Preferred Stock

WARREN BUFFETT: Morning. I’m Warren Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. And on my left is Charlie Munger, the vice chairman and my partner. And we’ll try to get him to say a few words at some point in the proceedings. (Laughter) The format today is going to be just slightly different. We have one item to — normally, we breeze through the meeting pretty fast, and we’ll do that, but we have one item of business on the preferred stock that I could tell caused some confusion with people. So, I’ll discuss that a little bit. And if, before the vote on that, anybody would like to talk about the preferred issue, we’ll have any comments or questions at that time. And then we’ll breeze through the rest of the meeting, and then we’ll open it up. And I’ll have one announcement to make then, too. And then after that, we’ll go for, maybe, close to noon. And feel free, earlier, anybody that would like to leave, you’re free to, obviously, at any time. WARREN BUFFETT: The second item of business at this meeting is to consider the recommendation of the board of directors to amend the company’s certificate of incorporation. The proposed amendment would add a provision to the certificate of incorporation authorizing the board of directors to issue up to one million shares of preferred stock in one or more series, with such preferences, limitations, and relative rights as the board of directors may determine. Now, we discussed this some in the annual report. But I would say — and we’ll find out the exact number — but I think we probably had 11 or 12 — maybe 12,000 or so shares voted against the proposal. And I think we had a couple thousand shares that abstained. And since there really is no downside to the proposal, that indicated to me that I’d not done a very adequate job of explaining the logic of authorizing the preferred. So, I’d like to discuss that for a minute now. And I’d also like anybody that would like to ask questions about it, they can do so now. We can talk about it later, too. But if you’d like to do it before the vote, that’d be fine.