Well, it's 3:45 in Omaha, and this is the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway. It doesn't look like an annual meeting, it doesn't feel exactly like an annual meeting, and it particularly doesn't feel like an annual meeting because my partner of 60 years, Charlie Munger, is not sitting up here. I think most of the people that come to our meeting really come to listen to Charlie. I want to assure you, Charlie, at 96, is in fine shape. His mind is as good as ever, his voice is as strong as ever, but it just didn't seem like a good idea to have him make the trip to Omaha for this meeting. Charlie is really taking to this new life. He's added Zoom to his repertoire.
He has meetings every day with various people, and he's just skipped right by me technologically, but that really isn't such a huge achievement. It's more like stepping over a peanut or something. Nevertheless, I want to assure you Charlie is in fine shape, and he'll be back next year. We'll try to have everything in the show that we normally have next year. Ajit Jain, also, who is the Vice Chairman in charge of insurance, is safely in New York. Again, it just did not seem worthwhile for him to travel to Omaha for this meeting. On my left, we do have Greg Abel, and Greg is the Vice Chairman in charge of all operations except insurance. Greg manages a business that has more than $150 billion in revenues and crosses across dozens of industries and has more than 300,000 employees.
He's been at that job a couple of years, and frankly, I don't know what I'd be doing today if I didn't have Ajit and Greg handling the duties that I was doing only about 1/4 as well a couple of years ago. I owe a lot of thanks to Greg, and you'll get exposed to him more as this meeting goes along. The meeting will be divided into four parts. In a moment or two, I will talk, give sort of a monologue with slides. I've never really used slides before. I've taught college classes intermittently, but pretty steadily from age 21 to age 88, and I never recall using a single slide. Who says you can't teach an old dog a new trick? We'll see whether you can or not.
I've got a number of slides, and I would like to take you through those in the first section, which will start in just a minute. We'll move on to a brief recap of Berkshire's first quarter results. We put those up in the 10-Q, which was posted on the internet on berkshirehathaway.com this morning, there's lots and lots of detail in there, I'm not going to go through that. I'll point out one or two things that may be of interest to you. I'll talk a little bit about what we did in April, which is something that is new to Berkshire to be that current. I'll give you that, we'll have the formal meeting, which will take maybe 15 or 20 minutes.
From there, we'll go to Becky Quick, who, for a couple of hours, will grill me and Greg on questions she's selected from a huge batch that I'm told she's received. They went to Carol Loomis and Andrew Ross Sorkin, as well as to Becky. To simplify things, we've consolidated all those questions that Becky will ask. Like I say, we'll go for a couple of hours, and there's no specified cutoff time at present. We'll just see how things develop. What's, of course, on everybody's mind the last two months or so is what's going to be the situation in terms of health in the United States and what's going to be the situation in terms of the economy in the United States in the months and perhaps the years to come. I don't really have anything to add to your knowledge on health.
In school, I did okay in accounting, but I was a disaster in biology. I'm learning about these various matters the same way you are. I think, personally, I feel extraordinarily good about being able to listen to Dr. Fauci, who I'd never heard of a year ago. I think we're very, very fortunate as a country. To have somebody at 79 years of age who appears to be able to work 24 hours a day and keep a good humor about him, and communicate in a very straightforward manner about fairly complex subjects, and tell you when he knows something and when he doesn't know something. I'm not going to talk about any political figures at all or politics generally this afternoon.
I do feel that I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Dr. Fauci for educating and informing me, actually along with my friend Bill Gates too, as to what's going on. I know I get it from a straight shooter when I get it from either one of those. Thank you, Dr. Fauci. When this hit us, and as I sit here in this auditorium with 17,000 or 18,000 empty seats, the last time I was here, it was absolutely packed. Creighton was playing Villanova, and there were 17,000 or 18,000, whatever it holds. It was full. There wasn't one person in that crowd, this was in January, there wasn't one person in that crowd that didn't think that March Madness wasn't going to occur. It's been a flip of the switch in a huge way in terms of national behavior, the national psyche.
It's dramatic. When we started on this journey, which we didn't ask for, it seemed to me there was an extraordinary wide variety of possibilities on both the health side and on the economic side. There was DEFCON 5 on one side and DEFCON 1 on the other side. Nobody really knows, of course, all the possibilities that there are, and they don't know what probability factor to stick on them. In this particular situation, it did seem to me that there was an extraordinary range of things that could happen on the health side, and an extraordinary range in terms of the economy. Of course, they intersect and affect each other, so they're bouncing off each other as you go along. I would say again, I don't know anything you don't know about health matters.
I do think the range of possibilities has narrowed down somewhat in that respect. We know we're not getting a best case, and we know we're not getting a worst case. The possibility initially of the virus was hard to evaluate, and it's still hard to evaluate. There's a lot of things we've learned about it, and a lot of things we know we don't know. At least we know what we don't know, and some very smart people are working on it, and we're learning as we go along. The virus obviously has been very transmissible, but on the good side, it's not that good, but it is not as lethal as it might've been.
We had a Spanish flu in 1918. My dad and four siblings and his parents went through it. They have a terrific story in the March 15th edition of The Omaha World-Herald that you can go to omaha.com and look up. It's also on the first page, I believe, on Google if you put in "Spanish flu Omaha." During that particular time, in maybe four months or so, Omaha had 974, I believe, deaths. That was 1/2 of 1% of the population. That figure wasn't greatly different than around the country. If you think of 1/2 of 1% of the population now, you're talking 1,000,007 or thereabout people.
Unfortunately, in terms of the worst case, this does not appear to, in fact, I think you can almost rule out it being as lethal as the Spanish flu was, but it's very, very transmissible. Of course, we have the problem, we don't know the denominator in terms of exactly how lethal it is because we don't know how many people have had it and didn't know they had it. In any event, the range of probabilities on health have narrowed down somewhat. I would say the range of probabilities or possibilities on the economic side are still extraordinarily wide. We do not know exactly what happens when you voluntarily shut down a substantial portion of your society. In 2008 and 2009. Our economic train went off the tracks.
There were some reasons why the roadbed was weak in terms of the banks and all of that sort of thing. This time, we just pulled the train off the tracks and put it on a siding. I don't really know of any parallel in terms of a very, well, the most important country in the world. Most productive, huge population, in effect, sidelining its economy and its workforce, and obviously and unavoidably creating a huge amount of anxiety and changing people's psyche and causing them to somewhat lose their bearings in many cases, understandably. This is quite an experiment, and we may know the answer to most of the questions reasonably soon, but we may not know the answers to some very important questions for many years. It still has this enormous range of possibilities.
Even facing that, I would like to talk to you about the economic future of the country because I remain convinced I was convinced of this in World War II, I was convinced of it during the Cuban Missile Crisis, 9/11, the financial crisis, that nothing can basically stop America. We've faced great problems in the past. We haven't faced this exact problem. In fact, we haven't really faced anything that even quite resembles this problem. We've faced tougher problems, and the American miracles, American magic, has always prevailed, and it will do so again.
I would like to take you through a little history to essentially make my case that if you were to pick one time to be born and one place to be born and you didn't know what your sex was going to be, you didn't know what your intelligence would be, you didn't know what your special talents or special deficiencies would be, that if you could do that one time, you would not pick 1720, you would not pick 1820, you would not pick 1920. You'd pick today, and you would pick America. Of course, the interesting thing about it is that ever since America was organized in 1789, when George Washington took the oath of office, people have wanted to come here. Can you imagine that? For 231 years, there's always been people that have wanted to come here.
