Buffett's $50 million credit card blunder

Peddling credit cards isn't so easy that a caveman can do it.

That seems to be the conclusion Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA, Fortune 500) chief executive Warren Buffett reluctantly reached last year, when he shut down a money-losing credit card business he had dreamed up for Berkshire's Geico car-insurance unit.

The decision was disclosed in Buffett's annual letter to Berkshire shareholders, released Saturday. The letter called Geico's brief foray into credit cards "a very expensive business fiasco entirely of [Buffett's] own making."

Since Berkshire took over Geico in 1996, the company has grown rapidly, thanks to low prices and an advertising budget that has grown 25-fold to $800 million.

Geico is best known for a series of television commercials featuring a gecko that talks with a Cockney accent. Since 2004, the company also has run spots on TV showing preppy cavemen protesting the claim that buying insurance at geico.com is "so easy a caveman can do it."

Geico has been expanding fast -- it has added 4 million policyholders since 2002 and is now the top car insurer in New York, among other places -- and Buffett says he has long puzzled over which other products the company might dangle before loyal Geico customers.

Against the advice of Geico executives, Buffett said in the letter, he lit upon the idea of a Geico credit card. The Geico Platinum MasterCard was born.

"I reasoned that Geico policyholders were likely to be good credit risks and, assuming we offered an attractive card, would likely favor us with their business," Buffett wrote in this year's letter.

Buffett was so high on the idea a few years ago that he urged Berkshire shareholders to use the card.

"Sign up for the new Geico credit card," Buffett wrote in his 2005 investor letter. "It's the one I now use."