Book Description

"Beginning in 1956 in a spare bedroom in his parents' Omaha, Nebraska, home, Warren Buffett has built a personal fortune of four billion dollars. Today, Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company he controls, has eleven billion dollars in assets, including major holdings in Coca-Cola, Wells Fargo, American Express and Capital Cities/ABC. But Warren Buffet is much more than wealthy and successful. The man Fortune magazine has ranked as the eighth richest American has managed to accumulate this enormous wealth while maintaining a unique reputation for the highest integrity and ethics in the often cutthroat world of American business and high finance." "So impeccable is his reputation, in fact, that in August, 1991, when the venerable Wall Street firm of Salomon Inc. was abruptly rocked by a bond-trading scandal that threatened its very future, Warren Buffett was the unanimous choice of Salomon's board of directors, of its clients, of the Federal government, of regulators, investigators and investors to take over as interim chairman and restore the firm's shattered reputation." "In Warren Buffet: The Good Guy of Wall Street veteran business journalist Andrew Kilpatrick presents the story of Warren Buffet from his roots in Omaha, where his family goes back five generations, his youth (nicknamed "Fireball" by his father, he early demonstrated a gift for making money and at age eleven was making $1,000 a year from two paper routes), his education at Columbia University School of Business (Harvard rejected him on the basis of a ten minute interview) and how, at age twenty-six, he started the Buffett Partnership." "Kilpatrick explores Berkshire Hathaway's ownership of less glamorous but hugely profitable companies such as GEICO Insurance, See's Candies, Wesco Finance, Nebraska Furniture Mart, Scott Feltzer Manufacturing, and the World Book Encyclopedia. He provides insights into Buffett's business philosophy, his unqualified insistence on integrity, and his most daring financial operations." "This is the portrait of a man who made a fortune the old fashioned way, who eschewed the risky short-term strategies of the greed-ridden 1980s in favor of commonsense investments in companies of genuine permanent value. Kilpatrick reveals an extraordinary human being who combines financial genius, impeccable ethics, surprising to some, and a wonderful sense of humor." "Warren Buffett is an American original and this is his story."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved