by Andrew Weeraratne

Created on: February 21, 2008

Each time when there is discomfort and squirm in the U.S. financial markets as it is now, people tend to form inconclusive opinions that fall in the realm of exaggeration. One of those exaggerations is to elevate a few people as genius because they weather financial storms with ease. This elevation of people, instead of understanding the society that they operate in fully, does not make much sense.

A good case in point is the statements about Warren Buffett as he is constantly being rated as a genius. This is especially true at a time when financial markets go down, along with a few other so-called geniuses, while Buffett could be seen standing solid with his avuncular smile.

As modest as Mr. Buffett is, he will tell you that he does not consider him to be a genius. He became so wealthy because Buffett is the one-eyed king in the land of the blind with abundance of wealth and unsurpassed opportunity. To give an illustration: take the most recent example of Buffett's offer to reinsure Municipal Bonds of three major failing insurance carriers. While many others with capital sit on the sideline praising Buffett's genius all he did was to offer to reinsure the least risky assets, perhaps in the entire world. Those insurance underwriters are not going down because they wrote insurance on municipal bonds, but because without being satisfied with a conservative investment and a good living, they got into speculating on the latest trend called sub-prime bonds along with the rest of the blind in the society. Now Buffett steps in and says he will take over the good bonds and leave the blind with the bad ones. There is nothing genius about that move. In fact, as Buffett admits, he won't even get a ticket to heaven for doing that.

Having extensively researched the U.S. capitalist system, to write my books, I can submit enough facts to substantiate that almost anyone with access to capital as Buffett had could have done (and still could do) exactly what he had done. The reason others couldn't do what Buffett did could be better explained by dipping into Zen Buddhism. To better explain the reasons, since Zen is full of tales, let's begin with a tale: a wealthy man who was feeling miserable, in spite of all his wealth, was once told that a Zen monk has the recipe for happiness. The wealthy man, having sold his business and having traveled a long way, comes to see the Zen monk only to be told that finding happiness lies in two simple words: paying attention.

Warren Buffett is

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