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Warren Buffett’s annual investor letter is out. Here are the biggest takeaways.
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is cautioning investors in his Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate not to expect the “eye-popping performance” of its past, due to a dearth of deals at attractive valuations.
The handful of U.S. companies capable of truly moving the needle at Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire have already been picked over, and there are no meaningful acquisition targets outside the U.S., Buffett noted in his company annual shareholder letter, released on Saturday.
But Berkshire is prepared to pounce should a large-scale opportunity arise, with its cash reserves rising to a record $167.6 billion in the fourth quarter.
“By both luck and pluck, a few winners have emerged from a great many dozens of decisions. And we now have a small cadre of long-time managers who never muse about going elsewhere and who regard 65 as just another birthday,” the 93-year-old Buffett said in his yearly missive, one of the most-read reports in business.
Buffett began with a tribute to Charlie Munger, who died in November just 33 days shy of his 100th birthday.
“Charlie never sought to take credit for his role as creator but instead let me take the bows and receive the accolades,” Buffett relayed of his longtime investing partner. “In reality, Charlie was the ‘architect’ of the present Berkshire, and I acted as the ‘general contractor’ to carry out the day-by-day construction of his vision.”
Berkshire’s already established succession plan calls for vice chairman Greg Abel to replace Buffett as CEO and two other investment managers to take charge of its stock portfolio. In charge of Berkshire’s noninsurance businesses since 2018, Abel “in all respects is ready to be CEO of Berkshire tomorrow,” Buffett wrote.
Berkshire’s insurance businesses fared well last year as utilities fell short, Buffett noted.
The regulatory climate and climate change is making it difficult to project earnings and asset values in utilities, formerly among the most stable industries, he noted.
Buffett said he intends to retain his nearly 30% stake of Occidental Petroleum “indefinitely” but has no plans to own or run the company. He cited Occidental’s “vast oil and gas holdings in the United States,” and leadership in carbon-capture initiatives as in the nation’s interest.
He also hiked Berkshire’s stake in five large Japanese trading houses, saying all “follow shareholder-friendly policies that are much superior to those customarily practices in the U.S.”
Further, “the managements at the five have been far less aggressive about their own compensation than is typical in the United States,” Buffett wrote of Marubeni, Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo.
CBS News
Mass deportation would come with hefty bill, require more manpower, immigration experts say
The mass deportation plan former President Donald Trump has pledged to institute if he’s reelected would come with a hefty price tag.
The American Immigration Council estimated that it could cost $88 billion annually to deport one million people a year. The removal of millions of construction, hospitality and agriculture workers could reduce the U.S. gross domestic product by $1.7 trillion.
Tom Homan, who led U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first Trump administration, said he doesn’t know if the $88 billion a year cost estimate is accurate, but he says mass deportation is necessary.
“What price do you put on national security? Is it worth it?” Homan said.
How deportations work now
60 Minutes recently joined ICE officers in Silver Spring, Maryland, as they located and arrested undocumented immigrants with criminal histories, including assault, robbery, drug and gun convictions. They’d been identified by ICE as threats to public safety.
60 Minutes
They stopped a van and arrested the passenger, a 24-year-old Guatemalan with an assault conviction, who had been ordered deported by a judge five years ago. ICE officers said the driver of the van was also in the country illegally and had been deported once before, but he was let go. Matt Elliston, director of ICE’s Baltimore field office, said the driver didn’t have a criminal record.
“He was picking up his employee to go to work,” Elliston said. “It doesn’t make sense to waste a detention bed on someone like that when we have other felons to go out and get today.”
Elliston said ICE’s mission is targeted enforcement — using immigration law to improve public safety.
“It’s not to just aimlessly arrest anyone we come across,” he said.
It took a team of more than a dozen officers seven hours to arrest six people, and that doesn’t include the many hours spent searching for them.
Are there resources to support mass deportation?
There are more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States — about 3% of the population — and Trump has vowed to launch the largest mass deportation program in U.S. history. Homan, who Trump has said would join him if he wins a second term, said he’s unaware of any written mass deportation plan.
“ICE is very good at these operations. This is what they do,” Homan said.
But Elliston doesn’t know how, in Maryland, the agency could find the resources for mass deportation.
60 Minutes
“Just the amount of money that that would cost in order to detain everybody, you know, it [would be] at the Department of Defense level of financing,” he said.
Jason Houser, ICE chief of staff during the first two years of the Biden administration, said it costs $150 a night to detain people like those 60 Minutes saw arrested. The average stay as they await deportation is 46 days. One deportation flight can cost $250,000, and that assumes the home country will accept them. Many, like Cuba and Venezuela, rarely do.
Who would handle mass deportation?
ICE currently has around 6,000 law enforcement officers in its deportation branch. It would require a massive increase in manpower to arrest and deport a million people a year, Houser said.
“You’re talking 100,000 official officers, police officers, detention officers, support staff, management staff,” he said.
Trump adviser Stephen Miller has said staff could come from other government agencies, like the Drug Enforcement Administration, but Houser criticized the idea of taking people from other agencies outside ICE off their set missions.
