Without compounding--investing new capital at pretty good rates--Berkshire is a very boring cash cow with pretty low returns. Even with all the capital allocated to operating units for capex and tuck-ins, the operating earnings have been on a pretty unexciting trajectory for a long time.

I don’t know if the frequency of recessions has anything to do with it, but it’s a simple fact that the interregnum between those fallow periods is more than twice as long as it was from, say 1960-1990. Did Warren use those economic soft times to scoop up bargains, either in part (stock) or in whole? I don’t really follow every jot and tittle of when acquisitions and purchases were made, so I wouldn’t know. But I figure it’s worth a speculation here, if only so I don’t get lumped in with the cohort that never posts anything about Berkshire ;)

Here’s a chart of recessions in the US over the past 60 years or so:

conference-board.org - How are US recessions defined

It’s clear that the soft economic periods tend to be much less frequent nowadays, and perhaps shallower too, excepting 2008, of course. Those are the best times to be greedy, as the saying goes, and with fewer opportunities it’s that much harder to suss out the bargains which make the early days of overachievement look so easy.