My friend, I think has jumped the gun just a shade on putting up slide one, but I'm going to call for some slides as we go along. The interesting thing about this country is what is on slide one. Let's put it up. This is an extraordinarily young country. I'm comparing it to a couple of guys that are pretty old. When you think about the fact that my age, Charlie's age, or our life experience, and then we'll throw in this young guy over here, Greg Abel. If our life experiences combined exceed the life of the United States, we are a very young country. What we've accomplished is miraculous. Just think of this as a little spot in history. If we go to slide two, I've tried to estimate. Well, let's go back.
We'll stay with slide two, but the population in 1790, we had 3.9 million people here. It's funny when you look up census figures, you find out that they had a big fire in the Department of Commerce building in 1921, so they lost a lot of the census records. There's some things where there's a few gaps. There were 3.9 million people in the United States. Actually, I've got 0.6 million. It's closer to 0.7 million. There were 700,000 of those people were slaves at the time. Those 3.9 million people were one half of 1% of the population of the planet. If you'd asked any of those 3.9 million people, any of them, to imagine what life would be like 231 years later, even the most optimistic person, they could have been drinking heavily and even had a little pot.
They still could not in their wildest dreams have thought that in three lifetimes, Charlie's, mine, and Greg's, that in that period you would be looking at a country with 280 million vehicles shuffling around its roads. Airplanes, maybe not today so much, but they'll be back again. Flying people at 40,000 feet coast to coast in five hours. That great universities would exist in one state after another, great hospital systems, and entertainment would be delivered to people in a way nobody could have dreamt of in 1790. This country in 231 years has exceeded anybody's dreams. I went to the internet trying to prepare for this, and if you'll move to the next slide, I tried to find out what was the wealth of the country in 1789, our starting point. I punched in "United States wealth." I tried 1789. I tried 1790.
I thought it might be a little easier in terms of a round year. I think 4 million or so references came up, and I didn't look at all 4 million, but I can tell you the data collection in those early days on many fronts was not anything like today. You really can't find what I would consider reliable figures. You can find out how many mules there were in the country and a few things like that and trying to add them up. In real estate, when you're looking at houses or apartment houses or office buildings, they're each slightly different than each other, but they look to comparable sales. It's hard to find a lot of countries that have been sold, where the wealth has been estimated.
It was interesting to go back and think about the fact that in 1803, we purchased for $15 million. We made the Louisiana Purchase. That's a little later than 1789, but that's the best comp, as they say in real estate. That's the best comp we could find for land mass anyway. When we made that purchase, that was equal, incidentally, to about 1/4 , about 800,000+ square miles, but it was about 1/4 of what the lower 48 states now contain. We bought about 1/4 of the lower 48 for this $15 million back in 1803. If you live in Texas, and your grandfather is close to dying, and he calls the grandchildren, children around him. The French sold us the mineral rights on that $15 million deal as well. We got that whole strip there.
We got all of Kansas and essentially all of Oklahoma, they produced 21 billion barrels of oil for us and a lot of natural gas since the purchase. One of the sidelights is that, we paid our $15 million for the Louisiana Purchase. We paid $3 million of it, 20% of it. We paid with 200,000 ounces of gold valued at $15 an ounce. That $3 million that the French took. We got South Dakota as part of the Louisiana Purchase. The Homestake Mine up there, before it closed, produced well over 40 million ounces of gold. Comes to about $60 billion worth. Like I say, 200,000 ounces took care of 20% of our purchase price.
The Louisiana Purchase was a bargain, but it's what the going price was for 800,000 square miles, I guess, at the time, and $0.03 an acre. I decided by playing around with various numbers such as that as a reasonable estimate of the worth of the country, 1789, $1 billion was not a crazy figure. Now, if I'd been an academician or something, I would have put $1,107,400,000 or something like that. I would've made it look respectable, but it's a wild guess. It's not a crazy figure. What has happened, let's move on to the next slide, to the wealth of the country since then. Here we have some figures that come out pretty regularly.
Well, they do come out regularly, where the Federal Reserve estimates the net household worth of people in the United States, all the households in the United States. You can look these up, and you'll see that there's $30 trillion of stocks and, I think maybe single family homes, what other, there's 82 million or so owner-occupied single families and maybe 45 million rental apartments and so on. You start adding all these up, and the Federal Reserve tells us, and I invite you to look at the data, it's kind of interesting, that we now in the United States, 231 years later, we have $100 trillion. We have more than $100 trillion of household wealth, even though the stock market's gone down somewhat since the last quarterly report.
You say, "Well, we've had a lot of inflation, everything." We actually, in the U.S., for the first half of our existence roughly, we didn't really have that much inflation. We had inflationary periods and deflationary periods, the general price level did not change that dramatically. I will assume again for this calculation that there's been 20 for one inflation. It's way less than that in many commodities. It's very hard to measure and talk about equivalent benefits from different kinds of products and so on and costs. I think it's reasonable to say that the U.S., in real terms, has increased in wealth at something in the area of 5,000 for one, which is really mind-blowing. 5,000 for one in real terms in a country that had half a percent had a bunch of raw land. A vision.
To accomplish that in 231 years, there's just no denying that that's beyond what anybody could've dreamt earlier. It was not done, and this is important because we've now hit a bump in the road. It was not done without some very, very serious bumps in the road. It was not 231 years of steady progress. Matter of fact, we had been in this birth of this country, we'd been what? Into it 72 years. If we go to the next slide. 1861, we now had about 31 million people. With the 1960 census showed around 31 million people or thereabouts in the country, and 4 million of them were slaves, and we had never really resolved the very much unfinished business of what was involved in compromises in 1789, and we'll have more to say about that later.
We had something that not too many countries experience, and if you told people in 1789 that in 72 years you were going to have a division that caused the president of the United States at Gettysburg to say that, "Testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and dedicated can long endure." Imagine the president of the United States wondering aloud whether the country that he was presiding over could long endure only 72 years or 74 years at Gettysburg had taken place. While this marvelous dream was being played out, roughly 1/3 of the way through it, we faced this really moment of decision, and we entered into a contest that, if we'll go to the next slide, made an estimate, deliberately killed roughly 6% of the males in the country who were between 18 and 60.
I'm assuming that there were more than 600,000 deaths in the war. I think it's a reasonable estimate that 18-60 group, males were by far the great proportion. Imagine 6% of your working prime age males in a country are wiped out in four years. When we look at the progress of this country and we think of our own problems now, I just ask you to ponder, and we'll move to the next slide. That would be equivalent today to having four billion males in that same age group similarly wiped out. That was one incredible interruption which this country nevertheless worked through while compiling this American dream that is one of the wonders of the world, perhaps the wonder of the world in many senses. Let's move on to another crisis of a different sort that hit the country.
This, of course, is the 1929 crash, which led to the Great Depression. Here, the Dow Jones average, which we'll use for this. At that time, that's the one everybody paid attention to. Actually, the second most important average at that time, if you look at the papers, was "The New York Times" average, which has disappeared. Of course, the Standard & Poor's is probably regarded as a superior yardstick. The Dow Jones is a perfectly adequate yardstick. On September 3rd, 1929, the Dow Jones average closed at 381.17, and people were very happy, and buying stocks on margin had worked wonderfully. The Roaring '20s had a good feeling to it, with the auto coming of age and the day of air travel coming along and all kinds of new appliances and the telephone getting wider use.
Believe it or not, it hadn't really caught on that much prior thereto, but the movies were coming on. It was a happy place. Of course, if we'll move to the next slide, we'll look at what happened in the couple of months after September 3rd. The Dow Jones average almost got cut in half. That was pretty impressive until we had this recent situation where in a shorter period of time, we lost about 1/3 . The crash, and there's a great book about it called "The Great Crash" by John Kenneth Galbraith. Let me interject one little plug here. There's a small business in Omaha, and I hate what truncating this meeting or changing it so dramatically has done to many of the businesses in Omaha, because I think small business were the beneficiaries of it really.