Immigration enforcement also requires specialized training and language skills that most military and law enforcement officers don’t have.
“It is not an easy swap,” Elliston said. “What I can tell you in, from the Immigration and Nationality Act, immigration law is second to the U.S. tax code in complexity.”
Former President Donald Trump’s pledge to implement mass deportation if he’s reelected has ignited fears of family separations.
Monica Camacho Perez and her family have lived and worked in the United States since coming illegally from Mexico more than 20 years ago. Camacho Perez teaches English as a second language to immigrant adults, and she also works in the public high schools. Her family lives in Baltimore.
“We are a normal family, like anybody else,” she said. “We go to church. We work every day. We pay taxes,” she said.
She’s among the more than 500,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children who are protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program known as DACA.
“I’m the only one right now that’s, like, protected, while my parents are not, my brothers are not,” she said. “My brothers have children that are born here. So if they were to get deported, what will happen to their kids?”
Would families be separated if Trump’s reelected?
When asked whether there was a way to carry out mass deportations without separating families, Tom Homan, who led immigration enforcement during the first year-and-a-half of the Trump administration, said, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”
Like Camacho Perez’s nieces and nephews, more than four million U.S.-born children live with an undocumented parent.
60 Minutes
Asked why children should have to leave the country where they were born and raised, Homan said, “Because their parent absolutely entered the country illegally, had a child knowing he was in the country illegally. So he created that crisis.”
During Homan’s time leading ICE – in what became one of the most controversial policies of the Trump administration – at least 5,000 migrant children were forcibly separated from their parents when their parents were arrested at the border and prosecuted for crossing into the U.S. illegally.
Asked about published accounts saying that family separation at the border was his idea, Homan replied: “Not true. I didn’t write the memorandum to separate families. I signed the memo. Why’d I sign the memo? I was hoping to save lives. While you and I are talking right now, a child’s going to die in the border. . . . So we thought, ‘so maybe if we prosecute people, they’ll stop coming.'”
Trump has said Homan would be joining him in the new administration if he wins a second term. Asked if this family separation policy would be re-instituted then, Homan said, “I don’t know of any formal policy where they’re talking about family separations.”
60 Minutes
Asked whether it should be on the table, he replied, “It needs to be considered, absolutely.”
How that would happen given a court settlement reached late last year between the federal government and the American Civil Liberties Union is unclear. Under the settlement, the federal government is barred from separating migrant families at the border for the next eight years if the sole purpose is to prosecute the parents for entering the U.S. illegally.
“I can’t imagine living here without them.”
Back in Baltimore, Camacho Perez said she has given a lot of thought to what she would do if her parents were deported. Even though Baltimore is where she grew up, and she now owns her own home there, she thinks she would go back to Mexico with her parents if they were deported.
“They’re also part of my American dream,” she said. “And I can’t imagine living here without them.”
NEW YORK — Thousands of people, including from other parts of the country, descended on Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday afternoon for former President Donald Trump’s campaign rally.
The NYPD said it had drones over the area, robots, and a helicopter, as well as antiterrorism units outside monitoring the situation to keep everyone safe.
With just nine days to go until Election Day, a new CBS News poll has the two presidential candidates neck and neck, with Vice President Kamala Harris at 50% and Trump at 49% among likely voters. In battleground states, both are polling at 50%.
The focus of the respective campaigns has been on issues, including immigration, the war between Israel and Hamas, and crime.
JD Vance, Elon Musk, Melania Trump spoke
Sunday’s rally marked a detour from the battleground states for Trump. Among those who took the stage before the former president spoke were former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Staten Island activist Scott LoBaido.
“President Trump grew up here. He’s a New Yorker,” Giuliani said. “That’s why people get a little bit annoyed at him. He speaks his mind.”
When Trump entered the arena there was applause, a standing ovation, and everyone started chanting. Every seat appeared to be filled from the floor to the highest sections. In addition to Trump, vice presidential nominee JD Vance, billionaire supporter Elon Musk and Trump’s wife, Melania, all spoke.
Trump supporters revel in former president’s appearance
The former president is from Queens. CBS News New York met supporters from his home borough, but also a couple from Chicago.
“I just love him, and he’s the best. I want the economy to get better,” a woman said.
“We have an influx of migrants, illegal migrants. Our economy is … just go to the grocery store,” a man from Dutchess County added.
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman was one of several Long Island representatives who came to the Garden in the Trump motorcade.
“Just look around. This is incredible. We’re in New York City in the middle of, you know, this is liberal … one of the most liberal cities in the country, and it’s amazing,” New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov said.
Vulgar language during the introductions
Before Trump took the stage, there was some vulgar language in the speeches. Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who goes by Kill Tony, referred made a crude joke referring to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” and made other offensive jokes about Black people and Latinos.
Sid Rosenberg, a radio host that Trump often talks to, called Hillary Clinton a “sick son of a b***,” and referred to migrants as “f—ing illegals.”
David Rem, a childhood friend of Trump’s, called Harris “the antichrist.”
Grant Cardone, a business owner, said Harris “and her pimp handlers will destroy the country.”
