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.
2018-11-27 10:37:00 Tuesday ET

Warren Buffett offloads a few stocks from the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio in mid-November 2018. The latest S.E.C. report shows that the Oracle of Omaha sol
2025-06-20 08:27:00 Friday ET

President Trump poses new threats to Fed Chair monetary policy independence again. We describe, discuss, and delve into the mainstream reasons, conc
2018-03-21 06:32:00 Wednesday ET

Fed Chair Jerome Powell increases the neutral interest rate to a range of 1.5% to 1.75% in his debut post-FOMC press conference. The Federal Reserve raises
2023-12-03 11:33:00 Sunday ET

Macro innovations and asset alphas show significant mutual causation. April 2023 This brief article draws from the recent research publicati
2020-05-14 12:35:00 Thursday ET

Disruptive innovators can better compete against luck by figuring out why customers hire products and services to accomplish jobs. Clayton Christensen, T
2018-05-29 11:40:00 Tuesday ET

America and China, the modern world's most powerful nations may stumble into a **Thucydides trap** that Harvard professor and political scientist Graham