They got a lot of business with the Berkshire meeting, and they're going to get it in the future. They suffer during a period like this, and they just had a story about The Bookworm. Well, The Bookworm, if you buy any books that come out of it, anything I recommend, think about just putting Bookworm in Omaha. "The Great Crash" is a wonderful book, and John Kenneth Galbraith describes it. I would like to get into a bit of a personal note which will have some relevance, not too much, but some relevance to the story of the Great Depression. Because in 1929, my dad, who was 26 years of age then, was employed as a security salesman by a local small bank. He sold stocks and bonds, but mostly he sold stocks.
When stocks fall 48%, and you were selling them to people a few months ago, you really don't feel like going out and facing those same people. I think my dad probably elected to do as they say now, shelter in place, which means stay at home. There really wasn't that much at our house. We just had a small yard. It was wintertime anyway. My dad wouldn't have been puttering around the yard anyway, and television wasn't there. He and my mother got along very well. Under those conditions, if you'll turn to the next slide, I was born about nine months later. At that time, I was actually born on August 30th, but the stock market was closed that day, and so I'm using the previous day's figures.
I didn't notice at the time that the market was closed, the stock market had actually recovered over 20% during that 9.5 month period or thereabouts. People did not think in the fall of 1930, they did not think they were in a Great Depression. They thought it was a recession very much like had occurred at least a dozen times, although not always when stock markets were important. We'd had many recessions in the United States over the time, and this did not look like it was something dramatically out of the ordinary. For a while, actually for about 10 days after my birth, that view held on, and the stock market actually managed to go up all of 1% or 2% there in those 10 days. That's the last day.
Well, from that point, if you'll turn to the next slide, the stock market went from a level of 240 to 241, which was a noticeable decline because, if somebody had given me $1,000 on the day I was born and I'd bought stocks with it and bought the Dow average, my $1,000 would have become $170 in less than two years. That is something that none of us ever experienced. We may have had it with one stock occasionally, but in terms of having a broad range of America marked down 83% in two years and marked down 89% of the peak. It was in September 3rd, 1929. That was extraordinary. In that intervening period, less than one year after I was born, just slightly less than one year, my dad went to the bank where he worked and had his account.
Of course, the bank had a sign on it closed. He had no job. He had two kids at that point. His father had a grocery store, but Charlie and I both worked for my grandfather. Charlie worked there in 1940. I worked there in 1941, so we didn't know each other. My grandfather said to my father that, "Don't worry about your groceries." "Howard," he says, "I'll just let your bill run." My grandfather was not exactly. He cared about his family, but he wasn't going to go crazy. One of the things as I look back on that period is, and I don't think economists generally like to give it that much of a point of importance, but if we'd had the FDIC 10 years earlier. The FDIC started on January 1st, 1934.
It was part of the sweeping legislation that took place when Roosevelt came in. If we'd had the FDIC, we would have had a much, much different experience, I believe, in the Great Depression. People blame it on Smoot-Hawley. There's all kinds of things, and the margin requirements in 1929, and all of those things entered into creating a recession. If you have over 4,000 banks fail, that's 4,000 local experiences where people save and save and save and put their money away, and then someday they reach for it and it's gone. That happens in all 48 states, and it happens to your neighbors, and it happens to your relatives. It has to have an effect on the psyche that's incredible. One very, very, very good thing that came out of the Depression, in my view, is the FDIC.
It would have been a somewhat different world, I'm sure, if the bank failures hadn't just rolled across this country. With people that thought that they were savers found out that they had nothing when they went there, and there was a sign that said "Closed." Incidentally, the FDIC, I think very few people know this, or at least they don't appreciate it, but the FDIC has not cost the American taxpayer a dime. Its expenses have been paid, its losses have been paid all through assessments on banks. It's been a mutual insurance company of the banks backed by the federal government and associated with the federal government. Now it holds $100 billion, and that consists of premiums that were paid in and investment income on the premiums, less the expenses and paying of all the losses.
Think of the incredible amount of peace of mind that's given to people that were not similarly situated when the Great Depression hit. The Great Depression went on, and it lasted a very long time, but it lasted a lot longer in the minds of people than it did actually in its effects. World War II came along, and on sort of an involuntary manner, we adopted Keynesianism. We started running fiscal deficits, of course, that were absolutely huge and took our debt up to a percentage of GDP, which we had never reached before and never have reached since. We had an enormous economic recovery, but the minds of people had been so scarred, the memories. Parents told their children. 1929 became a symbol in people's minds. If you said 1929, it was like saying 1776 or 1492.
Everybody knew exactly what you were talking about, and it affected stock prices in a rather remarkable way to the point, if you'll change to the next slide. It was January 4th, 1951 that the kid who was born on August 30th, 1930 had finished college before the stock market got back to where it was at that earlier time. Take the years from 1920, 1930, or 1929 really, to 1951, or take the year from my birth, 20 years. Bear in mind that the country was only 140 years old when this started.
That's 20 years out of this amazing 231-year lifetime of our country that was flat out a time of, for a long time, of no economic growth and no feeling by people in terms about the wealth of the country, about what the American economy was worth, what all these corporations that were doing far, far, far better than they were on and on. It took all of that time to restore, in the market, a price level that was equal to what it was when I was born 20 years earlier. If you think about the fact that we're enduring a few months, and we'll endure some many more months. We don't know how it comes out, and people in the '30s didn't know how it was going to come out, they endured, persevered, prospered, and the American miracle continued.
It's interesting in that I actually don't have a slide for the next one because last night I was thinking after all the slides had been prepared, I was actually thinking about this a little bit, I remembered that at the start of 1954, the Dow was only at about 280. I remember 1954 because it was the best year I ever had in the stock market. The Dow went from essentially what, 280 or thereabouts at the start of the year to a little over 400 at the end of the year. When it went to 400, as soon as it went across 381, that famous figure from 1929.
When it went to 400, this will be hard for some of you to believe, but everybody wondered, "Is this 1929 all over again?" That seems a little far-fetched because it was a different country in 1954, but that was the common question, and it actually achieved such a level of worry about whether we were about to jump off another cliff just because the 381 of 1929 had been exceeded, that they held Senator Fulbright, Bill Fulbright of Arkansas, who became very famous later in terms of the Foreign Relations Committee. He headed the Senate Banking Committee, and he called for a special investigation, and he called it the, what did he call it? The Stock Market Study. If you read through it, he really was questioning whether we had built another house of cards again.
On his committee, it is interesting to see the Senate Finance Committee. One of the members was Prescott Bush, the father of George H.W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush, and had some illustrious names. His committee in March of 1955, with the Dow at 405, assembled 20 of the best minds in the United States to testify as to whether we were going crazy again because the market was at 400, the Dow was at 400, and we had gotten in this incredible trouble before. That was the mindset of the country. It is incredible. We did not really believe America was what it was. My boss, the reason I am familiar with this thousand-page book that I have here, I found it last night in the library.
Was that I was working in New York for one of the 20 people that was called down to testify before Senator Fulbright, and he testified right before Bill Martin, who was running the Federal Reserve, testified, and right after General Wood, who was running Sears, testified. Sears was very important then. Bill Martin, of course, was the fellow that the longest-running chairman in the history of the Fed, and he's the one that gave the famous quote about the function of the Fed was to take away the punchbowl just when the party started to get really warmed up. Ben Graham, my boss, sent me over to the public library in New York to gather some information for him, something you could do in five minutes with a computer now, and I dug out something, and he went to testify.
On page 545 of this book, I knew where to look. I didn't have to go through it all. He had the quote, which I remember. I remember because Ben Graham was one of the three smartest people I've met in my life, and he was the dean of people in securities business. He wrote the classic "Security Analysis" book in 1934. He wrote the book that changed my life, "The Intelligent Investor," in 1949. He was unbelievably smart. When he testified with the Dow at 404, he had one line in there right toward the start in his written testimony, and he said, "The stock market is high. Looks high. It is high, but it's not as high as it looks." He said it is high.
