(To be clear, Berkshire could buy any of the bottom 476 companies in the index, not all of them. Also it’s probably closer to 400, because Berkshire has to keep some cash around to pay insurance claims and so on.)
Warren Buffett is the legitimacy canary for any claims related to "bringing manufacturing/heavy industry/etc back to America." If there were any kind of non-bullshit plan to support the deployment of blocks of $10B to $100B on anything other than chips and data centers- which for damn sure we need- he would be first in line. But no. So he gets to sit around, eat his burger and coke, and collect $15B in interest on that cash.
They mention the tariffs as a trigger, but looking at the chart, the massive stock selling seems to spike around the last quarter of 2024. About the time of the election?
He's always making moves, you can look all the way back to 2021, pandemic = insane valuations, so they stopped buying and also started to go to cash. Russian war, energy scarcity, almost everything else looks pricey versus rising macro risk. 2022> Why buy a decent business at 25+ x earnings when Uncle Sam will hand you 5% risk‑free? Sold all his regional bank positions when SVB and co started to wobble, so that was +15B... Fitch knocks America off AAA, refunding schedule gets up over above a trillion dollars.
As he said: “We will always have more good ideas than prices that make sense.”
