The young business associates were sitting around a conference table last week, telling me about the philosophy and strategy of someone they greatly admire in their field, an investor who doesn't gamble wildly and knows exactly what he's buying.
"Warren Buffett takes a company that's doing well," Vir Mirchandani said, "and makes it stronger."
"His principle is he invests in companies where he knows what they're doing," Nikhil Sinha added.
Just then, Maddy Bencivenga popped into the room and announced: "Warren Buffett just bought Constellation Energy."
Talk about a teaching moment.
The associates, as their nameplates identify them, are actually high school students at Howard County's Academy of Finance, and Bencivenga is their instructor. For two periods of every school day, they leave their regular high schools to attend the academy and learn about the business of business - such as banking, accounting and financial planning. During the summer, they intern with financial firms or departments, dealing with everything from credit counseling to portfolio management.
In other words, the things many of the rest of us have been getting a crash course in as we watched the extraordinary market tumult last week and saw its immediate effects on our own 401(k)s, not to mention on the parent company of our gas and electricity provider.
I don't think my high school offered anything comparable to the academy, and even if it had, I doubt that the dreamy wannabe writer that I was then would have opted to take it. But if last week's upheavals proved anything, financial literacy surely deserves a place in the curriculum.
For one thing, many of us have become our own financial planners, whether we intended to or not when the traditional, company-run pensions of the past turned into the self-directed 401(k)s of today.
For another, even if you have a broker, your confidence in him or her may have been shaken by seeing the recent crashes of such legendary investment houses as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.
"It feels like an economic 9/11," said Pratik Dixit, another student at the academy. "It's really changed the culture of America."
His friends largely want to be doctors or engineers when they grow up, but last week, all they wanted to talk about was the economy.