Since that time, if we'll turn to the next slide, of course, we felt the American tailwind at full force. The Dow, well, let's see, yeah, when the Dow went down Friday, but when we made the slide, it was about 24,000. You're looking at a market today that has produced $100 for every dollar. All you did was had to believe in America, and just buy a cross-section of America. You didn't have to read The Wall Street Journal. You didn't have to look up the price of your stock. You didn't have to pay a lot of money in fees to anybody. You just had to believe that the American miracle was intact. You'd had this testing period between 1929 and, well, really, certainly 1954, as indicated by what happened when it got back up to 380.
You had this testing period. People really, they'd lost faith to some degree. They just didn't see the potential of what America could do. We found that nothing can stop America when you get right down to it. It's been true all along. It may have been interrupted with the scariest of scenarios, when you had a war with one group of states fighting another group of states. It may have been tested again in the Great Depression, and it may be tested now to some degree. In the end, the answer is never bet against America. That, in my view, is as true today as it was in 1789 and even was true during the Civil War and the depths of the Depression.
I'm now about to say something that, and don't change the slide yet, but I'm now about to say something that some of you will be tempted to argue with me about. I would make the case that we are imperfect in a very many ways. I would say, and if you'll put up the next slide, that we are now a better country as well as an incredibly more wealthy country than we were in 1789. We're far from what we should be, will be, we have gone dramatically in the right direction. It's interesting, we said in 1776, "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.
Among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." Yet, 14 years later, a year after we really officially began the country in 1789, adopted a Constitution, we found that more than 15% of the people in the country were slaves. We wrestled with that. When you say the word self-evident, that sort of sounds like you're saying any damn fool can recognize that. You certainly say, you can argue maybe a little bit about life and pursuit of happiness, but I don't see how in the world anybody can reconcile liberty with the idea that 15% of the population was enslaved. It took us a long time to at least partially correct that economy. It took a Civil War, and it took losing 6% of those people, the males that were between 18 and 60 years of age. We've moved in the right direction.
We've got a long ways to go, but we've moved in the right direction now. In addition, going back again to that 1776 statement that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator, et cetera. I think it was self-evident to the 50% of the population that they were getting a fair deal for over half the lifetime of the country. It took 131 years of our country's 231 years. It took 131 years until women were guaranteed the right to vote for our country's leaders. What's even more remarkable is that after we adopted the 19th Amendment in 1920, it took 61 more years until a woman was allowed to join those eight males on the Supreme Court. I grew up thinking that the Supreme Court must have been set had to be nine men.
At 61 years, so it took 192 years before Sandra Day O'Connor was appointed to the court. Now you can say that there was a pipeline problem. Half the population may have been women in 1920, but they weren't half the lawyers or weren't 10% of the lawyers probably. You can understand some delay, but 61 years is a long time to go and to pick 33 males in between. If that was entirely by chance, then the odds against that, if you were flipping coins, is about 8 billion to one . Now, like I said, there was a pipeline problem. It took us a long, long time, and it's not done yet. I think it does give meaning to the fact that we are a better society.
We have a lot of room to go. We are a better society than existed in 1789. When you go to Colonial Williamsburg, you have that. I've been there a couple of times. Matter of fact, I watched the debate between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford there in 1976. It was not a great time to be Black. It was not a great time to be a woman. Both of those categories still have certainly got potential for significant improvement in terms of fulfilling that pledge made in 1776 about how we believe that it's self-evident that all men are created equal. We have made progress. We are a better society. We will as the years go by. If you'll move to the next slide. I believe that. I think Let's see if I can get these slides in the proper order here.
I believe that when you get through evaluating all of the qualitative facts, what we have done toward meeting the aspirations of what we wrote in 1776, what we wrote in 1776 wasn't a fact, but it was an aspirational document, and we have worked toward those aspirations. We have a long way to go. I'll repeat, if you'll move to the next slide, that never bet against America. Let's move on now to a much broader subject, what I don't know. I don't know, and perhaps with a bias, I don't believe anybody knows what the market is going to do tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. I know America's going to move forward over time, but I don't know for sure. We learned this on September 10th, 2001, and we learned it a few months ago in terms of the virus.
Anything can happen in terms of markets. You can bet on America, but you have to be careful about how you bet. Simply because markets can do anything. On October, whatever it was, in 1987, October 11th, I believe, a Monday, yeah, markets went down 22% in one day. In 1914, they closed the stock market for about four months. After 9/11, closed the market for four days. We hustled to get it going again. Nobody knows what's going to happen tomorrow. When you bet them, I tell you to bet on America, and I tell you that's what's really gotten me through ever since I bought my first stock when I was 11. I caught a huge, huge, huge tailwind in America, but it wasn't going to blow in my direction every single day, and you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.
I would like to, in context of the present news, point out something you may find kind of interesting. If you go to YouTube, you'll find on June 17th of 2015, 4+ years ago, you'll find Sam Nunn, who's one of the people I admire the most in the United States, in the world, enormous patriot and tremendous senator. He's carried on thankless work since leaving the Senate, and I'd say heading something called the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which most of you haven't heard of, but have been slightly involved in it. Sam Nunn founded that. The Nuclear Threat Initiative, simply organizations devoted to trying to reduce the chances of something of a nuclear, chemical, biological, and now cyber nature from either malevolent or accidental or whatever it may be, from causing deaths to millions of Americans.
Among the things, Sam co-founded it, but he's been the heart and soul of the organization subsequently. He's talked about, worried about pandemics along with the nuclear threat for decades. He's participated in war games where they play out various scenarios, including malevolent pandemics that could be started by the same kind of nut that sent the anthrax letters in around 9/11, a little after. Sam appeared on this YouTube presentation, and I'm sure he's been on many others. I just happened to look this one up and talked about the dangers of a pandemic. Anybody should listen to Sam Nunn any time he talks. He said at that time, "Germs don't have borders," which we've certainly learned in the last couple of months.
When I clicked on YouTube, if you'll go to the next, I found out that recently it had 831 views. This was only a few days ago. I looked it up, and I don't know whether most of those views have just been in the last few days because, or the last few months, I should say, because of the interest in pandemics. It is hard to think about things that haven't happened yet. We can experience when something like the current pandemic happens, it's hard to factor that in, and that's why you never want to use borrowed money, at least in my view, in margin to buy into investments. We run Berkshire that way.
We run it so that we literally try to think of the worst case of not only just one thing going wrong, but other things going wrong at the same time, maybe partly caused by the first, but maybe independent even of the first. That you learned in, I don't know what grade now, probably earlier than when I went to school, but fifth or sixth grade, that you can have any series of numbers times zero and just need one zero in there and the answer is zero. There's no reason to use borrowed money to participate in the American tailwind, but there's every other reason to participate.
I can't resist pointing out that in October of 2019, a large 300-page, I've got it right here, book was brought out and Johns Hopkins, one of the most respected institutions in the country, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, NTI, and the intelligence group at The Economist collaborated to evaluate the problems of the worldwide preparedness for pandemics, essentially. I think in November, Sam came out to see me with Ernie Moniz, former Secretary of Energy, who now is the CEO of NTI. He and Sam are co-chairman. Beth Cameron, who did a lot of work on this report, came out to see me. They gave me, in November, I believe, of last year, they gave me this appraisal. The opening line, if you'll turn the page, this is the opening line of this 300-page tome.
