Warren Buffett has been unabashed crony for the Obama regime, to the extent that has even spited on the principles embraced by his Dad, Howard.
From an erstwhile venerable “value” investor, today Mr. Buffett’s investing formula has pronouncedly shifted into rent seeking.
Peter Schweizer of Reason reckoned in his March exposé on Warren Buffett that this folksy fellow “needed the TARP bailout more than most.”
Let’s run through the numbers. Berkshire Hathaway firms in total received $95 billion in TARP money. Berkshire, you’ll recall, held stock in Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and American Express. Not only did these companies receive TARP funds… they also dipped into the FDIC’s treasury to back their debt. Total bailout: $130 billion. TARP-enabled companies accounted for 30% of the Oracle’s publicly disclosed stock portfolio.
He’s definitely one of the top beneficiaries of the big bank bailout. And to sharpen the sting, he even got a better deal to help ailing Goldman Sachs than our own government. Buffett got a 10% preferred dividend while the Feds got all of 5%. He cleaned up with $500 million a year in dividends. Without the bailout, you can bet many of his stock holdings would have gone near-zero instead.
That’s from Addison Wiggins of the Daily Reckoning.
As I previously wrote, I think Mr. Buffett has been desperate about preserving his popularity, social privileges and political clout which seems to have mainly been latched on the sustenance of his track record, where the scale of his portfolio may have met the law of diminishing returns using his traditional "value" methods.
So instead of admitting reality, egoism has motivated him to radically shift strategies and to sacrifice principles for convenience.
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