rb

Yes there are operations and maintenance costs associate with wind turbines but they're pretty low.

It's a theoretical. Someone just punched some numbers in a calculator. They also assume a rate of 2.83 for 25 years which is bonkers. Of course there aren't 1st time buyers sitting on 140k for down payment.

I've heard of that. It's on of those things peddled by the anti green energy crowd. It's also total B.S. Firstly, you can tell it's false with a back of the envelope calculation. But if you want to get a little more precise there was an article in the International Journal of Sustainable Manufacturing that looked at the energy payback of 2MW turbines and found that payback to be 5-7 months. Now even if they're a bit off somewhere it tells you how B.S. the original claim is. I don't have the full article but you can read the abstract here: http://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1504/IJSM.2014.062496

I made a small fortune in BBD prefs years ago so I have a fondness for them. Didn't part take this time around though.

May I ask why you didn't see this coming? I always thought that wind is the superior technology to solar. Just one turbine can make a lot of electricity. Also most of the cost comes from installing the turbine. So I thought that improvements in the process will result in lower costs as time goes on.

In my opinion the whole real estate thing is a mirage and the possibly the next shoe to drop. These retailers occupy huge swaths of real estate. These retailers are going out. Plus they're going out at the same time. Who's gonna come in their place and absorb that huge supply? Definitely nobody that's gonna pay current market prices for it. The real estate's a dud.

Italy has a primary surplus of about 1.8 % of GDP. About the same as Germany. It's total deficit in 2016 was 2.4% of GDP and it's on track to lower that to 2.1% for 2017 through policy. It's pretty much the opposite of extend and pretend. What these poor guys could use is a bit of inflation.

I remember that Italy sorted out 2 banks when I was there this summer. But looking at the AR report that John provided. WOW! 23% of loans are non performing. You really need to try hard to screw up this bad.

Normally this acquisition would be accounted under the equity method. However in this case I think the accounting method will be determined by the nature of the contract under which the extra shares will be required. This is really going deep, deep into GAAP minutia and I don't think anyone can tell how it will be accounted without seeing the actual agreement.

Debt doesn't figure into operating margins. If you were to go lower in the P&L debt would lower margins not raise them.

Yeah, I'd be interested in the source as well. Dartmonkey's numbers indicate an op margin somewhere in the 7% range when their competitors are in the 1%-1.5% range. This would make them insanely profitable. I just don't see the way you get those margins selling diesel.

Agree. What a moron.

Not necessarily true at all.

Yep, stocks are cheap but for some reason he's not buying them hmmm ;)

I wonder which bank will have the nuts to publish a sell ratings on Brk? It will be instant fame but high risky move. I think Berkshire has more maturity than to engage in vindictive behavior because an analyst published a sell rating on it.

Dude, you buy so much BRK you should just surrender and make it your only holding. ;D

Yea dude, i don't think that anyone commenting on this thread is lining up to invest in this thing.

That's a good question. Maybe SJ can can add more flavour but here's what I can tell you. 1. When you're dealing with shady money you want to touch it as little as you can. These cars probably aren't leased by people but by trusts or numbered companies. 2. Could be a matter of preference/money management. The real estate is the savings/capital account. Junior's car goes to the chequing account so to speak. 3. There is difference in legislation. You can buy houses and not pay tax. If you buy a bunch of Ferraris the government can assign you an income (whatever they feel like) and make you pay tax on it. I don't think this is a reason though because this tool isn't used often and the Chinese haven't been quite sloppy in covering their tax bases. Just putting it out there that there is legislation in place.

Almost every Western country has investor immigration program. US does. Australia does. NZ does. Maybe Canadian one is easier to deal with, but my guess it's not the main draw for Chinese to Canada. My guess it would have been the other reasons mentioned, easy (?) entry after Hong Kong reverted to China, large communities to join. Not sure why US is less attractive. Perhaps a bit tougher entry/immigration. There's clearly a lot of Chinese immigration, education-based entry and RE purchases in US, but still seems way less than Canada. And way less (almost none) RE price bubble based on Chinese RE purchases. There's a bunch of Chinese RE purchases in US, but seems nothing as big as in Canada. Australia and NZ are facing similar issues as Canada re Chinese money. The US is less attractive for a number of reasons: unfriendly immigration policies, political issues, education is much more expensive, no healthcare, hard to get citizenship, etc. On top of that there's a fear that the US may just take your stuff if it so decides one day. No such fears with Canada, Oz and NZ. Despite all that the US is still getting a good chunk of Chinese money. It's not as obvious because the US economy is much larger. The effect is a lot different when $100 billion of Chinese money hits British Columbia (GDP $250 billion) than when $100 billion of Chinese money hits California (GDP 2.5 trillion).

To add a bit on what SJ said, Canada also has investor immigration program. If you have a couple million it's really easy to become a Canadian resident and citizen. Until recently one could qualify for the investor program essentially with real estate investments. If sure there's an army of lawyers in a room somewhere now trying to figure out how to get around the new regs.

Ummm.... Buffett? Really surprised he's not on the list.

I've had problems with the site freezing. I think it has to do with a problem with flash. Especially if you have another site open that uses flash CoBF is prone to crash if there's a problem.

Then it would make sense to look at something like enterprise value which adds the debt to the market cap and subtracts out the cash or failing that at least subtract cash from the total debt. I am as suspicious as TwoCitiesCapital of selectively removing individual companies. Of course working with net debt numbers makes a lot more sense. But I was pretty lazy yesterday and I didn't want to put in a lot of work populating data. Also I'm pretty familiar with the companies so I felt pretty comfortable with removing companies. This was basically back of the envelope stuff. I could have put in a lot more work to do it properly and I would have arrived at the same conclusion. Btw, the Dow data set is basically one that begs for adjustment. It's a small sample size with some big outliers: CVX and XOM on the income side and MSFT and AAPL on the debt side. S&P would have been much better and wouldn't need adjustment. But i chose to thank the OP for his work of putting these together instead of asking why he didn't do all 500 cos.

I think i covered that in my post:

The logic is that nuance of how the debt comes to be. There's a world of difference between MSFT and AAPL and CVX and XOM. MSFT and AAPL are taking on debt to lower their taxes and have their debt covered 2x by cash in their bank accounts. CVX and XOM are taking on debt to pay their bills because their profits just cratered. If the inopportune moment as you call it comes MSFT and AAPL can just pay a bit of tax and extinguish their debt but XOM and CVX are stuffed. Huge difference. We're looking at these data sets in order to draw some informed conclusions. Adjusting the data with information we have about special situation improves the data and leads to better conclusions.