At the 2009 annual meeting, I submitted a question to Carol Loomis to ask Buffett to do a post-mortem on the Gen Re acquisition. Here was his response:

"On General Re, I was dead wrong. I evaluated the company based on its past reputation and what it had been 15 years prior, rather than what it had actually become by 1998. Unbeknownst to me, underwriting standards had severely slipped, and they were writing a lot of business that was drastically mispriced, along with a massive, complicated derivatives book that we had no business owning."

"But when we find that we've made a mistake, we don't try to hide it. We look at our own handiwork, and we fix it. We put Joe Brandon and Tad Montross in charge, and they did a terrific job. They re-established discipline, they walked away from bad business, and they systematically wound down that derivatives book. Today, Gen Re is exactly the kind of company I thought I was buying in the first place, and I feel terrific about it."

However, Buffett has acknowledged that issuing Berkshire stock for Gen Re "caused Berkshire shareholders to give far more than they received."

Charlie Munger added:
"There's a lot to be learned from failure. We like looking at our mistakes because we spent a lot of money buying them. If you can't face your own errors, you're going to pay for them twice." I luv Charlie ;-)