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Great post @rajpgokul, highly appreciated insights! many thanks

Quite agree .... as it's not collectable Thing is .... every time a balloon is floated, it's a few more days of diminished traffic through the SOH before it is resolved, and a further draw on global SPR inventory. Jawbone all you want, but you fight against a price rise as that inventory depletes ... and have to fight harder the less inventory you have left. Knocking out the bridges and power stations, just means the Iranians knocking out the same in US friendly states, not Iran magically coming to the table. It just evidences a trapped, drowning man, punching at every/anything, desperately searching for a way out of the tarpit. Let the man tire, and drown. One of the WWII takeaways was that bombing civilian infrastructure to diminish ability to produce more war material, just made the population more resistant ... even when their leadership were Nazi. Arguably, the same thing happening here. SD

Right. Getting rid of the capital gains tax altogether would be a fine solution.

Great post, thanks for sharing. And now I'm curious what clears your local hurdle rate...

My god, Buffett looks so older

The man loves to float trial balloons, as many politicians do. He got his immediate feedback and changed course/strategy. Some would say that this is "pragmatic" behavior.

I did not realize that getting to the truth is now by majority rule. Indeed at one time, the earth was deemed flat and heretics were executed. Rather than put up a coherent argument to me - I suggest you write your detailed thesis and send it off to the Federal Reserve telling them why they are wholly incorrect and that their data is incorrect.

The 20% toll is not "real"... ...it is just his style to negotiate and make people talk about himself...probably in his mind it is smart anchoring to a bad outcome to more easily achieve a "middle" ground (that is not middle but in his favor)...some people do it in negotiations...

I actually agree, it is getting ridiculous. They need to get stricter about all the acting, and about tactical fouls. Players don't give a shit about yellow cards. There should be more time penalties, that put your team at a serious disadvantage, being down to 10 or even 9 players. A tactical foul preventing the opponent from launching a quick counterattack should lead to a 15-minute penalty. Acting seriously hurt, slowing down the game for more than a few seconds, should automatically put the player on the sidelines for 5 minutes, so he can recover from his pain.

@Milu, you're such a troublemaker! , It's sacrilege to post something like that here! [j/k naturally!]

These rules are a huge incentive to build new rental housing (or rehab housing that will otherwise eventually get torn down), and they also encourage more inventory of existing housing stock available for sale. For 1031, if an individual investor can't 1031 they're just going to hold the house until death when the basis steps up. For an institutional investor, they're going to hold the property until they can sell it for 25% higher to meet the same IRR after tax. For bonus depreciation, an investor will need to rent a house for much more in order to meet their IRR hurdle. Maybe there's a better system without 1031/bonus depreciation, but if you just end those two provisions in the tax code the housing crisis will be exacerbated if anything.

Can't believe Cubs is still here despite 95% opposition from the other posters. No one is changing any minds.... for some reason investors prefer parties that want to increase the debt, expand the scope of govt, start more govt programs, because that works, raise taxes and have less control over their lives over time. This surprised me a decade ago but no more. Some survivorship bias going on here. They are from or made money in largely cities/which tend left, they are more social/therefore on a forum, they are from socialist Europe, they are educated into left wing, all their profs were left, idk. On another note, how about those trump accounts? Pretty sweet. Now if we could get the wealthy to leave their money in a private workers citizens fund (no govt) that invests in etf's and gives half the gains to anyone working full time forever, who's a citizen, in equal amounts regardless of wage, we could double down on capitalism again and get everyone involved.

I think that would be the most interesting part for me. How do they fund and structure this deal. $5.7B is not chump change even for Fairfax. I agree they're not buying it dirt cheap during a banking crisis ala Eurobank, but there's likely some more juice in this orange yet to be extracted before growth prospects are considered. The key for me is the loan book, hopefully they had a good look at that, and most of the bad loans have cycled, and the NPL is truly reflective of the current loan book. If so then the secular growth story and Fairfax's in house expertise and opportunities for cross product synergies can be brought to bear on the investment. That would not only benefit Fairfax, but many other stakeholders including the local economy and eventually the government whose residual stake as well as tax receipts will be bolstered. I'm a firm believer that private sector banks outperform state run banks, that's been demonstrably evident throughout history across many jurisdictions. All of that said, something that gives me pause is why there hasn't been much more interest in this investment from other external investors or even international banks looking to get a foothold in an emerging market. Any number of explanations are possible, and certainly I would concede that Fairfax has the best set up to do the deal, but nonetheless, the interest has certainly been tepid. No doubt this will be one of the more interesting chapters in Fairfax's quite colorful history. It also represents a quite sizable investment relative to its current market cap.

