Full 2020 Berkshire Hathaway AGM Video   [warning: 5 hours & 47 mins long!!]

I suggest skipping the first hour, as it is just journos and their guests talking.  The actual AGM (with WB) starts at the 1:00 mark.

03-May-2020:  https://www.livewiremarkets.com/wires/highlights-from-the-2020-berkshire-agm

Buffett has now sold out of the four major American airlines -

[the following is an excerpt from Patrick Poke's "wire" that was posted on Livewire around 4 hours ago - there's a link to the full "wire" above]

Is Berkshire buying stocks?

Last week, I asked the question, “is Berkshire buying stocks?” It seems we now have a very clear answer – Berkshire’s a net seller. In Q1 2020, they sold US$4B inequities, buying another US$2.1B inequities, and US$1.7B in Treasuries.

But the big news came on the next slide. Buffett prefaced it with a warning; “I’ve added another figure that I wouldn’t normally present to you, but I want to be sure that if I’m talking to you about investments and stocks more than I usually am, I want you to know what Berkshire’s actually doing.”

The airline business has changed in a major way

“That isn’t because we thought the stock market was going to go down… I just decided that I made a mistake (in buying the airlines).”

The primary reason for the large selldown in April was a complete exit from the airline stocks. They had paid around US$7-8B for a roughly 15% stake in the four biggest airlines in America – American Airlines, Delta Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and United Continental. They thought they were buying approximately a billion dollars’ worth of underlying earnings for that amount, but of course, that’s all changed now. Buffett was complimentary of the management teams at the airlines he’d owned and emphasised the point that this was due to uncertainty about demand for flights over the medium term, not due to a mistake any company had made. Apart from this, airlines are also racking up billions of dollars of debt in the meantime.

“I don’t know whether, two or three years from now, if many people will fly as many passenger miles as they did last year… The future is much less clear to me.”

Later, during the Q&A session, Buffett made the point that there may be too many planes in the world when this is all over. This could spell tough times ahead for Berkshire-owned Precision Castparts, but of course, also Boeing and Airbus.

“I don’t know what their future is. We’re gonna have aircraft, we’re gonna be flying. The real question is whether you need a lot of new planes or not.”

Where are all the deals?

“We’re willing to do something very big. You could come to me on Monday morning with something that involved thirty, forty, or fifty billion dollars and if we really liked what we’re seeing, we would do it.”

Why haven’t they done it then? Well, they’re just not getting attractive deals on their desk yet.

Buffett said the Fed’s quick action injecting liquidity into markets meant that many companies had been able to raise significant amounts of capital to get them through this crisis. Some major companies had even come to market twice. He said even Berkshire had raised additional capital, even though they don’t need it, just to be safe.

But with all this cheap money available, there’s been little need for Buffett’s cash. So for now, they’re happy to keep their balance sheet like “Fort Knox”.

[... click on the link above for more ...]