Wall Street Journal (September 1)
“Five venerable Japanese companies were sitting in the bargain bin in plain sight. It took a 90-year-old Warren Buffett to scoop them up.” His company Berkshire Hathaway bought “stakes in Japanese trading companies shunned by others, seeing low valuation and healthy dividends.” The stakes of about 5%, are in trading companies that “resemble none other than Berkshire Hathaway itself,” with “holdings in energy, mining and consumer goods, sometimes owning companies outright and other times taking smaller stakes.”
Tags: Bargain bin, Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett, Consumer goods, Dividends, Energy, Japan, Mining, Shunned, Stakes, Trading companies, Valuation
New York Times (September 25)
Companies are discovering that “quitting China is hard to do” as they look to shift operations to avoid Trump tariffs. “Few places can match China’s convenience and reliability.” Not only is China a near comprehensive source of “the ingredients that go into today’s consumer goods,” it also boasts “a dependable source of workers who know how to hold down factory jobs,” along with “reliable roads and rail lines connecting suppliers to assembly plants to ports.”
Tags: China, Consumer goods, Convenience, Dependable, Factory, Operations, Ports, Rail, Reliable, Roads, Source, Suppliers, Tariffs, Trump
Newsweek (March 12)
By playing “his America First card,” President Trump thinks he’s getting ahead, particularly in the Rust Belt. He believes adopting tariffs will help fulfill “his promise to America’s industrial heartland to bring back jobs in its traditional industries. The problem is that those in the industrial heartland don’t seem to think it’s the right thing to do.” In fact, many “who work in manufacturing, remain convinced that tariffs will increase costs and lead to job losses. Far from saving the industrial sector, they say, Trump is showing economic illiteracy that will only add to the cost of significant consumer goods.”
Tags: America first, Consumer goods, Costs, Economic illiteracy, Heartland, Jobs, Manufacturing, Rust Belt, Tariffs, Trump