Biological threats, natural, intentional, or accidental, in any country can pose risk to global health, international security, and the worldwide economy. This book was prepared in order to evaluate the preparedness of the various countries and rank them. We ranked pretty well, but all of the countries got a failing grade, basically. You would think with the prestige of Johns Hopkins and The Economist, along with people like Sam and Ernie, et cetera, that this would have gotten some attention. Again, Sam, if you'll turn to the next page, Sam and the others went on YouTube on October 24th, 2019, and they have racked up, as of a couple days ago, 1,498 views. My friend Bill Gates was delivering the same warning at a TED Talk some years back, and he's gotten a lot more views.
It just says something about the fact that you're going to get bolts from the blue, and you can read papers about them, and you can talk about what'll happen if some, as the fellows at Salomon used to tell me, some 25 sigma event comes along, and they'd say that'll happen once in the life of the universe, and then it happens to them a couple of times in a month and they go broke. You just don't know what's going to happen. You know, at least in my view, you know that America's tailwind is not exhausted. You're going to get a fine result if you own equities over a long period of time. The idea that equities will not produce better results than the 30-year Treasury bond, which yields 1.25% Now. It's taxable income.
It's the aim of the Federal Reserve to have 2% a year inflation. Equities are going to outperform that bond. They're going to outperform Treasury bills. They're going to outperform that money you've stuck under your mattress. They are a enormously sound investment as long as they're an investment and they're not a gambling device or something that you think you can safely buy on margin or whatever it may be. It's interesting that stocks offer, we always look at stocks as just being a part of a business. Stocks are a small part of a business. If in 1789 you'd saved a small amount of money, it wasn't easy to save, you might have bought, with those savings, you might have bought a tiny plot of property. Maybe you bought a house that could be rented to somebody.
You didn't really have the chance to buy in with 10 different people who were developing businesses and who were presumably putting their own money in and that would have the American tailwind behind. Of the 10, a reasonably high percentage would succeed in a way and earn decent returns. Those are the choices you might have had to do with savings. They started offering bonds originally, and there again, you got a limited return, but the return in those days may have been 5% or 6% or something of the sort. You can't buy risk-free bonds. The yardstick for me is always the U.S. Treasury. When somebody offers you quite a bit more than the U.S. Treasury, there's usually a reason. There's more risk.
Going back to stocks, people bring the attitude to them too often that because they are liquid and quoted minute by minute, that you develop an opinion on them minute by minute. That's really foolish when you think about it. That's something Graham taught me in 1949. That single thought, stocks were parts of businesses and not just little things that moved around on charts. Charts were very popular in those days and whatever it may be. Imagine for a moment that you decided to invest money now, and you bought a farm. The farmland around here, let's say you bought 160 acres, and you bought it at X per share or per acre. The farmer next to you had 160 identical acres, same contour, same soil quality. It was identical.
That farmer next door to you was a very peculiar character because every day that farmer with the identical farm said, "I'll sell you my farm, or I'll buy your farm at a certain price," which he would name. That's a very obliging neighbor. That's got to be a plus to have a fellow like that with the next farm. You don't get that with farms. You get it with stocks. If you want 100 shares of General Motors on Monday morning, somebody will buy your 100 shares or sell you another 100 shares at exactly the same price, and that goes on five days a week. Just imagine if you had a farmer doing that. When you bought the farm, you looked to what the farm would produce. That was what went through your mind. You're saying to yourself, "I'm paying X dollars per acre.
I think I'll get so many bushels of corn or soybean." On average, some years good, some years bad, and some years the price will be good, some years the price will be bad, et cetera. You think about the potential of the farm. Now you get this idiot that buys a farm next to you, and on top of that, he's sort of a manic depressive and drinks, maybe smokes a little pot. His numbers just go all over the place. Now, the only thing you have to do is to remember that this guy next door is there to serve you and not to instruct you. You bought the farm because you thought the farm had the potential. You don't really need a quote on it. If you bought in with John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie, there were never any quotes.
Well, there were quotes later on, but basically, you bought into the business, and that's what you're doing when you buy stocks. You get this added advantage that you do have this neighbor who you're not obliged to listen to at all, who is going to give you a price every day, and he's going to have his ups and downs, and maybe he'll name a selling price that he'll buy at, in which case you sell if you want to. Maybe he'll name a very low price, and you'll buy his farm from him. You don't have to, and you don't want to put yourself in a position where you have to. Stocks have this enormous inherent advantage of people yelling out prices all the time to you. Many people turn that into a disadvantage.
Of course, many people can profit in one way or another from telling you that they can tell you what this farmer is going to yell out tomorrow or next neighboring farmer is going to yell out tomorrow or next week or next month. There's huge money in it. People tell you that it's important and they know, and that you should pay a lot of attention to their thoughts about what price changes should be, or you tell yourself that there should be this great difference. The truth is, if you owned the businesses you liked prior to the virus arriving, it changes prices. Nobody's forcing you to sell.
If you really like the business and you like the management you're in with, and the business hasn't fundamentally changed, I'll get to that little one, a report on Berkshire, which I will soon, I promise. The stocks have an enormous advantage, you still can bet on America, but you can't bet unless you're willing and have an outlook to independently decide that you want to own a cross-section of America because I don't think most people are in a position to pick single stocks. A few maybe, on balance, I think people are much better off buying a cross-section of America and just forgetting about it. If you'd done that, if I'd done that when I got out of college, that's all I had to do to make 100 for one and then collect dividends on top of it which increased substantially over time.
The American tailwind is marvelous. American business represents it's going to have interruptions. You're not going to foresee the interruptions. You do not want to get yourself in a position where those interruptions can affect you, either because you're leveraged or because you're psychologically unable to handle looking at a bunch of numbers.
If you really had a farm, you had this neighbor, one day he offered you $2,000 an acre, the next day he offers you $1,200 an acre, maybe the day after that, he offers you $800 an acre, are you really going to feel that at $2,000 an acre, when you had evaluated what the farm would produce, are you going to let this guy drive you into thinking, "I better sell because his number keeps coming in lower all the time?" It's a very important matter to bring the right psychological approach to owning common stocks. I will tell you, if you bet on America and sustain that position for decades, you're going to do better than, in my view, far better than owning Treasury securities or far better than following people who tell you what the farmer's going to yell out next.
There's huge amounts of money that people pay for advice they really don't need, and for advice where the person giving it can be very well-meaning in it and believe their own line. The truth is that you can't deliver superior results to everybody by just having them trade around a business. If you bought into a business, it's going to deliver what the business produces, and the idea that you can outsmart the person next to you or that the person advising you can outsmart the person sitting next to you is really the wrong approach. Find businesses, get a cross-section. In my view, for most people, the best thing to do is to own the S&P 500 index fund. People will try and sell you other things because there's more money in it for them if they do.
I'm not saying that that's a conscious act on their part. Most good salespeople believe their own baloney. That's part of being a good salesperson, and I'm sure I've done plenty of that in my life, too, but it's very human if you keep repeating something often enough. That's why lawyers have the witnesses keep saying things over and over again that by the time they get on the witness stand, they'll believe it, whether it was true in the first place or not. You are dealing with something fundamentally advantageous, in my view, in owning common stocks. I will bet on America the rest of my life, and I hope my successors at Berkshire do it. Now, we do it in two different ways. We do it by buying entire businesses, and we buy parts of businesses.
I would like to emphasize that. Well, I'd like to give you a few figures that will tie in from our activities in the first quarter, and also what we've done in April. We do try to pick the businesses that we think we understand. We don't buy the S&P 500. We like to buy the entire businesses when we buy them. We don't get a chance to do that very often. Most of the best businesses are not available for sale in their entirety. We don't mind in the least buying partial interests in businesses. We would rather own 6% or 7% or 8% of a wonderful company and regard it as a partnership interest, essentially, in that company. We get an opportunity to do that through marketable securities, and sometimes we get more opportunities than others.