My feeling is that Ron Olson was attorney for the principals, and like the Microsoft story, Buffett may have wanted to avoid any accusations of insider information. But that is just my weak opinion.

Analyst estimates for Q2 look too high. They are ignoring bond losses again presumably because other insurance companies don’t include it in their adjusted EPS.

Scenario 1 is easier. P/b for a 17% ROE should be around 2.25-2.5x P/B. IVPS short cut of BVPS + float per share is also easy at $4750. Scenario 2 I don’t understand.

Spek - you need to stop acting like Baghdad Bob - where you deny reality in the face of facts. Housing, whether renting or buying, is an inelastic item - which most sensible individuals, let alone a PHD, easily understands: One must have housing - and faced with fixed supply - you either rent or buy. When renting is high - you move to buying. Either way, PRICES rise for BOTH substitutes. If I need a car - and a Mercedes is deemed too expensive, I move to a Lexus, which gets more expensive due to increased demand. Renting is a "substitute" for buying. Increase demand for one substitute and you increase the demand and prices for the other "substitute". As my economic expert @John Hjorth would say - that's econ 101. Pouring millions of illegal immigrants into your country drives UP prices for an inelastic item. Why don't you just stop making up stuff when faced with non-partisan data. I suppose next thing you will tell me is that the prices in Florida and Tennessee have NOTHING to do with the historic and massive migration to those states.

RBC reaffirmed their Buy rating on Fairfax this week, with target set at $2277US (3200 cdn)

Immutable title. It can be done manually, and very efficiently, but the title specs can be altered at any time (property lines moved a few feet, etc), and there is incentive to bribe to get it done. Once the blockchain block is validated via the second signature, the data (title specs) cannot be changed. Modernisation and lower cost. Stop the land component transferring, taxes drop, and affordability rises. The cost of land + dwelling lease; a lot lower than outright purchase of the land + the dwelling on it. The world, and technology, has moved on; what was a good solution decades ago, is now just acceptable ... but no longer really fit for today's purpose. SD

This logic makes sense to me, but I think there are a lot of other factors that play a role. Couldn't it also have something to do with the fact that renters tend to have less capital so affordability weighs on rents before home sales? Seems like this could have something to do with the "K shaped" recovery everyone talks about. Renting a home is sort of like a commodity, whereas buying a home has a collectible type value layered on top (having pets, growing a garden, painting the walls whatever color you want, etc.) If I've got $10 million and want to buy a new house, I'm not going an indefinite timeframe for a bargain, whereas if I've got $8,000 a month income and I don't have anywhere to live, I'm going to pay market rent while I continue to save for a big enough downpayment to make the numbers work. I also suspect the huge build out of multi family that started around 2020/2021 may have played a role in slowing rent growth over the last 6 years. The replacement cost for homes (not just the price) also went up enormously since 2020, and since those multi family units have all hit the market by now, and the economics don't really make sense to build a lot more multi-family (what with much higher construction costs and carrying costs), I suspect the next 5 years see rent prices increase a lot faster than home prices.

The chart shows that rents increase all the time. Illegals rent - they can’t buy houses unless they come in with a stash of cash which I think few do. So they can’t buy houses, somebody else must drive prices for homes. Besides, even the Dallas Fed paper states that only 30% of the increase is due to illegal immigration , so 70% comes from other factors. This would be a stronger argument if you could show causation and rents rise more than homes prices , which is what you expect if the driving factor would be illegal immigration. But this chart shows the opposite. @cubsfan you need to take chill pills, or some THC gummies - you get too riled up about stuff.

Who’s this Buffett character buying all this alphabet stock. Doesn’t he know that it’s going to be free cash flow negative soon and that it’s wasting a ton of money on capex that has no chance of yielding a successful return and that Michael Burry said that it is gaming their depreciation by artificially extending out the years. Old man must have gone crazy.

The diving in that game was atrocious. Was at the bar with some friends for happy hour and in maybe 5 minutes, around the midway point, there were probably a half dozen guys rolling around like pansies. The one goalie too, what a clown.

The with tokenization and block chain the existing title system is obsolete and can 100% be done without the humans. Which is also why adoption is slow. You have 2 separate groups of people fighting against the change. Those who want to keep their horses and buggies. Those who want to keep riding the horses and buggies. But for those of us who have ridden in the tesla... why do i wanna go back to having my title be transferred to me by horse and buggy? I may have to wait for all the slow people to die but change gonna come

"Or pretend not to know" is a great way to put it. We all know housing (renting or buy) is inelastic, and prices react violently with a demand shock, rising disproportionately with fixed supply. You can see it in the chart.