No. of Recommendations: 17
But is it possible we were all lulled to sleep????
At the very least, perhaps we were sleeping in the wrong place. The popular notion has been that, yes, Berkshire was now too big to do particularly well on the investment side, but the wholly owned subsidiaries were an unusually good bunch on average.
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
Endpoints can lead you astray a bit sometimes. There are some specific moving parts that really ought to be considered before considering these to be simply trends, the wildfire liabilities and the fact that BNSF seems to have been coming off some unsustainably high earnings from coal carloads. But certainly at a top level you can say that investments have been the stars lately, not operating earnings.
Jim
