Subject: Re: brk, increasing demand for the common
So, brkb can afford to pay out 8 billion a year in a div AND do 20 billion in buybacks price permitting annually.

IF, the markets believed this would be the minimum cap allocation plan going forward ,brkb rises 5 % or so, today.

Ok, finally we have a hard number estimate from you regarding the benefit of a dividend.

Let's say a ~1% dividend is established, and let's further say as you assert, the stock goes up by 5%. So on that 1% each year, about 1/3% goes towards taxes. That means that in a mere 15 years, most of the stock holders will have sent the entire 5% bump into the government's maw. It means that had this policy been in place for all the decades, the Gottesman charitable contribution would have been about $1.2B lower than it was not having a dividend for all the decades! That's about 20% lower!

Now please explain how intrinsic value (or any long-term value) can go up simply by the institution of some other method (in this case a dividend) of distributing capital to investors. It smacks of financial engineering of some sort, and as we all know, financial engineering rarely adds any real value. Financial engineering sometimes improves taxation, that is indeed why it's done most of the time, but as far as REAL value of a business, I don't see it. Can you explain your thought process further? How did you come up with 5%?