With that, I hope I've convinced you to bet on America. I'm not saying that this is the right time to buy stocks. If you mean by right that they're going to go up instead of down, I don't know where they're going to go in the next day or week or month or year. I hope I know enough to know. Well, I think I can buy a cross-section and do fine over 20 or 30 years. You may think that's for a guy 89, taking kind of an optimistic viewpoint. I hope that really everybody would buy stocks with the idea that they're buying partnerships and businesses, and they wouldn't look at them as chips to move around up or down.
We will just now take a quick look, and I see we've got Becky's email address, so if you have questions on what I've said or other things, you can email these questions, and she is back there probably sort of a madhouse trying to handle questions coming in and pick out the ones she's going to prioritize. Feel free to, anything I've talked about so far, to send along to her. We'll keep her address up when I later hold the formal part of the meeting, too. Very briefly, in terms of Berkshire in the first quarter, if you'll put up. Do we have the slides on that? There we are.
Our operating earnings were, there's much more about this in the 10-Q, it's really not worth spending any real time on, the operating earnings for the first quarter have no meaning whatsoever in terms of forecasting what's going to happen the next year. I don't know the consequences of shutting down the American economy. I know eventually it will work, whatever we do. We may make mistakes. We will make mistakes, I'm not, during this talk and later on, I'm not going to be second-guessing people on this because nobody knows for sure what any alternative action would produce or anything of the sort.
What we do know is that for some period, certainly during the balance of the year, it could go on a considerable period of time, who knows, our operating earnings will be less, considerably less than if the virus hadn't come along. It hurts some of our businesses a lot. Some of our businesses effectively have been shut down. It affects others much less. Our three major businesses of insurance and the BNSF Railroad, and our energy business, those are our three largest by some margin. They're in a reasonably decent position. They'll spend more than their depreciation. Some of the earnings will go, along with depreciation, will go toward increasing fixed assets. Basically, these businesses will produce cash even though their earnings decline somewhat. If we'll go to part two, at Berkshire, we keep ourselves in an extraordinarily strong position.
We'll always do that. That's fundamental. We insure people. We're a specialist to some extent, and a leader. It's not our main business, but we sell structured settlements. That means somebody gets in a terrible accident, usually an auto accident, and they're going to require care for 10, 30, 50 years. Their family or their lawyer is wise enough, in our view, rather than take some big cash settlement, to essentially arrange to have money paid over the lifetime of the individual to take care of their medical bills or whatever it may be. We're large. We've got many people that, in effect, have staked their well-being on the promises of Berkshire to take care of them for, like I say, 50 years or longer into the future. Now, I would never take real chances with other people's money under any circumstances.
Both Charlie and I come from a background where we ran partnerships. I started mine in 1956, for really seven, either actual family members or the equivalent, and Charlie did the same thing six years later. We never, neither one of us, I think, I know I didn't, and I'm virtually certain the same is true of Charlie, neither one of us ever had a single institution investment with us. Every single bit of money we managed for other people was from individuals, people with faces attached to them, or entities, or money with faces attached to them. We've always felt that our job is basically that of a trustee, and hopefully a reasonably smart trustee in terms of what we were trying to accomplish. The trustee aspect has been very important, and it's true for the people with the structured settlements.
It's true for up and down the line, but it's true for the owners very much, too. We always operate from a position of strength. Now, I show on the slide that's up, I show our Well, let's go back one. Yeah. I show our net, our cash and Treasury bill position on March 31st, and you might look at that and say, "Well, you've got $125 billion or so in cash and Treasury bills, and you've got, at least at that point, we had about $180 billion or so in equities." You can say, "Well, that's a huge position to have in Treasury bills versus just $180 billion in equities." We really have far more than that in equities because we own a lot of businesses.
We own 100% of the stock of a great many businesses, which to us are very similar to the marketable stocks we own. We just don't own them all. They don't have a quote on them. We have hundreds of billions of wholly owned businesses, and so our $124 billion is not some 40% or so cash positions. It's far less than that. We will always keep plenty of cash on hand and for any circumstances, if a 9/11 comes along, if the stock market is closed as it was in World War I, it's not going to be, but I didn't think we were going to be having a pandemic when I watched that Creighton-Villanova game in January either.
We want to be in a position at Berkshire where, well, you remember Blanche DuBois in "A Streetcar Named Desire." That goes back before many of you, but she said she's dependent on the kindness of strangers. We don't want to be dependent on the kindness of friends even, because there are times when money almost stops. We had one of those, interestingly enough. We had it, of course, in 2008 and 2009. Right around the day or two leading up to March 23rd, we came very close, but fortunately, we had a Federal Reserve that knew what to do. Investment- grade companies were essentially going to be frozen out of the market.
CFOs all over the country had been taught to maximize returns on equity capital, so they financed themselves to some extent through commercial paper because that was very cheap, and it was backed up by bank lines and all of that. They let the debt creep up quite a bit at many companies. Then, of course, they had the hell scared out of them by what was happening in markets, particularly the equity markets. So they rushed to draw down lines of credit, and that surprised the people who had extended those lines of credit, and they got very nervous. The capacity of Wall Street to absorb a rush to liquidity that was taking place in mid-March was strained to the limit to the point where the Federal Reserve observing these markets decided they had to move in a very big way.
We got to the point where the U.S. Treasury market, the deepest of all markets, got somewhat disorganized. When that happens, believe me, every bank and CFO in the country knows it, and they react with fear. Fear is the most contagious disease you can imagine. It makes the virus look like a piker. We came very close to having a total freeze of credit to the largest companies in the world who were depending on it. To the great credit of Jay Powell, I've always had Paul Volcker up on a special place, special pedestal in terms of Federal Reserve Chairmen over the years. We've had a lot of very good Fed Chairmen, but Paul Volcker, I had him at the top of the list. I'll recommend another book.
Paul Volcker died about, I don't know, less than maybe a year ago or a little less. Not much before he died, he wrote a book called "Keeping at It." If you call my friends at The Bookworm, I think you'll enjoy reading that book. Paul Volcker was a giant. In many ways, he was a big guy, too. He and Jay Powell couldn't seem more in temperament or anything. Jay Powell, in my view, and the Fed Board belong up there on that pedestal with him because they acted in the middle of March, probably somewhat instructed by what they'd seen in 2008 and 2009. They reacted in a huge way, and essentially allowed what's happened since that time to play out the way it has.
March, when the market had essentially frozen, closed a little after mid-month, ended up, because the Fed took these actions on March 23rd, it ended up being the largest month for corporate debt issuance I believe in history. Then April followed through and was even a larger month, and you saw all kinds of companies grabbing everything, coming to market, and spreads actually narrowed. Every one of those people that issued bonds in late March and April will send a thank you letter to the Fed because it would not have happened if they hadn't operated with really unprecedented speed and determination. We'll know the consequences of swelling the Fed's balance sheet. You can look at the Fed's balance sheet. They put it out every Thursday. It's kind of interesting reading if you're sort of a nut like me.
It's up there on the internet every Thursday, and you'll see some extraordinary changes there in the last six or seven weeks. Like I say, we don't know the consequences of that. Nobody knows exactly. We don't know the consequences of what undoubtedly we'll have to do. We do know the consequences of doing nothing, and that would have been the tendency of the Fed in many years past, not doing nothing, but doing something inadequate. Mario Draghi brought the whatever it takes to Europe, and the Fed in mid-March sort of did whatever it takes squared. We owe him a huge thank you. We're prepared at Berkshire. We always prepare on the basis that maybe the Fed will not have a Chairman that acts like that, and we really want to be prepared for anything.
