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Warren Buffett has the cash to buy Tesla, Starbucks, or McDonald's

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Re: Warren Buffett has the cash to buy Tesla, Starbucks, or McDonald's

#62
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post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

75% of Gates Foundation's money end's up in big four consulting firms, which by gates himself do a better work at deploying money than other more rational actors like local governments or communities. So yeah, prob that's not charity too... it's just a way to get the maximum available tax cut, you donate to your own or your friends charity and he or she funnels backs the money where you need it to be.

Source? Just looking at the annual letter, they're out there doing good things in third world health impact.

Wow, -3 points https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/12/13/21004456/b...

"How we got here: The Gates Foundation believes in consultants"

Re: Warren Buffett has the cash to buy Tesla, Starbucks, or McDonald's

#63
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At the level Berkshire operates at the calculation is different from generically investing in the market. Buffet buys companies, or big chunks of them, so what matters is the risk profile and liquidity of the individual company. Also when he buys by definition he will create the bottom price of the stock. Him buying will make it go up, so he can’t wait until the price hits bottom, he waits until he has the best buyin…

Okay since you opened the door to playing "call the bottom" where do you think it will be? I'll swag first. The end will be in sight when the US new case rate hits its inflection point and begins decreasing. From that you can sorta tell when things will settle down biology-wise.

Sure, but that doesn’t necessarily coincide with peak economic impact. We may be looking at some traumatic bankruptcies and economic disruptions, and those will likely lag the medical impact, in some cases by quite a lot. Some of the habits and behaviour changes people are developing may stick, causing severe problems for some companies or even whole industries, and this will play out over a long time. So I can’t say when we will hit bottom, there are too many uncertainties. Also the bottom for some industries and companies will differ from others.

Re: Warren Buffett has the cash to buy Tesla, Starbucks, or McDonald's

#64
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post #11

They really need to tax this man, he's even on record saying how he needs to be taxed more.

Billionares say things like that all the time but that's just for publicity. Truth is, if he really wanted to be taxed more, he could. There's no need to change any laws for that. His Berkshire Hathaway is already claiming a lot of tax breaks to lower their tax liabilities - if he wants to contribute more to federal budget he just needs to stop doing that :) After all, claiming a tax break is a privilege, it's not ma…

Berkshire Hathaway is not 100% owned by Buffett. He wants people with his personal level of wealth to be taxed more.

Re: Warren Buffett has the cash to buy Tesla, Starbucks, or McDonald's

#65
post #4

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Insurance doesn't normally cover pandemics.

Insurance covers insurable events, some of them may be triggered by a pandemic, and some of those might be excluded. Check your fine print. * Life insurance is probably going to take a hit. My life insurance doesn't mention pandemic or acts of god. Suicide yes. Pandemic no. * Auto insurance is probably going to be marginally more profitable as miles driven drop. * Home/Property isn't likely to be heavily affected. *…

I'm thinking business continuity insurance would be a big hit if they have a lot of that on their reinsurance side.

Re: Warren Buffett has the cash to buy Tesla, Starbucks, or McDonald's

#66
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post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Berkshire has almost all of their cash in short term treasury bills. It's a cash equivalent, because you don't want to keep 100bn in a checking account, and it does get hurt by inflation. But that's OK, because making a purchase when the time is right will more than make up for it. Cash is still king, in Buffet's world.

I'd just add that in addition to that $128B in liquid Treasury securities (which is what "cash" means when we talk about such large amounts) they also have about $103B debt that cancels their net cash-debt position to about $25B. The debt has long maturity, though, so most of the cash can be deployed immediately. Also, Buffett applies something like the Taleb's "barbell method" to his holdings: he never buys high gra…

Most of Berkeshire's debt is associated with their utility businesses which have very low risk and low margins because of safe multi-decade contracts.

Re: Warren Buffett has the cash to buy Tesla, Starbucks, or McDonald's

#67
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billionares say things like that all the time but that's just for publicity. Truth is, if he really wanted to be taxed more, he could. There's no need to change any laws for that. His Berkshire Hathaway is already claiming a lot of tax breaks to lower their tax liabilities - if he wants to contribute more to federal budget he just needs to stop doing that :) After all, claiming a tax break is a privilege, it's not ma…

Berkshire Hathaway is not 100% owned by Buffett. He wants people with his personal level of wealth to be taxed more.

Definitely all six of them should be taxed more.

Re: Warren Buffett has the cash to buy Tesla, Starbucks, or McDonald's

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My life insurance doesn't mention pandemic or acts of god. Suicide yes. Pandemic no. I'd be pretty surprised if this wasn't true. Who's taking out life insurance exclusively for predictable causes of death? You don't insure those, you avoid them. "Acts of god" are most of the reason you'd want life insurance in the first place.

Exclusively? No. But I think suicide is covered on some policies after a waiting period.

Usually a year. Just checked my policy from pacific life, it has a 1 year cliff (hah) for suicide.

Re: Warren Buffett has the cash to buy Tesla, Starbucks, or McDonald's

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how that can be the case. Here's the data from DC on the Flu https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html Over the past decade a low season of 140,000 hospitalizations to a high of 810,000. For this to be 20x worse you'd need each stay from the flu to be 1 day and each for COVID-19 to be 20, and then we'd need to reach somewhere between 700,000 - 4,000,000 positive COVID-19 cases in the U.S. und…

We had 500 deaths yesterday. We’re doubling ever 2-3 days. I’ll take 3 days. At the end of next week, we’ll have 2000 deaths a day. At the end of two weeks, we’ll have almost 10,000. We’ll have 200k dead in roughly three weeks.

https://www.xkcd.com/605/

Re: Warren Buffett has the cash to buy Tesla, Starbucks, or McDonald's

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how that can be the case. Here's the data from DC on the Flu https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html Over the past decade a low season of 140,000 hospitalizations to a high of 810,000. For this to be 20x worse you'd need each stay from the flu to be 1 day and each for COVID-19 to be 20, and then we'd need to reach somewhere between 700,000 - 4,000,000 positive COVID-19 cases in the U.S. und…

We had 500 deaths yesterday. We’re doubling ever 2-3 days. I’ll take 3 days. At the end of next week, we’ll have 2000 deaths a day. At the end of two weeks, we’ll have almost 10,000. We’ll have 200k dead in roughly three weeks.

Posting this update half way through the 3-week period. We are now at 16,510 deaths total(1) on April 9th.

I'm not suggesting COVID-19 isn't bad, it just isn't 20x flu bad with the mitigation we have in place.

We won't really understand the statistics on this until a year or more out when analysis of all the death certificates come in and we can look at how 2020 is different, i.e. for each COVID-19 how many fewer flu deaths did we have? etc.

(1) https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

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