Author: Susie Gharib, Anchor

The big event of the year for shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway is Warren Buffett’s annual meeting in Omaha, Nebraska. They look forward to learning from the richest man in the world. This year 31,000 shareholders -- some from as far away as India and Australia -- made the pilgrimage.

The other big event: The Movie. The meeting opens every year with this humorous hour-long satire featuring Buffett and his sidekick, Charlie Munger, Berkshire’s 84-year-old Vice Chairman. It’s produced by Buffett’s daughter, Susie. You won’t ever see clips from it on TV or You Tube. Buffett doesn’t allow anyone to film it. But it’s a perennial favorite with shareholders. And this year’s movie was a huge hit.

So what did I think of Warren Buffett’s kids? Here are some impressions of Susie, Howard, and Peter Buffett.

They are normal.
They are remarkably down to earth, considering their father is the richest man in the world with a net worth of $62 billion. When Howard greeted me at his home he was wearing shabby chinos, a khaki work shirt and muddy construction boots. He drove me to his farm in an old pick up truck. He is so “real” and it was refreshing to see that. When I asked Howard the size of the staff working on his 850-acre farm, his answer was “none”. He plants and harvests the corn and soybeans by himself. Sometimes he has a helper or his son gives him a hand. He can afford hiring a team of workers, but he chooses to do it this way, because he enjoys it. And I think it’s also part of his Warren Buffett DNA—keeping things simple and low budget.

The word “authentic” has been overused lately. But it’s about the best word I can come up with to describe the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange who I interviewed for the first time today. Duncan Niederauer is a regular guy. He took over as the boss of the Big Board last December when John Thain moved over to Merrill Lynch to become the new Chairman and CEO of the troubled investment firm.

Niederauer talks and acts like a stock trader. His style is breezy and friendly. Minutes after I shook his hand, we were already talking about his years at Goldman Sachs, his three kids, and why he’s a fan of the Cleveland Indians (His mother is from Brooklyn and doesn’t like the Yankees, forcing him to pick any other team to root for. He was attracted to the underdog Indians.) He’s starkly different from Thain, who is reserved and formal. I found it revealing that Niederauer chose not move into the grand office that Thain occupied -- with a combination of antique English furniture and a stock ticker -- preferring a more modest space down the hall.

If you watch the broadcast tonight, you'll see my in-depth interview with President George W. Bush. (If you miss the program, look for the video and transcript of the interview on the NBR website.) I thought I'd use this blog entry to share with you what I call my "Reporter's Notebook." The notebook contains my impressions of my conversation with the President.

The interview took place in the Map Room of the White House, where FDR studied military maps during WWII. As for the mood, President Bush was upbeat and confident about the outlook for the economy, despite the recent gloomy economic news. When I asked him about what he plans to do after he leaves the White House in January, he mentioned several projects. At the top of his list is a book which he plans to write without the help of a ghost writer.

I also asked President Bush if he thinks Senator Hillary Clinton or Senator Barack Obama will be the Democratic challenger to Senator John McCain in the general election. He said it's "too close to call."

I have always wanted to interview Alan Greenspan. Today I did.

We met at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. He came to the historic concert hall to participate in a panel sponsored by the World Business Forum. Afterwards he joined me in the “Roxy Suite,” a plush Art Deco design lounge decorated with photos of Judy Garland, Katherine Hepburn, John Wayne, Shirley Temple, and Frank Sinatra. Against this glamorous backdrop, we talked for 45 minutes about housing, inflation, recession, oil prices etc. He refused to answer any of my questions about the stock market, even though the first thing he did before he sat down for the interview was to check his Blackberry to see how the Dow and the Nasdaq were doing. (He was surprised to see the Dow down and the Nasdaq up.)

Why is it that more than 27,000 Berkshire Hathaway shareholders made their way this weekend to Omaha to pay homage to the world’s most famous investor? This year I traveled to America’s Great Plains to find out why Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder meeting is the talk of the investment world. It was my first time attending this event that Buffett calls “Woodstock for Capitalists.”

My flight from New York to Omaha was packed with capitalists. Everyone -- and I mean everyone -- was going to the Berkshire meeting. The passengers were hedge fund guys, money managers, CEOs, and individual investors. The money manager sitting next to me said he’s been going to the meeting every year for 22 years. His son made headline news in the 1990s -- he was ten years old then -- when he asked Buffett at the shareholder’s meeting why he invested in shares of Coke and not Pepsi. In fact, all weekend people told me stories about their “first time” meeting the Oracle of Omaha, and they bragged about how many times they’ve made the pilgrimage since. When I told them this was my first visit, they gave me loving looks that seemed to say “you’ll never be the same after this experience.”

The success of Warren Buffet is legendary.

World famous stock market investor of modern times. An icon for hundreds of thousands of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. One of the richest men in the world. It makes you wonder...What is it like to work for this extraordinary man?

It’s a question I asked three CEOs who work for Buffet: Richard Santulli of NetJets, Denis Abrams of Benjamin Moore, and Bruce Whitman of FlightSafety International.

This week you’ll hear their candid revelations about their boss.

John Thain tells me he’ll be staying on at the Big Board... for the long term.

I asked Thain about his personal plans during my interview with him on the day of the big merger between the New York Stock Exchange and Paris’ Euronext. Now that he’s CEO of NYSE Euronext -- the biggest stock market in the world -- and just pulled off the first trans-Atlantic market merger, I thought he might want to move on to Washington like so many of his former colleagues at Goldman Sachs. When Thain was tapped as CEO in 2004, he said he planned to stay 3 to 5 years. But, now, Thain tells me he’s having “fun,” and he’s “excited” about what he’s doing. He adds, “I’m not thinking about anything different.”

And, what does Thain think about the stock market these days?

As NBR prepares to ring in the New Year with our annual Investment Review & Preview Special, the mood on Wall Street is positive and hopeful. Earnings at the big brokerage firms are up. Wall Street bonuses are big. And, mergers are back. It’s no wonder that my sources on the Street sound so upbeat -- even happy.

Most of the market strategists I’ve been talking to are forecasting another up year in the markets. Some, like Bernie Schaeffer of Schaeffer Investment Research, are over-the-top bullish. He expects the Dow to be up by 16% in 2007. But, even the strategists who are cautious -- like Liz Ann Sonders at Charles Schwab -- aren’t really predicting a bad year, just a less exuberant one.