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.
2018-03-09 08:33:00 Friday ET
David Solomon succeeds Lloyd Blankfein as the new CEO of Goldman Sachs. Unlike his predecessors Lloyd Blankfein and Gary Cohn, Solomon has been an investmen
2022-03-15 10:32:00 Tuesday ET
Capital structure theory and practice The genesis of modern capital structure theory traces back to the seminal work of Modigliani and Miller (1958
2023-02-28 11:30:00 Tuesday ET
The Biden Inflation Reduction Act is central to modern world capitalism. As of 2022-2023, global inflation has gradually declined from the peak of 9.8% d
2017-02-07 07:47:00 Tuesday ET
With prescient clairvoyance, Bill Gates predicted the recent sustainable rise of Netflix and Facebook during a Playboy interview back in 1994. He said th
2019-02-17 14:40:00 Sunday ET
U.S. economic inequality increases to pre-Great-Depression levels. U.C. Berkeley economics professor Gabriel Zucman empirically finds that the top 0.1% rich
2020-09-24 10:26:00 Thursday ET
Edge strategies help business leaders improve core products and services in a more cost-effective and less risky way. Alan Lewis and Dan McKone (2016)