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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.

Says the open border and Antifa lover...

Weak ad hominem from a guy who can't tell the difference between correlation and causation.

You're hilarious - "weak correlation"?? & "heavily politicized"? When BOTH prices rise at the same time, the obvious conclusion is STRONG correlation. From a Federal Reserve that Trump has been totally frustrated with. Heavily politicized? Using ACTUAL historical data. You never run out of excuses when faced with facts.

Get rid of depreciation expense and the 1031 exchange program and you'll get rid of the big parasites that are driving up prices.

The existing title system is already quite efficient because with the passage of time and as property changes hands, there is less and less to research. The issue is, what are we insuring against today? My guess is, it is more and more scams, as opposed to legitimate title issues and questions, which are routinely picked up by title examiners. Tokenization probably would not make difference because unlike all other insurance, title insurance only provides coverage for prior events and is relatively cheap to begin with.

Surprised he sounded down on Apple. Maybe he was just a big Tim Apple fan

Charlie didn't give a single f who he offended. Warren does care about PR

But why do we need tokenization for this? The existing title system could probably be made more efficient but at least there is a public body there that people can trust.

Yeah I was saying this for a while, everyone was pretty exuberant about France but they never really faced a strong team yet... and they choked. Shame cause the potential was there but always happy to see Mbappe lose.

That’s penalty decision against France was questionable, imo. The French looked soulless in this game and Mbappe was nowhere to be seen. I guess that’s how you win in against a team with a star player. Kudo’s to the Spanish defense and midfield. They destroyed the French game and while it wasn’t pretty , it surely worked. They clearly were the better team.

I hear you - these methods work, and ROE as a sanity check on economic book value makes sense. Also, hello...hope to catch up more at the next conference. Need as many smart and generous people in my life as possible! You'll have a perfectly decent day if you ignore the below. But if you get bored, humor this ridiculous & unrealistic thought experiment, if you will. How would you fill in the blanks? Is the premise too ridiculous to even consider?

Fairly good summation of the SOH tolling 'thing' ...... https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Trumps-Hormuz-Toll-Could-Upend-Global-Energy-Trade.html 'Imposing a charge equivalent to one-fifth of the cargo’s value would achieve almost exactly the opposite. It would transform a temporary geopolitical disruption into a permanent structural cost, replacing the risk of an Iranian blockade with an American toll that could be just as damaging to energy markets. After spending enormous political, military and financial resources trying to preserve freedom of navigation, Washington would effectively begin charging the world for the freedom it claims to have restored.' 'The resulting levy on oil and gas could therefore approach $115 billion per year under fairly moderate assumptions, before including petrochemicals, fertilizers, containerized goods and other commercial cargo. This would not be a conventional shipping toll based on the cost of providing a service or maintaining infrastructure. It would be an ad valorem charge on some of the most important commodity flows in the global economy.' 'Washington would effectively be asserting that military protection of an international shipping route creates a right to collect a percentage of the goods passing through it. That principle would have implications far beyond the Gulf. If naval protection creates a right to tax commercial cargo, other military powers could make similar claims around contested maritime routes. The distinction between securing freedom of navigation and monetizing control over navigation would become dangerously blurred.' 'The direct 20% payment would therefore be only the beginning. War-risk insurance premiums would remain elevated, while shipowners could demand additional compensation for crews and vessels entering the region. Financing costs would increase because cargoes exposed to possible seizure, delayed payment or changing regulations would become riskier collateral. Traders would build larger margins into contracts, and buyers would seek supplies from routes not subject to arbitrary charges.' One has to be truly gifted to f*** ** this badly Gasoline prices have already begun to reflect the now higher crude prices; it is only a matter of time until US refineries start failing (running at capacity, no maintenance shutdowns), China has already further scaled back its refining, and the Saudi East West pipeline terminals at Yanbu are very vulnerable. Houthis don't have to destroy, continually damage enough to progressively reduce throughput .... is good enough. Of course ...... most would expect Orange Boy to do whatever he can to lower gasoline prices, and the speculative community to squeeze US inventories as much as possible. Rising volatility, rapid change, pending mid-terms, and an 80 year old dealing with the pressure ..... what could possibly go wrong SD

Insurance belongs to FFH - I don’t think they need to consolidate, perhaps similar structure to Anchorage but instead of Omers, have FFH