Doing the locomotion

DURING the crisis of 2008-09, Warren Buffett made two big bets in the midst of the panic. He bought a slug of preferred stock in Goldman Sachs. And he took over BNSF, a huge railway. Goldman’s 32,500 bankers and BSNF’s 32,000 miles of tracks, stretching from the Pacific to Texas, had nothing in common, except that it was impossible to imagine American capitalism without them. “It’s an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States,” declared Mr Buffett when he bought the railway company, which, naturally, was advised by bankers working for a certain “vampire squid”.