Except from 2002 to 2010, we never went three years without buying a bank.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Yeah, we shot ourselves in the foot right out of the gate. The guy who ran it at first misled pretty much everybody about how much capital we had. He said we had enough to go three years without making money, and we had enough to go three weeks.
There was no avoiding the fact that we were going to hit our debt ceiling.
Nobody wants to have in their CV in the upper echelons of the American economic family that they nationalised major banks.
Since we had little money and few documents, we had nothing.
This is our 40th year in business. We don't have a single penny from outside investors, and we never borrowed heavily from the banks. We have a healthy balance sheet and more credit than we can use.
Liberty never had to file bankruptcy, thanks to God's blessings, but we did go through tough times and painful debt restructuring in the 1990s.
I've never wanted to play bank managers and real people particularly.
I avoid banks and I've never been in any sort of corporate environment at all.
For the past ten years I have had no financial problems.
I never had a long-term plan.