After working for a year in Washington, D.C. as
an energy and environmental policy analyst, Peter
Navarro received a Master's in Public Administration
from the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University
in 1979 and completed his Ph.D. in economics from
Harvard in 1986.
Professor Navarro has written frequently on economic,
energy and environmental issues and are published
ranging from the Harvard Business Review, Journal
of Business, and Wall Street Journal to the Boston
Globe, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and
Washington Post.
Professor Navarro is also the author of five books
on economics and public policy, including The
Dimming of America (Ballinger, 1984), The Policy
Game (Wiley, 1984) and the If It's Raining in
Brazil, Buy Starbucks: The Investor's Guide to
Profiting From News (McGraw Hill, 2001). His website
is www.peternavarro.com.
-
Berkshire Hathaway:
Warren
Buffett-
Warren
Buffett’s determination and creativity have
made him who he is now: the chairman of a long-term
investment company which has more than $2 billion
in holdings. As a child, Buffett was already ambitious.
He was an enthusiastic and industrious paper boy
for the Washington Post, and tried to cover more
than one route at the same time. He also made
money by collecting and selling lost golf balls.
Buffett’s interest in finance was clear extremely
early on in his life. He started playing the stock
market with one of his sisters when he was eleven.
At twelve, he was betting on horses, and by high
school he had started a business (pinball machines)
with a friend, which earned him fifty dollars
a week. Not only did he own a business by graduation,
but he also had bought himself forty acres of
Nebraskan farm land with his profit. Graduate
school was a formative time for Buffett. It was
there that he met Benjamin Graham, an economic
scholar whose work Buffett had begun studying
in college. Buffett believed strongly in Graham’s
theory that it is wise to look for stocks of companies
which are undervalued, which will most probably
prosper with a little time. Thus began Buffett’s
untraditional approach to portfolio management.
After working for his father’s investment
banking company for the three years after business
school, Buffett returned to Graham and worked
as a security analyst at Graham’s company
for two years until 1956. In that year, at the
age of twenty-five, Buffett started his own investment
company, the Buffett Partnership, using $5,000
of his own funds and collecting $100,000 from
interested friends and family. One of the smartest
moves made by Buffet’s company at that time
was to invest in American Express. In 1963, a
scandal surrounded AmEx, and Wall Street believed
the company was near the end. But Buffett, always
with his wits about him and his thinking cap on,
noticed when in restaurants and shops that customers
were still using the card to buy. He went ahead
and bought 5 percent of the stock, which by 1961
had risen from 35 to 189 market points. Buffett
is now chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., which
makes the long-term investments which Buffett
is so adept at choosing.
April
7th Show Highlights: 
