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Buffett says the business is “good” at Berkshire AGM’s good address

Warren Buffett opened Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting on Saturday with an optimistic assessment of the U.S. pandemic recovery, saying the business was “very good” in parts of the economy.

In an annual speech to Berkshire shareholders, the 90-year-old investment world dean said US capitalism “worked perfectly”.

“It’s been a very unusual recession,” Buffett said. “Right now business is very good in many segments of the economy… But still, there are problems if you’re in some kind of business that’s really downsized.”

He gave the first part of the meeting before opening questions to shareholders through lists of the 20 most valuable companies in the world, in 2021 and 1989.

“We had a map for the future, somehow an unwanted map that leaves us five of the top six companies in the world 232 years later,” he said. “That’s not an accident and it’s not in a smarter or stronger way, or because we were something like that.”

But he warned that “the world can change in a very, very dramatic way,” he pointed out in 1989 on a list dominated by Japanese teams.

The day is a departure from what Berkshire shareholders expected ahead of time pandemic the company was forced into a virtual format. He was joined by Buffett this year with his longtime business partner and Berkshire vice-president Charlie Munger, as well as Greg Abel and Ajit Jain, two men appointed by shareholders as potential heirs.

The event will no longer be a regular affair without a set of investors flocking to the annual meeting or to Omaha. a video for star-studded investors in the past Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul have been on television Breaking Bad and the US version of Rainn Wilson as Dwight Schrute Office.

The four men are speaking in Los Angeles, where Munger lives, and will have to ask questions for about three and a half hours before the committee calls the start of the day’s official business.

Investors need to wait hours to hear the result on the most important issues of the day: how shareholders voted two shareholder proposals this would encourage Berkshire to raise awareness of its efforts to address climate change and diversity and employee inclusion.

The Berkshire committee has advised shareholders to vote on both proposals. draws reprimands from some. California’s Public Employee Retirement System and asset manager Neuberger Berman have said they will save the votes of several directors for the company’s re-election on Saturday.

Others, including one of the company’s largest shareholders – Norges Bank – have approved the proposals from both shareholders. The proposals, however, are uphill, with the company’s dual-class structure and Buffett’s high stake in high-voting shares.

Berkshire director Ron Olson and law firm partner Munger Tolles & Olson told Yahoo Finance on Saturday he hoped the two proposals would fail.

Earlier in the day, the company said hoping to win $ 11.7 billion or $ 7,638 per Class A share for a loss of $ 49.7 billion a year or $ 30,653 per share.


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