That explains some of the $124 billion in cash and bills. We don't need it all. We do never want to be dependent on not only the kindness of strangers but the kindness of friends. In the next slide, we have what we did in equities, and these numbers are tiny when you get right down to it. I mean, for having $500 billion or so in market value at the start of the year, or something close to that. We bought in $1.7 billion of stock, and our purchases were $couple of billion more than our sales of equities. As you saw on the previous slide, we had operating earnings of almost $6 billion, and so we did very little in the first quarter.
I've added another figure, which I wouldn't normally present to you, but I want to be sure that if I'm talking to you about investments and stocks more than I usually have, I want you to know what Berkshire's actually doing. You'll see in the month of April that we net sold $6 billion or so of securities. That isn't because we thought the stock market was going to go down or anything of the sort, or because somebody changes their target price, or they change this year's earnings forecast. I just decided that I'd made a mistake in evaluating. It was an understandable mistake. It was a probability-weighted decision when we bought that we were getting an attractive amount for our money when investing across the airlines business.
We bought roughly 10% of the four largest airlines. This is not 100% of what we did in April, but we probably paid somewhere between $7 billion-$8 billion to own 10% of the four large companies in the airline business. We felt for that we were getting $1 billion roughly of earnings. It wasn't we're getting $1 billion of dividends, but we felt our share of the underlying earnings was $1 billion, and we felt that that number was more likely to go up than down over a period of time. That it would be cyclical, obviously. It was as if we bought the whole company, but we bought it through the New York Stock Exchange, and we can only effectively buy 10% roughly of the four.
We treat it mentally exactly as if we were buying a business. It turned out I was wrong about that business because of something that was not in any way the fault of four excellent CEOs. Believe me, it's no joy being a CEO of an airline. The companies we bought were well-managed. They did a lot of things right. It's a very difficult business because you're dealing with millions of people every day, and if something goes wrong for 1% of them, they are very unhappy. I don't envy anybody the job of being CEO of an airline, but I particularly don't enjoy being in a period like this where essentially people have been told basically not to fly. I've been told not to fly for a while. I'm looking forward to flying.
I may not fly commercial, but that's another question. The airline business, and I may be wrong, and I hope I'm wrong, but I think it changed in a very major way, and it's obviously changed in the fact that the four companies are each going to borrow perhaps an average of at least $10 billion or $12 billion each way. You have to pay that back out of earnings over some period of time. You're $10 billion or $12 billion worse off if that happens. Of course, in some cases, they're having to sell stock or sell the right to buy a stock at these prices, and that takes away from the upside down. I don't know whether two or three years from now that as many people will fly as many passenger miles as they did last year. They may and they may not.
The future is much less clear to me about how the business will turn out through absolutely no fault of the airlines themselves. Something that was a low probability event happened, and it happened to hurt particularly the travel business, the hotel business, the cruise business, the theme park business, the airline business in particular. Of course, the airline business has the problem that if the business comes back 70% or 80%, the aircraft don't disappear. You've got too many planes, and it didn't look that way when the orders were placed a few months ago or when arrangements were made. The world changed for airlines, and I wish them well, but it's one of the businesses we have. We have businesses we own directly that are going to be hurt significantly. The virus will cost Berkshire money.
It doesn't cost money because of our stock and various other businesses moves around. If XYZ, which say is one of our holdings and we own it as a business and we like the business, the stock goes down 20 or 30 or 40%, we don't feel we're poorer in that situation. We felt we were poorer in terms of what actually happened to those airline businesses, just as if we'd owned 100% of them. That explains those sales, which are relatively minor, but I want to make sure that nobody thinks that that involves a market prediction. That pretty well wraps it up for Berkshire. Now we move into the formal part of the meeting, which will be followed by a fairly extended question and answer period if there are a lot of questions with Becky.
While we're doing this formal part of the meeting, it's not too exciting, so feel free to leave whatever you're viewing this through. If you want to send questions to Becky, we'll keep her contact information up on the screen. If you want to get yourself a sandwich or do anything else, or you can pay attention to the formal part of the meeting. We will do this and won't take too long, and then we will move on to the question and answer meeting. With that, I will call the meeting to order. This follows a script, if you can't tell by what I'm saying. I'm Warren Buffett, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the company, and I welcome you to this 2020 annual meeting of shareholders.
Marc Hamburg is Secretary of Berkshire Hathaway, and he will make a written record of the proceedings. Dan Jaksich has been appointed Inspector of Elections at this meeting. He will certify to the count of votes cast in the election for directors and the motions to be voted upon at this meeting. The named proxy holders for this meeting are Walter Scott and Marc Hamburg. Does the Secretary have a report of the number of Berkshire shares outstanding entitled to vote and represented at the meeting?
Yes, I do. As indicated in the proxy statement that accompanied the notice of this meeting that was sent to all shareholders of record on March 4, 2020, the record date for this meeting, there were 699,123 shares of Class A Berkshire Hathaway common stock outstanding, with each share entitled to one vote on motions considered at the meeting, and 1,382,352,370 shares of Class B Berkshire Hathaway common stock outstanding, with each share entitled to 1/10,000 of one vote on motions considered at the meeting. Of that number, 472,037 Class A shares and 834,802,274 Class B shares are represented at this meeting by proxies returned through Thursday evening, April 30th.
Thank you. That number represents a quorum, and we will therefore directly proceed with the meeting. First order of business will be a reading of the minutes at the last meeting of shareholders. I recognize Ms. Debbie Bosanek, who will place a motion before the meeting.
I move that the reading of the minutes of the last meeting of shareholders be dispensed with and the minutes be approved.
Do I hear a second?
I second the motion.
The motion is carried. The next item of business is to elect Directors. I recognize Ms. Debbie Bosanek to place motion before the meeting with respect to Election of Directors.
I move that Warren Buffett, Charles Munger, Gregory Abel, Howard Buffett, Stephen Burke , Kenneth Chenault, Susan Decker, David Gottesman, Charlotte Guyman, Ajit Jain, Thomas Murphy, Ronald Olson, Walter Scott, and Meryl Witmer be elected as Directors. I second the motion.
It has been moved and seconded that Warren Buffett, Charles Munger, Greg Abel, Howard Buffett, Steve Burke, Ken Chenault, Susan Decker, David Gottesman, Charlotte Guyman, Ajit Jain, Tom Murphy, Ron Olson, Walter Scott, and Meryl Witmer be elected as Directors. The nominations are ready to be acted upon. Mr. Jaksich , when you're ready, you may give your report.
My report is ready. The ballot of the proxy holders in response to proxies that were received through last Thursday evening cast not less than 543,203 votes for each nominee. That number exceeds a majority of the number of the total votes of all Class A and Class B shares outstanding. The certification required by Delaware law of the precise count of the votes will be given to the secretary to be placed with the minutes of this meeting.
Thank you, Mr. Jaksich . Warren Buffett, Charles Munger, Greg Abel, Howard Buffett, Steve Burke, Ken Chenault, Susan Decker, David Gottesman, Charlotte Guyman, Ajit Jain, Tom Murphy, Ron Olson, Walter Scott, and Meryl Witmer have been elected as directors. Ken, if you're watching or listening, Ken Chenault, our new Director, actually got the highest vote of all the Directors. Well ahead of me, I might add. Congratulations, Ken. The next item on the agenda is an advisory vote on the compensation of Berkshire Hathaway's Executive Officers. I recognize Ms. Debbie Bosanek to place a motion before the meeting on this item.
I move that the shareholders of the company approve, on an advisory basis, the compensation paid to the company's named executive officers as disclosed pursuant to Item 402 of Regulation S-K, including the compensation discussion and analysis, the accompanying compensation tables, and the related narrative discussion in the company's 2020 annual meeting proxy statement. I second the motion.
It has been moved and seconded that the shareholders of the company approve on an advisory basis the compensation paid to the company's named executive officers. Mr. Jaksich , when you are ready, you may give your report.
