Good morning to all of you. Switching topics, Charlie and Warren E. Buffett and from Bonn, Germany, I want to first give you a big thank you and then a question. 'Come by train.' You wrote in the shareholder letter. And that is how I came to Omaha for the first time back in 1997. I deliberately took the train from Denver to experience Omaha as a railroad city. And I immediately liked Omaha a lot. But the train ride, I saw a room for improvement. So, thank you very much for taking the future of American railroads into your gifted hands.
Oh, here's a question. It's about Greece, the future of the euro, and the fiscal discipline all over the world, and what we have to prepare for as investors. In the past, you have been warning us about structural weaknesses of the US dollar. Now, we see Greece and potentially other European countries in crisis. Berkshire has significant investments in the Eurozone. The big ones like Cologne Re, Munich Re, and even small ones like Iskar's Chrome investment in Hamburg. How are you preparing Berkshire Hathaway for potential currency failures? And what are your thoughts on the sustainability of the euro? And what is your advice for us as investors?
Yeah, I'm going to... Charlie and I have not talked about Greece actually recently. And so, I'm going to be very interested in hearing his views on that. I'll answer the last part of your question first. We have a lot of exposure in various countries on both the asset and liability side. In other words, we own stock in Munich Re and they've got lots of assets, majority probably in the euro. We have Cologne Re, a subsidiary of General Re, which has a substantial net worth that is basically tied to the euro. On the other hand, we have very substantial liabilities that are denominated in other currencies, including fairly big time in the euro around the world. For example, when we reinsured Equitas three years ago, we took on many billions of liabilities around the world. And we were paid by, in effect, Lloyd's. And we took that money and invested it in dollars. So, we keep those liabilities for all kinds of old insurance claims arising from Equitas in foreign currencies. And if the euro depreciates against the dollar, we benefit on that side, but we lose, as you point out, on other sides. I can't tell you... and it's something I'm not concerned about, you know, whether our net balance in euros or sterling or yen or whatever. I can't tell you what it is on any given day. Some of it enters into our equity put options and things of that sort. But we have no dramatic exposures in any other currency. That doesn't mean that other currencies are unimportant to us, because what happens with the Greek situation and what may fall out from that can be quite important in terms of the world's economy. And Charlie is going to explain to you exactly what that might be.
Yeah. Well, generally speaking and with rare exceptions, of course, we're agnostic about currencies. We simply do our business and we take those fluctuations as they fall.
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Buffett, W. (2026, April 4). Warren Buffett: ‘That’s one of the best questions I’ve ever heard!’ [Interview transcript]. The Financial Review. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/802245/
MLA
Warren Buffett. "Warren Buffett: ‘That’s one of the best questions I’ve ever heard!’." The Financial Review, 4 Apr. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/802245/.
BibTeX
@misc{buffett2026_802245,
author = {Warren Buffett},
title = {Warren Buffett: ‘That’s one of the best questions I’ve ever heard!’},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, The Financial Review. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {apr},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/802245/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
