No. of Recommendations: 8
For those who are opposed to a cash dividend in any respect, 2 questions:
- Given that you seem comfortable with Berkshire holding cash indefinitely waiting for the opportunity to deploy it at some future date, are you in favor of...
I don't think anyone is in that camp...the word "indefinitely" is easily construed as forever, which would make it a bit of a straw man.
I'm happy for Berkshire to sit on cash for a while longer, because I think the "while" will be a reasonable time frame. It always has been in the past. They might cave in this time (they might have to), but I suspect not. And teh cash pile is huge, but not really that huge as a fraction of the size of the firm. Cash+fixed income as a % of investments has ranged from 31% to 65%, current figure 58%. Cash per se as a % of investments has generally been in the range of 19-39% this century, and only got above that about 5 quarters ago. The latest figure is definitely high at 56%, but this stretch with an unusually large cash allocation hasn't exactly been a long wait.
I strongly believe that cash will considerably outperform the great majority of equity investments over the next X months. Alas, I don't know what values of X make that prediction true. Wild guess 18 months plus or minus 18?
Jim
(just raised more cash today...)
