2019-04-07 13:39:00 Sun ET
stock market gold oil stock return s&p 500 asset market stabilization asset price fluctuations stocks bonds currencies commodities funds term spreads credit spreads fair value spreads asset investments
CNBC news anchor Becky Quick interviews Warren Buffett in early-2019. Buffett explains the fact that book value fluctuations are a metric that has lost relevance for Berkshire Hathaway over time. At least 3 circumstances lead to this outcome. First, Berkshire has gradually morphed from a company whose assets concentrate in marketable stocks into a unique public corporation whose major value resides in operating businesses. From a fundamental viewpoint, equity stakes represent key parts of corporate stock ownership and control as investors favor liquidity over managerial rent protection.
Second, the new U.S. accounting rules require the current collection of operating companies to be part of book value at a dollar sum far below their current market value. This gross undervaluation may mislead the typical retail investor.
Third, it is likely for Berkshire to reconsider significant share repurchases that take place at share prices above book value (but below the Buffett estimate of intrinsic value). Each share buyback boosts intrinsic value and also constrains the potential uptick of book value.
This combination of circumstances causes the book-value scorecard to become out of touch with economic reality. Buffett hence focuses on the Berkshire market capitalization, and this alternative better reflects business performance in practice.
If any of our AYA Analytica financial health memos (FHM), blog posts, ebooks, newsletters, and notifications etc, or any other form of online content curation, involves potential copyright concerns, please feel free to contact us at service@ayafintech.network so that we can remove relevant content in response to any such request within a reasonable time frame.
2018-10-25 10:36:00 Thursday ET
Trump tariffs begin to bite U.S. corporate profits from Ford and Harley-Davidson to Caterpillar and Walmart etc. U.S. corporate profit growth remains high a
2018-01-17 05:30:00 Wednesday ET
European Union antitrust regulators impose a fine on Qualcomm for advancing its key exclusive microchip deal with Apple to block out rivals such as Intel an
2019-06-07 04:02:05 Friday ET
The world seeks to reduce medicine prices and other health care costs to better regulate big pharma. Nowadays the Trump administration requires pharmaceutic
2018-08-23 11:34:00 Thursday ET
Harvard financial economist Alberto Cavallo empirically shows the recent *Amazon effect* that online retailers such as Amazon, Alibaba, and eBay etc use fas
2018-09-17 12:40:00 Monday ET
Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller's long-term stock market indicator points to a recent peak. His cyclically-adjusted P/E ratio (or CAPE) accounts for long-
2019-06-29 17:30:00 Saturday ET
Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz proposes the primary economic priorities in lieu of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism includes lower taxation, deregulation, socia