In today’s newsletter: Berkshire Hathaway hasn’t reported any additional Occidental Petroleum share purchases after buying for six straight days, Buffett’s moves in Asia get attention, and an activist arrested at Berkshire’s annual meeting is not being prosecuted,
Occidental Petroleum’s stock price in recent days has mostly stayed below the $60 level that has sometimes prompted Berkshire Hathaway to buy more shares, but the company hasn’t reported any new purchases after the six-day streak that ended on Thursday last week.
Berkshire has two business days to disclose its moves, so we won’t know until later tonight or next week if Berkshire added to its position in the oil giant in the second half of this week.
At today’s closing price of $58.94, Berkshire’s 217.3 million share stake is valued at $12.8 billion. It owns 24.4% of Occidental’s outstanding shares.
In addition, Berkshire has warrants that it received as part of its 2019 financing of Occidental’s Anadarko Petroleum purchase to buy an additional 84 million shares for $59.62 each.
Since exercising those options would prompt Occidental to issue new stock, increasing the number of its outstanding shares, Berkshire’s stake would be just under 31% if that happened, not 34% as I mistakenly calculated in last week’s newsletter.
In a Bloomberg opinion piece headlined “Buffett’s Play Means This Time, Japan Is Different (Really),” Gearoid Reidy notes that “overseas buying exploded over the past month, ever since Warren Buffett announced he’d boosted his investment in the country’s five largest trading houses.”
With new corporate governance rules pushing Japanese companies to boost shareholder returns and the yen depressed by expectations that interest rates in the country will remain low, the benchmark Nikkei 225 is trading at levels not seen since 1990, the year after CNBC first went on the air.
But Institutional Investor warns that due to Japan’s “unique” market and economy, big U.S. investors “have much to learn about the country before they bet on its success.”
Pres. Biden takes the stage at a Taiwan Semiconductor plant in Phoenix, Dec. 6, 2022. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Meanwhile, in a Washington Post opinion piece, the National Review’s Jim Geraghty worries that Buffett’s sale of Berkshire’s TSCM stake “might make the world a tiny bit more dangerous” because “if Buffett isn’t sure Taiwan is a safe place to invest anymore, then it’s a sign that China’s intimidation is already working.”
“If China can scare foreign investors away,” he writes, “it will gradually but steadily erode Taiwan’s ability to pay for what it needs to deter an invasion.”
Charge dropped in Berkshire annual meeting arrest
Omaha prosecutors have dropped a criminal trespassing charge against the leader of a conservative group who was arrested at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting earlier this month.
That’s according to a statement this week by the National Legal and Policy Center in which Chairman and CEO Peter Flaherty says he “never should have been arrested” and that Berkshire’s “silencing of me in an ominous precedent for the right of shareholders in public companies. It cannot be allowed to stand.”
As he was speaking in favor of his shareholder proposal to separate Berkshire’s chairman and CEO roles, Flaherty insinuated that Bill Gates was associated with Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of young women.
At that point, his microphone was turned off and he was escorted out of the meeting by an Omaha police officer for allegedly refusing a request to leave.
Buffett could be heard saying Flaherty had “crossed a boundary” with a personal attack.