My report is ready. The ballot of the proxy holders in response to proxies that were received through last Thursday evening cast not less than 519,750 votes to approve on an advisory basis the compensation paid to the company's named executive officers. That number exceeds a majority of the number of the total votes of all Class A and Class B shares outstanding. The certification required by Delaware law of the precise count of the votes will be given to the secretary to be placed with the minutes of this meeting.
Thank you, Mr. Jaksich . The motion to approve on an advisory basis the compensation paid to the company's named executive officers has passed. The next item on the agenda is an advisory vote on the frequency of a shareholder advisory vote on compensation of Berkshire Hathaway's executive officers. I recognize Ms. Debbie Bosanek to place a motion before the meeting on this item.
I move that the shareholders of the company determine, on an advisory basis, the frequency, whether annual, biannual, or triennial, with which they shall have an advisory vote on the compensation paid to the company's named executive officers as set forth in the company's 2020 annual meeting proxy statement. I second the motion.
It's been moved and seconded that the shareholders of the company determine the frequency with which they shall have an advisory vote on compensation of named executive officers, with the option being every one, two, or three years. Mr. Jaksich , when you are ready, you may give your report.
My report is ready. The ballot of the proxy holders in response to proxies that were received through last Thursday evening casts 131,443 votes for a frequency of every year, 2,228 votes for a frequency of every two years, and 419,984 votes for a frequency of every three years of an advisory vote on the compensation paid to the company's named executive officers. The certification required by Delaware law of the precise count of the votes will be given to the secretary to be placed with the minutes of this meeting.
Thank you, Mr. Jaksich. The shareholders of the company have determined on an advisory basis that they shall have an advisory vote on the compensation paid to the company's named executive officers every three years. Now we're through with sort of the boilerplate resolutions. This next item is of more importance. We have put up on the berkshirehathaway.com site some material relating to this motion, which I hope shareholders and others read because it's important and Well, I'll describe it as the script says. The next item of business. There's a motion put forth by the Boards of Trustees of the New York City Employees' Retirement System, the New York City Teachers' Retirement System, the New York City Police Pension Fund, and the New York City Fire Pension Funds, collectively called the Systems. The motion is set forth in the proxy statement.
The motion requests that the company adopt a policy for improving Board and top management diversity. The directors have recommended that the shareholders vote against the proposal. I'd like to interrupt the script here just a second to point out that when we saw that it would be impossible to have shareholders attend this meeting and traveling to Omaha, and gatherings which really neither the governor or the mayor or the public safety people thought would be advisable. We were hoping to have somebody from the Comptroller's office come and present the motion and then have a good discussion at the meeting of the pros and cons, because it's a serious, important subject.
I can tell you on a personal basis, I think I'm in sync with the Comptroller in terms of how he wants the world to evolve, but I disagree on the specifics of this motion as applied to Boards generally and to Berkshire's Board in particular. We've been very outspoken over the years. We've probably written more on qualifications for directors than probably any public company I can think of, and we've been consistent over the years, and we've explained the reasons for our position, and we know a great many people disagree with that position. I welcomed the idea of really presenting to our meeting and having our shareholders hear what they had to say and evaluate what our thoughts were.
When we had to essentially not allow shareholders at the meeting, we immediately got in touch with the Comptroller's office, and we said we'd make an exception if anybody from the Comptroller's office wanted to come out and present the proposition or the proposal and engage in our discussion of the pros and cons. As you might expect, they were not in a position to send somebody. We offered, we may have made it even in the first place, we'd be glad to have somebody introduce the motion on their behalf. We would also, if they would send along a supporting statement, we would be glad to have the person that was their proxy in effect present the motion. We'd be happy to have them read the supporting statement. We said we'd appreciate it if they keep it to five minutes or less.
They wrote back immediately or emailed back immediately and said that they'd be delighted to do it that way, and they'd even try and keep it down to three minutes. They have sent a supporting statement, which is going to be read to you in a minute, and I'm glad they did it. I do hope shareholders will or have already, and others, will listen to what the supporting statement says and will also read the original arguments that they made in the proxy for their proposal. They will read our reasons for suggest voting against, because it's an important topic, and I really hope that next year that if somebody from the Comptroller's office wishes to come out, we'd be glad to have even a more fulsome discussion of the subject.
With that, I will now recognize Mr. Hamburg to read a statement prepared by the Comptroller of the City of New York in support of the motion.
Thank you. Mr. Chairman, Members of the Board, fellow share owners. I'm Marc Hamburg from Berkshire Hathaway, and I'm here to present Proposal 4 on behalf of the New York City Comptroller, Scott Stringer, and the New York City Pension Funds. The funds have approximately $211 billion in assets as of February and are substantial long-term Berkshire Hathaway share owners with 2.5 million shares.
Our proposal requests that Berkshire Hathaway Board adopt a diversity search policy requiring that the initial candidates from which new director nominees and external CEOs are chosen include qualified female and racially or ethnically diverse candidates. First of all, we would like to commend the directors for the addition of Mr. Kenneth Chenault and the fact that 21% of the Board is made up of women. We would also like to reco gnize that the executive pipeline includes diverse candidates, including Mr. Ajit Jain, another Board Member.
Secondly, we applaud Mr. Buffett's recognition that women in the boardroom have historically been rare, and even more importantly, that although women won the right to have their voices heard in a voting booth a century ago, attaining similar status in a boardroom remains a work in progress. With our share owner proposal, what we are seeking is to nudge this particular process forward. Thirdly, one of the things that Mr. Buffett mentions is that he only buys businesses that have three criteria, the second of which is able and honest managers, and that the most important duty for a Board is to find and retain a talented CEO. We would note that in reviewing Berkshire Hathaway's largest stock market holdings of businesses, all 10 of these companies have Boards that meet our Board diversity requirement.
In essence, the companies that Berkshire Hathaway has found fit to invest in are those that have more diverse Boards. Fourthly, we would like to clarify that through this shareholder proposal, we are not asking for the Berkshire Hathaway Board, our guardians, to have a quantifiable end result in terms of its composition, but that an initial pool of candidates for a Board seat include a woman and another individual who is racially or ethnically diverse. We believe these candidates, if qualified, would also have very high integrity, business savvy, shareholder orientation, and a genuine interest in the company. According to a 2016 Harvard Business Review study, including more than one woman or a member of a racial minority in a finalist pool helps combat the unconscious biases amongst interviewers and increases the likelihood of a diverse hire.
What we are requesting is a small step in that direction to include diverse candidates at the beginning of the search. Finally, we would like to applaud Berkshire Hathaway's robust internal CEO succession plans. Our proposal states that a CEO diversity policy should only apply in the case of an external search. The New York City Comptroller's Office is disappointed that we never had the opportunity to discuss our proposal with directors or management, but remain open to constructive engagement. In the interim, we strongly urge Berkshire Hathaway share owners to support Proposal 4. Thank you.
Okay. Thanks, Marc. Thank you to the Comptroller for presenting that supporting statement. The motion is now ready to be acted upon. Mr. Jaksich, when you are ready, you may give your report.
My report is ready. The ballot of the proxy holders in response to proxies that were received through last Thursday evening cast 65,925 votes for the motion and 485,824 votes against the motion. The number of votes against the motion exceeds a majority of the number of votes of all Class A and Class B shares properly cast on the matter, as well as all votes outstanding, the motion has failed. The certification required by Delaware law of the precise count of the votes will be given to the secretary to be placed with the minutes of this meeting.
Thank you, Mr. Jaksich. The proposal fails.
I move that this meeting be adjourned. I second the motion to adjourn.
A motion has been made and seconded. The meeting is adjourned. Thank you. I just looked at my watch, and I talked a lot longer than I should have, probably. That's not a unique experience of mine that just occurred.