From Karl Marx’s vampire to Warren Buffett’s moat, the crumbling gothic castle has been capitalism’s favorite metaphor for 250 years
Source: Fortune ·
Jamie Dimon’s “fortress” and Warren Buffett’s “moat” come from the same place as Dracula’s castle, and this week AI put both to the test.
From the source
Markets are ushering in a particularly gothic Halloween as the AI trade exposes a crumbling aristocratic pile of early 21st century capitalism. Wall Street has been describing itself in castle-adjacent terms for years. Jamie Dimon has long talked to JPMorgan shareholders about the bank’s “fortress balance sheet.” His 2015 letter set aside a section to answer the question of what the phrase even meant. By 2021, he’d added a second castle word, warning that “the moats that protect this company are not particularly deep.” The moat came from Warren Buffett. In a 1999 Fortune article with Carol Loomis, he argued that the key to investing is a company’s competitive advantage and how durable it is, and that the businesses worth owning have wide moats around them. The gothic novel’s favorite picture of danger is a castle falling apart, and for about 250 years the two have traded images: the castle and the moat, the vampire, the creature built in a lab. This Halloween season has them rushing…
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