness. If, in fact, that is the case, then we're in trouble. If you can't trust Buffett, I'm not really sure who in business you can trust.