Reinko

Buffett Enters the Fray

Barry from the bigpicture blog has a perfect article explaining it is even far more then 10% a year.

Here is the link:
bigpicture.typepad.com...

Buffet sure knows his way around. I don't think this is a vote for confidence but a nice grab of dollars.
Read the article from Barry and if you after that would like a bit of the newly offered 2.5 billion common stock, don't complain about future haircuts...

Buffett's Strange Bet

There are many ways to beat broad market indices, here in Holland even pension funds who by law are only allowed to invest in indices can do it.

It is very simple:
In the morning they borrow their stocks to hedge funds and late in the evening they get them back. Of course the hedge funds have to pay a fee for having these stocks for one day.

And at the end of the year the pension fund manager has 'beaten' the index and the pension fund clients are impressed year in year out...
But nothing this pension fund manager has done can't be done by some computer program.

Buffett: We Are Not in a Credit Crunch

Of course there is no credit crunch for Buffet and for all those others who have some real backing up on borrowed money.

Just look at the so called h3 release from the Federal Reserve, link:

www.federalreserve.gov.../

The column 'non borrowed (3)' shows the combined reserves of the US commercial banks, as you see they are in the negative zone right now.
And the money auction column says there has been applied 'enough' liquidity to keep bank business rolling.

In the USA there is about 50 billion in money auction stuff and here in Europe it is above 500 billion, this is a reflection of the fact that here in Europe that banks have much more colateral to offer compared to the US banks that have negative total on balance assets...

So indeed, there is no 'credit crunch' at all!