Xerxes

To be fair, I think Viking meant what Putin really wants. I.e what will really bring closure. Not just the formal demands.

Ok @Candyman1 here is the statement from the letter, while doesn’t offer any clue as to when TRS will be liquidated it offers some clue on the perceived margin of safety it has, as seen from Watsa

I don’t have an answer either on those two questions. the only thing that I can think of as a tangible Russian “ask” is the control of the Black Sea coast and related cities (Odessa, Mariople). Everything else they don’t need anymore (I.e Kiev) they will pound & burn and inact such a high cost on the poor Ukrainian, and forever keep the city under the spectre of threat as a “hostage”. that is the only think I can think of. fully agree with Spek, that we are now in war with Russia, in all but name.

Mike Wilson of Morgan Stanley has been also pounding the table as early last August (I think) that today is more reminiscent of post-WW2 and not 70s. I have tried looking for that interview but cannot find it.

No one is under any illusion that a permanent cease fire would mean swaths of eastern Ukraine de-populated either by choice or by Moscow, to give the re-drawn map more permanency. Living under Russian yoke, or anywhere proximate to it, is not a life worth living. I ll push back on the Chamberlain/Munich comment (re: how Neil would be a good speech writer). I get it. Who doesn’t want to pound their chest and be Churchillian, all day long, in face of adversity. But that is the version of history where that scenario played itself out. This is not Lord of the Rings, where it always have a good ending, no matter how many times you watch it. Can you imagine Emperor Hirohito getting all Churchillian as the atomic bombs were being dropped in 1945. “We will fight to the last man, we will fight in the mountains” It is not like he knew that post-war Japan would thrive economically. At moment in 1945, Hirohito needed to be a Chamberline not a Churchill, while full knowing they were being subjugated and the post war economic prosperity being unknown to him. Btw And there were 2 atomic explosions because Americans had only 2 bombs. If they had 15, they would have nuked every city (saving Tokyo for the last) from south to north and north to south, all day long and every day. That is what that war was. Eradicating the Japanese race from the face of the planet unless unconditional surrender is tendered. Edit : before anyone gets excited and points out Pearl Habour etc. it doesn’t matter … that is what the war evolved into. Unconditional surrender means only one thing. Subjugation or destruction.

Well BRIC was a narrative as a portfolio of letters. As long as one letter (C) pull the rest of portfolio. The narrative worked well enough till ‘08. Now the new narrative de-carbonization etc. until it isn’t. for me it makes sense : the money distributed in the Covid era end up in the low/middle class who buy houses, more cars, dishwashers etc unlike ‘08-09 money printing that just inflated assets.

if there is some sort of peace, Putin entire focus will shift back to Russia to shore up his regime and find those “traitors” who had mislead him. Killing Ukrainian would mean unleashing an insurgency in himself a day later the conventional fighting ended, and turning this into his Afghanistan. I happen to believe that while they had plans to decapitate the Ukrainian regime (Zelensky) at the onset of the conflict, as the conflict unfolded they probably came to the conclusion that he is needed to be the person alive as the president making peace given his popularity. Same way Tokyo was not nuked in 1945 but two other cities were. this is Iran-Iraq war all over again with two exhausted boxers, fighting to stalemate, but one side may decide to use a pistol if push comes to shove.

Putin is a rational actor. He will not push the red apocalyptic button as that would be MAD but will use tactical nuclear, if the foundation of Russia (=> his regime really <=) is threatened. This prolonging war & sanctions threaten the very core of his regime, so that is a real possibility, and I am not in the ‘that would never happen’ camp when it comes tactical nukes.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-22/niall-ferguson-putin-and-biden-misunderstand-history-in-ukraine-war great read by Niall Ferguson. Glad to see he is not delusional and not in the “lets fight the Russian to the last Ukrainian crowd”

^^^ If the shorts had done well or really well (for whatever reasons), would we have considered them still as a “stupid move” “gone over their heads” etc. does the outcome has a say if the move was stupid or is the binary nature of thinking that is considered stupid, regardless of the outcome

I think this podcast is really worth listening too. Specially the part how it is the growth in the lower/middle class that really propel the commodity cycle in contrast to monetary inflation etc.

