The Buffett effect

If youre in trouble,there are few things that should cheer you up as much as Warren Buffett coming into view on the horizon. If hes interested in you,it means he thinks that youll recover that he is,in effect,betting the hefty purses of his investors on you picking yourself up,dusting yourself off and marching onwards. Buffett was recently in South Korea on a long-planned visit there,visiting plants used by an Israeli tool-making company in which hes invested; while there,he looked across the sea to battered Japan and declared that he saw buying opportunities. It is tough to think of any two other words from any other man as capable of inspiring confidence in a Japanese recovery.

People look to Buffett because,in a world surrounded by those worrying about the short term,he looks to the long term. In the darkest days of the financial crisis,the moment at which many began to believe that,however difficult the climb up,there was a way out of the pit in which wed fallen was when Buffett stepped in to buy $5 billion worth of Goldman Sachs stock in spite of the fact that hed long been a critic of the Wall Street investment-bank culture of which Goldman was emblematic. Lehman had crashed,Bear Stearns had gone down,Merrill Lynch lay dead but,even so,Buffett took what he now calls a bet on the US economy and put money in the biggest I-bank of them all. So much of a surprise was it,of course,that it is precisely for allegedly passing on insider information about that buy that former McKinsey head Rajat Gupta is now being prosecuted.

So favourable were the terms at which he bought that Buffett makes $500 million a year from that investment; $15 a second. When a country is recovering,Buffett knows theres money to be made. It isnt that surprising,perhaps,that after his South Korea trip he visits India,to talk about insurance and machine tools. Oh,and as a reminder of why he invests,not just how,he will try to follow up on the efforts he and fellow philanthropist Bill Gates are making to corral Indias wealthy into giving away more than a pitiful fraction of their fortunes to charity.