Subject: Re: Eschewing BRK Dogma
But certainly at a top level you can say that investments have been the stars lately, not operating earnings.

I remain pessimistic about Berkshire, at least at this price, but I think this is a bit too negative, especially regarding the MSR group.

Last 3 years annualized, per share figures, inflation adjusted

Rails earnings after tax: -5.6%/year
Utilities earnings after tax: -2.3%/year
Manufacturing/Service/Retail after tax: -1.8%/year

...but Investments per share: +9.7%/year

One of the primary advantages that Berkshire has had over its history is its anti-empire building approach: subsidiaries earn money, but that does not entitle those subsidiaries to *keep* that money in the absence of reasonable investment opportunities. It instead gets allocated by corporate. That's part of the magic sauce that led to Berkshire's rate of compounding over time.

A consequence of this is that, almost by design, many Berkshire subsidiaries, especially capital-light subsidiaries, should tend to show lower subsidiary-level earnings growth than otherwise similar firms in the same industry that retain and reinvest a larger share of their earnings; their generated earnings are funneled to Omaha and deployed to better opportunities. [Handwavy estimate incoming:] You can compare the MSR segment's $13.65 billion after-tax earnings number to the change in identifiable assets of that group in footnote 26 (187.22-183.88) and roughly ballpark that they're only retaining about 25% of their earnings. So if you wanted an apples-to-apples comparison, you'd want to compare that earnings growth to the earnings growth of companies with similar earnings retention.***

[Of course, the reason I'm pretty pessimistic is that I no longer believe there are sufficient opportunities to deploy those earnings, which is consistent with the enormous and growing cash pile. But that's a different conversation.]

*** Back of the envelope math is comparing 2025 after-tax earnings from MSR group in Item 7 to year-over-year change in Identifiable Assets in footnote 26 for the Manufacturing, Service and Retailing, McLane, and Pilot lines of business. This is a rough proxy, not clean accounting: identifiable assets are not retained earnings, and the estimate would be off if the segment used a lot of earnings to pay down liabilities or if acquisitions/disposals/working-capital swings moved the asset base. But as a ballpark, comparing MSR’s $13.65B of after-tax earnings to the roughly $3.34B increase in identifiable assets suggests only about a quarter of earnings stayed in the group as incremental assets.