巴菲特在采访中还是保持他一贯的对美国经济前景乐观的态度，他说对美国的未来是100％异常乐观，那些看空美国的人们这次还是会失败，但是短期日子会比较困难。他认为五年后情况肯定是好的，但是短期几个月甚至两年内能否好转他也看不清。

对于他投资的三家银行，他非常看好US BANKCORP和WELLS FARGO，说他们在经济一旦恢复时会处于最有利地位。

以下是原文：

Warren Buffett Live on CNBC's Squawk Box: Complete Transcript
Published: Monday, 4 May 2009 | 9:51 AM ET Text Size By: Alex Crippen
Executive Producer

Warren Buffett tells CNBC's Becky Quick this morning the U.S. economy is "very slow" and "getting slower."

WARREN BUFFETT WATCH'S LIVE INTERVIEW SUMMARY

But in a live interview in the driveway of his Omaha home, Buffett repeats his long-held optimism that the economy will get better -- he just doesn't know when.

Becky also asked him about other headlines in the morning's newspapers.

Here is the complete transcript of the interview, along with video clips:

BECKY:  We’ve been listening to Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger all morning long, all weekend long.  We’ve probably asked them every question you possibly could under the sun.  But another day means another full set of headlines.   So we thought that while we’re in Omaha we couldn’t help but try and get the Oracle of Omaha, Omaha’s most famous son,  to maybe sit down with us.  Mr Buffett, thank you very much for joining us.

BUFFETT:  My pleasure.

BECKY:  You said at the meeting that you read five papers a day.

BUFFETT:  At least.

BECKY:  At least five papers a day.  I know, we’ve probably asked you every question under the sun, but I thought with these new headlines, maybe we could go through some of them and get your thoughts.

BUFFETT:  OK. (Laughs.)

BECKY:  Let’s start things off with the Wall Street Journal.   I brought five or six papers, to give you a quick quiz off of some of these.

BUFFETT:  Uh oh.  (Laughs.)

BECKY:  First of all, you’re all over the papers with the meeting.   A lot of papers that have come out – this one on the front of the Journal says Slump Has Dealt Buffett a Rather Rough Hand.  Inside it says Buffett Plays Down Hoopla and Hope.  The funny thing, I thought, is depending on which newspaper you pick up, which headline you read, some people say you’re very optimistic about the future, others say you’re very concerned.  What’s the right take?

BUFFETT:  Maybe they both have got it right.  I’m 100 percent, enormously optimistic about the future of this country over time.  I mean, there’s no way you can bet against America and win.  Just look back at a couple of hundred years ago, how people were living and how they live now.  We’re not any smarter than they were a couple of hundred years ago.  We’ve got the same land and everything else.   But we’ve unleashed human potential and will continue to do so.   So twenty years from now, fifty years from now,  your kids and grandchildren are going to live far better than you live.  But, in the short term,  things are going to be tough for awhile.   And we see no real pickup in a whole variety of businesses we have.   But they’ll be doing fine in a few years.   I don’t know whether they’ll be doing fine in three months, six months, two years.  I know they’ll be doing fine in five years, and I hope they’ll be doing fine in five months.  I don’t have the answer to exactly when.

BECKY:   You say you see no real sign of pickup.  Have you seen any sign of a slowing in the rate of decline?  Or any signs of a bottom, I guess?

BUFFETT:  Certainly in residential real estate in important parts of the country, like California, where they’ve been in a nose dive, you know, a year ago, and six months ago, we’re seeing a lot more activity, particularly in the medium to lower priced homes.  Lower mortgage rates help.  There have been a few – California has a special program to help.  So houses are moving.  Now, California is a very big area, so Stockton’s not the same as San Francisco would be, but there’s a lot of activity.   And I would say that the prices have tended to stabilize in a place like that, whereas in South Florida you still got a huge oversupply.  So, but, that’s getting better.

BECKY:  OK.  In the Financial Times this morning, the lead story is about Citigroup [C  3.20    0.23  (+7.74%)   ] and Bank of America [BAC  10.38    1.68  (+19.31%)   ], how they’re each working on plans to raise ten billion dollars in additional capital.   Today was supposed to be the day that we’d be getting those stress test results.   You own stakes in three out of the 19 banks that are going through the stress test.   Well Fargo [WFC  24.25    4.64  (+23.66%)   ], SunTrust [STI  17.27    3.46  (+25.05%)   ], and US Bancorp [USB  20.32    2.36  (+13.14%)   ].   Do you know the outcome of the stress tests for any of them?

