Warren Buffett Says Virus, Oil ‘One-Two Punch’ Still Not as Bad as 2008
Warren Buffett Says Virus, Oil ‘One-Two Punch’ Still Not as Bad as 2008
(Bloomberg) -- Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said the recent panic that’s hit markets isn’t as bad as the 2008 financial crisis.
“The combination, actually, of the coronavirus and what happened with oil over the week” was “a big one-two punch,” Buffett said Tuesday in an interview with Yahoo Finance. Still, the panic in 2008 “was much more scary, by far, than anything that happened” on Monday, when the S&P 500 index slumped 7.6%.
Buffett, who runs Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has sought to reassure investors as concerns over the spread of the coronavirus roiled markets. On Monday, U.S. stocks had their steepest one-day drop since the financial crisis. Buffett, 89, said in the interview that the current market turmoil is still less pronounced than the panic in 2008 that spread to money-market funds and commercial paper.
The virus is “scary stuff,” Buffett said in an interview with CNBC last month. “I don’t think it should affect what you do in stocks. But, in terms of the human race, it’s scary stuff when you have a pandemic.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Katherine Chiglinsky in New York at kchiglinsky@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, Daniel Taub, Steve Dickson
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