Warren Buffett always had spectacular timing. As Wall Street burns, the billionaire investor is the hero of the hour after predicting the financial meltdown and riding to the rescue — $5 billion (£2.7 billion) in hand — of Goldman Sachs.
Tomorrow marks the release of The Snowball, the first and only, Buffett says, biography to be written with his co-operation. The book’s author is Alice Schroeder, a former analyst who spent “literally thousands” of hours with Buffett and his family.
“Invaluable” hardly describes Schroeder’s access to the world’s richest man when you consider that lunch with Buffett recently fetched $2.1m in a charity auction.
Such is Buffett’s reputation that last week, when he snapped up his stake in Goldman, the bank’s shares rose $8 as investors who had wondered if it would survive the credit crunch reacted positively.
Schroeder said: “Around the time Bear Stearns was being taken over, he talked about the domino effect to me. He said to me first Bear, then Lehman, then Merrill. He saw this coming and he talked about a crisis of a magnitude that we had not seen before.”
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