BUFFETT:  No, no.

BECKY:  What do you – you’ve said in the past you’ve done your own stress tests.

BUFFETT:   Yeah sure.  You know, we’ve got very appreciable money in them.  So we, we know the business model of two of those three quite well.  The third I don’t know that well.

BECKY:  Which do you know well?

BUFFETT:  I know US Bancorp and Wells Fargo.  I don’t know the business model of SunTrust that well.   So I can’t talk about SunTrust intelligently.   But I can tell you that US Bancorp and Wells Fargo are extremely strong banks.  They have terrific earning power and earning power is enormously important in looking at what happens to a business in the future.   And you couldn’t have two better banks virtually positioned than those two for future earnings.   They got – things could get a lot, lot worse and most companies would come through fine.

BECKY:  Does that mean you don’t think the government will make them raise additional funds, or once things wind up in Washington you don’t know what’s going to happen?

BUFFETT:  I don’t know what’s going to happen.  (Laughs.)

BECKY:  OK, let’s talk about the front page, this morning, of, or at least the business section of the New York Times.   It’s got – talk about how over the weekend, despite Obama trying to get people to go out and buy cars made in Detroit, they saw little bump for Chrysler sales over the weekend.   Chrysler, obviously, at this point, in bankruptcy.   What are some of the aftershocks and effects and some of the unintended consequences that could come up from putting Chrysler in bankruptcy and what happens to GM [GM  1.81  ---  UNCH  (0)   ]?

BUFFETT:  Well, I think, you know, it is tough to be in bankruptcy.   If you’re not in it very long, and that’s the hope of everybody, that they’re out in 60 days or something like that, the disruption is less.  But, it obviously has to worry dealers.   It worries consumers.  Now the government said they stand by the warranties and everything, so I don’t think people should be worried.  But they may worry, even though they stand behind the warranties, that the fellow who has been servicing their call, you know, over the years, won’t be around in a year or two.  It’s very  important for Chrysler to get out of bankruptcy very quickly and it depends on the bankruptcy judge.

BECKY:  There is some talk out there that the bondholders should accept this deal that’s been pushed down.  Are you sympathetic to that?

BUFFETT:  (Laughs.)  Well, I’m sympathetic to both sides on it.  I mean, the bondholders want a secure bond.  If I have a first mortgage on my house here, and the first mortgage is for half of what the house is worth, and somebody says I want you to take a big haircut because I’ve got credit card debt someplace else, that’s got problems.  It has problems in terms of future lending.  I mean, if priorities don’t mean anything that’s going to disrupt lending practices in the future.  On the other hand, to have a few people standing in the way of something that has, ah, so much importance to the whole country, I can see why people on the other side are very upset.  But giving up priorities in lending, abandoning that principle, would have a whole lot of consequences.

BECKY:  A whole lot of bad consequences down the road?

BUFFETT:  I think it would.  If we want to encourage lending in this country, we don’t want to say to somebody who lends and gets a secured position that that secured position doesn’t mean anything.  So it’s a tough problem both ways.

BECKY:  OK, back in studio Joe and Carl are both standing by, and our guest host today is Senator Judd Gregg.  Joe, you have a question as well?

JOE KERNEN:  I do.  I’m looking at – let’s keep, keep doing this with the newspapers for Warren.  I’m looking at the Wall Street Journal, Warren.  I see the Cherry Coke.  That looks to be your’s.  I can see your hand, your bridge hand, and I see the way you’ve got it all – you’ve got a seven and an eight of hearts.

BUFFETT: (Laughs.)

JOE:  And then you’ve got the hearts, you’ve got everything going in, sort of, in sequence.  I’m wondering, A, do you remember whether you did well with that hand that you have there?  And B, the article above it, Warren.  In the past –

BUFFETT:  Well –

JOE:  No, go ahead.

BUFFETT:  Well, if you don’t know whether I did well or not, Joe, I’m going to tell you I did well, regardless.  (Laughs.)

JOE:  Yeah, I don’t know.  In the past, you have said to return to some of the capital gains rates and the dividend rates and the marginal rates of the 90s, not a big deal for corporations.  You’re OK with that.   This latest proposal to tax corporations.  Cisco [CSCO  19.54    -0.04  (-0.2%)   ], for example, thinks this is not a great idea, that it’s going to hurt U.S. corporations.  Could you weigh in on whether this is, you have a problem with this move?

