Ninety-year-old Warren Buffett and his 97-year-old vice chairman, Charlie Munger, just hosted the 2021 Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-A) annual shareholder meeting. In normal years, more than 40,000 die-hard investors flock to Omaha, Nebraska, this time of year to listen to the wisdom of Buffett and Munger. This year, the meeting was held virtually, and anyone who wanted to listen to the two legends take questions from shareholders was able to do so for almost six hours via livestream. I was one of those virtual attendees. One of the many things I learned was that through Berkshire's many subsidiary operating businesses, Buffett is seeing what he describes as "very substantial inflation." As Berkshire's CEO, he is in the perfect spot to provide an opinion on how fast inflation is moving. Name an industry, and Berkshire is involved in it: railroads, real estate, energy generation, insurance, distribution, manufacturing, jewelry sales, confectionary products, vacuum cleaners and so much more. Buffett constantly receives real-time data on what is happening in the American economy. So if he sees that inflation is ramping up, then it is happening. My Generation Has Never Dealt With the Bite of Inflation For me personally as an investor, inflation is not something I've ever had to deal with. And it isn't because I'm all that young anymore! For the past three decades, inflation has been muted in the United States. As a result, many investors don't spend a minute worrying about it. But I bet Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger do, and so do my parents... In the 1970s and early 1980s, inflation was out of control. It routinely passed 5% per year for more than a decade, reaching as high as 15%. To appreciate what 15% inflation means to us as investors and savers, think of it this way... If you start the year with $1 million of cash in your bank account and the country experiences a year of 15% inflation, at the end of that year, your $1 million of cash would be worth only $850,000. If you get two years of 15% inflation, the purchasing power of that $1 million would be reduced to only $722,500. Five years of high inflation, and your starting cash pile wouldn't be worth much at all! That's what inflation is, folks - a weakening of the purchasing power of the dollar. Warren Buffett is seeing serious inflation, and I'm not the least bit surprised. Central bankers across the world could not have created more risk for runaway inflation if they tried. | 
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