Buffett on Stock Options and Bad Accounting

追加: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]I think there was a there was a bill introduced in the Indiana legislature in the 1890s, I believe.

[00:00:06]And the bill was to change the value of the mathematical term pi to three even instead of 3.1415.

[00:00:16]And the legislator who introduced it said that it was too difficult for the school children of Indiana to work with this terribly long unending uh term and it would be so much easier if pi was just three and he thought that they ought to enact that. Well, I thought that was quite rational compared to what you know, what what the uh Congress of the United States was going to do in telling people that since it they the uh one of the arguments was that it makes it very tough for startup companies if they have to expense this.

[00:00:44]Well, it makes it tough if they have to pay their electricity bill, too, but uh I mean that is that that but those were the kind of arguments you got and my memory is Charlie is better on this than I am probably, but I think the accounting firms 40 years ago or 50 years ago were in accord with our position, but the every client would put pressure on, you know, and then they they they don't want to report expenses. They particularly don't want to report expenses that are paid to them.

[00:01:13]And that can be huge and it might prove obnoxious if recorded by conventional accounting, but if it's sort of lost