I’d be worried about it falling into the trap of basically every other conglomerate.
Buffett acts like an owner because he is one. Without that influence, no matter what he says about culture, it is at risk for erosion via the political behavior that has long plagued such firms.
This is definitely a risk, and the general idea of putting 20-25% of your total investments in any single stock is pretty stupid because there are untold other risks that don’t become obvious until they happen.
Still, I figure if it blows up and I can’t retire, I’ll just start a GoFundMe. Single income teacher with kids - that’s a sympathetic profile, right?
You need to be Oppressed By Radical Socialists for a successful GoFundMe. The good news is that literally everything bad that happens is in fact Oppression By Radical Socialists. THAT’S SOCIALISM!
Yes it is well known that the only way to stop socialism is for the fortunate to pool some of their money according to their means and give it to the less fortunate according to their needs. And then for a random company to take 25% in pure rent seeking, exploiting the network effect of happening to have the winning platform.
Berkshire is just a PE fund that can’t ever exit an investment because the tax cost is prohibitive. The DTL on their Apple investment is something like $25 billion, which is a single-digit percentage of the entire conglomerate’s market cap. After Munger and Buffett are gone, they just have to spin everything off and try to sell whatever’s left to Apple to get out from under that tax bill, like Yahoo tried to do a few years ago. The structure is pretty marginal even with two of the best investors of all time in charge, it would be insanity to keep operating it with anyone else. I mean, why would anyone good even want to run Berkshire rather than a PE fund? It’s the same job, you just don’t get a carry.
Is this a parody of something?
I think it’s just Matt Levine colonizing my writing style.
if you liked BABA in the 80s you’re going to love it in the 70s!
The “fade Cathie Wood” ETF is up over 100% lolololol
As pessimistic as I’ve been for almost a year on everything market related - and still am, I’m on the side that the market is overreacting to this China sanctions talk. I’d start buying baba at these prices.
Maybe for a short term bounce but don’t buy and hold anything in China, imo. Matter of when, not if, we are in conflict with them. They don’t even have capitalism, it’s “Communism with Chinese Characteristics,” which translates to “sure, you can engage in capitalism and we can gank your shit whenever we feel like it.”
Its amazing how gas prices locally were going up like every hour while oil was on the way up. A few days and -25% oil later and gas prices locally haven’t come down at all.
You gotta love how they check like hourly when prices are going up and make sure to pace the increase, but when they’re dropping they take their sweet ass time and lag the decrease.
Like the SPR is basically just another highly efficient way to funnel extra profits to corporations. Pretty star spangled amazing.
Posted that while I had this queued up, but reading the details of today’s US/China meeting, it’s undeniable:
China wants to take the West on and is trying to decide if this is the moment. Signs point to maybe, but even if no, it WILL happen.
People doing business in China 10 years ago were saying it very clearly: they want our technology and know-how and once they feel like they have what they need, they will kick us to the curb. Then we tricked ourselves into thinking that wasn’t the deal or magically wouldn’t happen for reasons.
Xi is starting to feel himself. Like Putin, he may not even give a damn about our sanctions, especially as the world’s manufacturing capacity are within his borders.
Oh, you sanction me? Well, guess I’ll just SEIZE THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION.
There are 500 million smartphones and 500,000 teslas in China, for starters. They’re far en route on the capitalism train whether the pretend to not be or not.
That is the point, the 500 million smartphones and 500,000 teslas are in China. They actually make everything, we just draw up blueprints in Palo Alto. Xi’s nationalistic attitude is that at some point, shouldn’t we just keep all this shit in China?
My claim isn’t that China will revert to real Communism, it’s that they will do exactly what Putin just did, which is either directly or indirectly tell Western companies and investors to gtfo.
It’s no more or less than this:
The only difference in what I’m saying is that Xi may do it proactively instead of reactively if he feels like sanctions are inevitable for actions he feels entitled to take.
Agree that a short term bounce is possible if tensions ease in the short term. But:
a) I think people following the Chinese market for a living see the writing on the wall so won’t easily fall for a head fake
b) China doesn’t want tensions to ease, imo. I think they will straddle a middle ground. For example, it came out that one thing Russia asked China for was MREs (meal, ready to eat). Could easily go:
China: you are trying to starve the Russian people, we don’t agree, we will give them food!
West: those meals are to support a military supply line, you are prolonging their ability to fight the war!
China: we are prolonging the war??? We just gave food, you give billions of dollars of weapons to the Ukrainians. F you!
Wouldn’t cause an immediate trade war but just the above would be enough to prevent your short term bounce, imo.
This is fucking gross. Guillotines. Yesterday.