He even joked that he had fond thoughts of 1929 because it was when he was conceived: “my dad was a stock salesman and after the crash he didn’t have anything to do.”

Image Credit... Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

I wrote about Buffett in 1996, when Ted Turner upbraided fellow billionaires like Buffett and Bill Gates as “ol’ skinflints” for not loosening up “their wads” because they were afraid to fall off the Forbes 400 List. Back then, Buffett said he would wait until after he and his wife died, when he planned to give the bulk of his $15 billion to population control (even though, of course, every moment counts on that cause).

But then, about five years ago, Buffett said at Georgetown, he and Gates began plotting about philanthropy and now they have enrolled 115 plutocrats pledging a majority of their net worth.

“I’ve been dialing for dollars,” he said, adding that when billionaires resist, he gives them a warning: “If I’m talking to some 70-year-old, I say, ‘Do you really think your decision-making ability is going to be better when you’re 95 with some blonde on your lap, or now?’ ”

He calls the Fed “the greatest hedge fund in history,” and observed of the moment America nearly went off the cliff: “I give enormous credit to Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner and frankly, even though I didn’t vote for him, President Bush.”

W.’s “great insight,” one worthy of Adam Smith, he said, was expressed in 10 words in September 2008: “He went out there from the White House and he said, ‘If money doesn’t loosen up this sucker could go down.’ ”

The populist voice of the 1 percent stressed that “inequality is getting wider” and that we must figure out how to “share the bounty.”