Berkshire Hathaway gambles on five businesses that look a lot like his ownWARREN BUFFETT famously likes his businesses simple to understand and transparent. Why, then, has his conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway, poured $6bn into 5% stakes in Japan’s five biggest trading houses? Mitsubishi, Itochu, Mitsui, Marubeni and Sumitomo do not appear to meet either criterion. They…
Posts published in “Personal Finance”
THE STUDY of working life tends to be dominated by economists, management consultants and business-school professors. So it is nice to get a new perspective. James Suzman, an anthropologist, provides that fresh appraisal in an ambitious new book called “Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time”.Mr Suzman’s interpretation has a quasi-Biblical feel in…
FEW FIRMS struggle with too much success. One is Naspers, a South African media group founded in 1915. In a prescient bid to diversify away from newspapers in 2001 it paid $32m for a large stake in a piddly Chinese startup. Tencent, the startup in question, has since morphed into a gaming and messaging behemoth…
CORPORATE SCANDALS occur with depressing regularity, from the accounting misstatements at Enron in 2001 to fake bank accounts at Wells Fargo, uncovered in 2016. In June Wirecard, a German payments processor, revealed that €1.9bn ($2.3bn) was missing from its accounts. What was remarkable about the affair was that the company’s book-keeping had been the subject…
“WHEN DID Walmart grow a conscience?” The question, asked approvingly in a Boston Globe headline last year, would have made Milton Friedman turn in his grave. In a landmark New York Times Magazine essay, whose 50th anniversary fell on September 13th, the Nobel-prizewinning economist sought from the first paragraph to tear to shreds any notion…
A RECENT VIDEO of Elon Musk taking a spin in a new all-electric Volkswagen with Herbert Diess, the German carmaker’s boss, set tongues wagging. VW was forced to deny that a deal with Tesla was in the offing. A deeper bromance between Mr Musk’s firm and his main rival in the market for electric vehicles…
IN THE AUTUMN of 2010 le tout Paris of business braced for the sad, if predictable, end of an era. After 173 years and six generations, Hermès, a purveyor of handbags to bankers and neckties to their husbands, was to become part of LVMH. The champagne-to-evening-gowns mastodon, home to Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior, among…
THE BEST way to stay innovative, many bosses will tell you, is to hire the best people and let them get on with it. Few take this as literally as Reed Hastings of Netflix. The video-streamer’s employees can take as much holiday as they fancy and put anything on the company’s tab so long as,…
TO UNDERSTAND WHY it was a shock last month when Berkshire Hathaway invested $6.5bn in five Japanese trading houses that have been around for far longer even than its 90-year-old chairman, go back to a talk Warren Buffett gave to business students in Florida in 1998. As a sprightly sexagenarian with his sleeves rolled up,…
LARRY WHO? A few weeks ago asking a young tech worker in Silicon Valley about Larry Ellison, co-founder, former boss and now chief technology officer of Oracle, might have elicited blank stares. More surprising, given that his company is still the world’s second-largest software-maker, a follow-up question might have been: “Remind me what Oracle sells?”Being…