No. of Recommendations: 3
"I don't understand WANTING a dividend. You can sell enough each year."
You can until you run out of shares to sell. And, in doing so you are giving up a piece of your ownership in the business each time you sell.
"<<<You can sell enough each year >>>
Exactly. M.A.K.E Y.O.U.R O.W.N D.I.V
But it appears there’s some severe mental hang up with those attached to divided paying names. Take GE as the poster child of this. The fixation with receiving a dividend brought in blindness to the dividend paying ability. According to reports, GE was borrowing money to do this and share buybacks.
Buffett has alluded to this as the difficulty in stopping dividend once started.
Irrational behavior is rampant. Please keep Berkshire away from there. I’ll vote it down should it come up again."
GE's behaviour was probably motivated more to help hide the fact it was fiddling its earnings figures, which was the bigger issue at play there.
I'm sure though we can just as easily find plenty of examples of companies that are well run and pay dividends as we can find ones that aren't, so I can't see why we should assume BRK couldn't perform as one of the former, if management and shareholders were to agree upon dividends being paid.
(just for the record, I'm not saying BRK should start paying dividends, I'm totally OK with it continuing not to pay them as it is part of the culture here - but like an earlier post said, it shouldn't be something that is forever off the table.