BUFFETT:  Well, I can’t talk about all the details of this bill because I don’t know it.  But I would say this. We’re going to raise, probably at most, 2.3 trillion at the federal level in taxes.  So we’re raising close to 2.6 trillion just a couple of years ago and you know what we’re going to spend, so one way or another we’re going to need more taxes down the road.  There’s no magic wand on this.  The question is, who they should come from, and everybody that is a target of any increases is going to be back in Washington screaming.  So, the country can take higher tax rates.   It did very well, extremely well, in the 60s and the 90s with tax rates considerably higher in many areas than now.  So, I think it’s a question of, you know, who gets socked and when.  But the one thing I know is if we keep raising 2.3 trillion a year, we’re going to have massive deficits for a long, long time and those have consequences as well.

SENATOR GREGG:  Well, Mr. Buffett, if I could ask you that, following up on that.  What do you do about the debt?  I mean, if you going to expand, explode the debt here, it’s sort of like chasing your tail to try to catch up with revenues when you’ve got a debt ratio that’s going up to 80 percent of GDP.  Is that sustainable?  And if we’re looking at five to six percent, four to five percent, in deficits for the next ten years, and the debt ratio jumping from 40 percent to 80 percent, in the long run how do you get yourself out from underneath that type of debt situation, and the spending which is driving that debt?

BUFFETT:  Well, at some point you have to have tax revenues that are a whole lot closer to expenditures and you can get that in two ways, and both ways are unpleasant.  But if you don’t get it, the consequences are unpleasant as well.  And you mentioned going to 80 percent, you know, it will go a lot higher than that unless at some point you get a more of a balance between revenues and expenditures.  And we started from a fairly low debt position, and of course we came out of World War II with well over 100 percent.  But a country that continuously expands its debt as a percentage of GDP and raises much of the money abroad to finance that, at some point it’s going to inflate its way out of the burden of that debt.  I mean, every country that’s denominated its debt in its own currency and has found itself with uncomfortable amounts of debt relative to the rest of the world, in the end they inflate.  And that becomes a tax on everybody that has fixed dollar investments.

CARL QUINTANILLA:  Hey, Warren.  It’s Carl.  It’s good to see you.  One quick question on employment.  You know, we had the Chrysler bankruptcy last week.  This morning, Filene’s Basement is said to be filing for Chapter 11.  The Boston Globe may shut down in the coming days.   I wonder if you think those types of actions will pose a renewed threat to the economy or whether we can grind through some sort of jobless recovery like we have in the 90s.

BUFFETT:  Well, we’re going to face more unemployment, and who knows where it tops out.  It will top out eventually.  I mean, you know, we’ve hit double-digits in the past.  We have a wonderful economy over time.  The markets overshoot.  People make mistakes.  I mean, it’s not perfect at all times.  We had six panics in the 19th century, the Great Depression in the 20th century and all kinds of recessions.  We do come out of them.  How fast we come out of them depends, on some extent, on the wisdom of the policies in Washington.  But the biggest thing that brings us out of them is that we have a system that works very well over time even though it gets gummed up periodically.  It’s gummed up right now.  We’ll come out well, you know, whether the government does it exactly right or not.  But government policy is enormously important.  We will have more unemployment.  We won’t have more unemployment five years from now than we have now.  I’ll guarantee you that.  I think it will be appreciably less. When it turns, I don’t know.

BECKY:  Yeah, we’ve got that jobs number coming up on Friday.  Hard to say exactly what happens there.  If that number falls below 500-thousand, I believe the estimates are somewhere between 500 and 700-thousand jobs that will have been stripped from the economy again over that last month.  If it’s below 500-thousand, is it too soon to start celebrating the idea that we’re reaching the end?

BUFFETT:  Yeah, it would be too soon.  We have not – we’re not reaching the end.  At some point, we’re going to reach the end, and I don’t know when that will be, but I know whatever the day is, May fourth, in terms of the figures we’re getting out of all our businesses, the American economy is slow, very slow, and at the moment, still getting slower.   But that will turn.  And I can’t predict when.  I hope it’s very soon.

来自：http://www.cnbc.com/id/30559213