Charlie Munger: It's Going To Be Tougher In the Future. | Redlands Forum 2020【C:C.M Ep.180】

 

[Transcript]

JACK DANGERMOND: What about economically? Are you afraid of the times today? When compare it to ten years ago when the Great Recession happening. Maybe if you could comment about the recession what happened –

 

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, I had in a sense –

You gotta remember that I had the easiest time in the easiest place that any generation ever had. Imagine being born, a white male in a bourgeois household born in 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska.

I've had a huge tailwind all my life, there never was a better time when more things got fixed, more diseases got cured. There was more general prosperity and improvement and so on and so on and so on.

Is the future going to be as easy for the young male born in 19 – well, 2021? I don't think so. I think it's gonna be harder. I think you could almost see that coming.

And you know and some of it was accidental, we got this terrible hydrogen bomb it's given us 60 some years of peace. I mean, major peace, we have little Wars. And my father was scarcely out of one War before someone's going off on another.

And so, no, I think it's – I think it will be tougher in the future and I think the – I've been like continuously invested in American Enterprise for seventy years and, that was a pretty good seventy years. I think the averages are up something like 40 times in my adult life, there never was such a period before.

And well, in real inflation-adjusted of course it's not 40 times, it's way less because maybe two or three percent of that per annum is inflation. But what are the chances such as some of the real return was seven or eight percent? What are the chances that the person who born today is going to have seven or eight percent growth and no big Wars or troubles for seventy years?

I'd say they're almost zero.

Now, I don't think there is any reason to despair. After all, why should you despair in a world – If we have a game you can't win, anyway, we're all going to die. And if you can stand that you can stand a little depression or something. (Laughter)

(Source: https://youtu.be/Rh1WCzfCP24)

 

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