You have to understand accounting and you have to understand the nuances of accounting. It's the language of business and it's an imperfect language, but unless you are willing to put in the effort to learn accounting - how to read and interpret financial statements - you really shouldn't select stocks yourself
— Warren Buffett
Lust Financial Statements quotations
Since those don’t hit financial reports, the opportunities you had but didn’t accept, most people don’t bother thinking about them very much. At least that is a mistake we don’t make. We rub our own noses in our mistakes in blowing opportunities, as we just did.
Market values are fixed only in part by balance sheets and income statements;
much more by the hopes and fears of humanity; by greed, ambition, acts of God, invention, financial stress and strain, weather, discovery, fashion and numberless other causes impossible to be listed without omission.
After nearly making a terrible mistake not buying See's, we've made this mistake many times. We are apparently slow learners. These opportunity costs don't show up on financial statements, but have cost us many billions.
The insurance companies do not refer to the key policy rate when they send their statements. We can only control that rate. Long-term interest rates are determined largely by global financial markets.
I call it the Rule of Three. If you read a company's financial statements three times, and you still can't figure out how they make their money, that's usually for a reason.
You have more independent eyes scrutinizing the decision-making and financial statements of companies.
Everyone has taste, yet it is more of a taboo subject than sex or money.
The reason for this is simple: claims about your attitudes to or achievements in the carnal and financial arenas can be disputed only by your lover and your financial advisers, whereas by making statements about your taste you expose body and soul to terrible scrutiny. Taste is a merciless betrayer of social and cultural attitudes. Thus, while anybody will tell you as much (and perhaps more than) you want to know about their triumphs in bed and at the bank, it is taste that gets people's nerves tingling.
The minute a Wall Street firm purchases your debt, your bank no longer has it on its financial statement, which then allows the bank to look for more credit card customers. That's one reason why you get so many credit card offers.
New York is safer than it has been - and it's getting safer.
But it's never safe. As the financial and communications capital of the world, this is where terrorists want to make a statement, where they get the most bang for the buck.
I think once you start putting phony figures into financial statements, you get in a lot of trouble. And we've seen so much of that in the last 20 years.
The financial disclosure statements, they don't give you the tax rate.
They don't give you all the details that tax returns would.
You will learn more about Donald Trump by going down to the federal elections, where I filed a 104-page essentially financial statement of sorts, the forms that they have. It shows income - in fact, the income - I just looked today - the income is filed at $694 million for this past year, $694 million. If you would have told me I was going to make that 15 or 20 years ago, I would have been very surprised.
Sarah Palin is a great example of someone that just stirs the pot for the sake of the attention. No vision, no critical thinking, no backup to her statements. Just to incite little riots everywhere and capitalize upon it financially. To me, she is a microcosm of the ultimate cynicism in American politics.
You get in a lot of trouble when you start putting fictitious numbers on value.
I think to just say, we're going to say a dollar of cash is worth $2 all of a sudden, it isn't worth $2. It's worth a dollar today. And I think once you start putting phony figures into financial statements, you get in a lot of trouble.
Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.
Perhaps the most widespread misunderstanding of economics is that it applies solely to financial transactions. Frequently this leads to statements that "there are noneconomic values" to consider. There are, of course, noneconomic values. Indeed, there are only noneconomic values. Economics is not a value itself but merely a method of trading off one value against another.
Mandatory auditor rotation is designed to address a potential conflict of interest between a public company and its auditor. Because an auditor is hired and paid by the public company it audits, the auditor's desire to maintain a good relationship with its client could conflict with its duty to rigorously question the client's financial statements.
Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadn't stemmed the suspicion that people's opinions weren't really their own. "Who's paying you?" was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm, along with laughter - who would let themselves be bought?
When you are in the final days of your life, what will you want? Will you hug that college degree in the walnut frame? Will you ask to be carried to the garage so you can sit in your car? Will you find comfort in rereading your financial statement? Of course not. What will matter then will be people. If relationships will matter most then, shouldn't they matter most now?