I don’t know what you define as blitzkreig. But a Heinz Guderian-style blitzkreig would be (in my mind) Russian armour closely supported by air dashing ahead past Kiev and cities looking to outflank, encircle enemy military formation. Thereby bypassing the cities. once enemy military formations are obliterated then you would get the towns and cities through negotiations and political settlement. as oppose to first going for the cities. Pre-Bonaparte, Europe was also big on “capturing cities” but Napoleon (to some degree influenced by Prussia) demonstrated that it is far important to destroy enemy military formations and get the cities through settlement. I am not sure I have any clue on what Plan A was suppose to be with Putin. Perhaps he truly believe the people would raise up to overthrow their own government. If that delusion was Plan A, so plan B would be what we know: moving the siege guns and battery rams into position. either way no blitzkrieg IMO. Also there is the element that in Putin’z mind, he was actually waging a limited war to “encourage peasants to march on Kiev and overthrow their own government”. that limited war has morphed into something he can no longer control. War cannot be limited. You go all in with clear objectives.

So he is really swapping short-term duration money with [med/long-term duration money + management]. question ? i realize BRK is net buyer of its stock and he is no mood to issue stock to fund any purchase these days, …. but if he were to issue stock (b/c the seller hypothetically wanted a piece or be tax-efficient) and then buyback the said amount with BRK cash, are there major friction for BRK that would work against doing that ?

It is an old episode but was informative when I listened to it last year

If he was playing Age of Empires, he could have "loaded" from his last "save" from Feb 21, and do things differently, or used the following cheatcodes .... or maybe even go for "wimpywimpywimpy" What is the cheat code to get 10,000 Su-27MK ? 10,000 wood - lumberjack. 10,000 food - cheese steak jimmy's. 10,000 gold - robin hood. 10,000 stone - rock on. 100,000 of all resources - ninjalui. Commit suicide - wimpywimpywimpy. Control animals instead of men - natural wonders. Full map - marco.

@Spekulatius& others I think a good candidate is Statoil (which i recently discoverd it re-branded itself as "Equinor"). I knew of it by its old name, and accidently ran into again when browsing SempusAugustus newest letter. Equinor is a current Bloomstran holding, I have not been following this thread, so apologies if it has been mentioned before on earlier page. Here is a great read on it fro Barron'. I personally have found Shell way too complicated. In this day and age, market likes straight forward businesses when it comes O&G industry. Buy Equinor Stock. It’s the Stock to Play the Surge in European Natural-Gas Prices. | Barron's (barrons.com) "No Western energy company has greater exposure to European gas, which may be the single best energy market in the world now. Formerly known as Statoil, Equinor provides about 20% of the Continent’s gas. Equinor may also be the greenest of the top global energy companies, with a carbon footprint per barrel of oil and gas produced that is less than half the industry average. It stacks up well against its peers in offshore wind power generation and carbon capture, with unmatched technological expertise." "Equinor produces more than two million barrels a day of oil and its equivalent, split evenly between oil and gas. Two-thirds comes from the company’s prolific Norwegian offshore fields. European gas is about a third of its total output, and most of it is sold on the spot market and thus benefits from current high prices. “This winter, the energy realities in Europe have demonstrated the importance of stable and reliable deliveries of gas from Norway,” said Anders Opedal, Equinor’s CEO, on the company’s earnings call in February. “Currently, we see low inventories, low spare capacity, and too-low energy investments over time.” Of course we are heading into the summer month where demand wil wane ... "The biggest risk with Equinor would be a collapse in European gas prices. Its stock, however, already discounts some potential decline, given a free-cash-flow yield of about 20%, assuming oil at $100 a barrel and gas at $20—half the current price. Assume gas at $10 per thousand cubic feet and the free-cash-flow yield is about 10%."

The invention of supertanker 50-60 years ago turned a fragmented oil market into global market with a global price, albeit heavily influenced by OPEC at the beginning simply because of their outsize control on supply. everytime we had high prices that led to new source of supplied, lowering OPEC contribution and influence. Like the North Sea fields in the 80s. Etc. natural gas remained very much a local fragmented market (with local price) because it was constrained by the pipeline. As the number of LNG increases that will do to natural gas what supertanker did to the oil market: a convergence toward a global price (net of shipment cost etc)

not to mention high oil prices of late 70s and early 80s that kept the lifeline to USSR. it could have ended sooner than it did.

This a good article that summarizes Sir John Rose’ legacy at RR. A former banker at the helm of an aerospace firm = you get an aftermarket business turned into annuities to pad and smooth out the earning. https://amp.ft.com/content/6b861958-a56a-11e5-97e1-a754d5d9538c

I think where RR really faltered was their accounting practice where they book earnings on those long term rosy forecast today and reevaluate those assumptions. they had a CEO in the mid-2000 who really pioneered this at RR which really planted seeds of its demise. No different than GE Power. I cannot talk in details of accounting practices of P&W and GE Aviation when it comes to aftermarket (I don’t know them). My guess would be that they stayed away from aggressive accounting. same for Boeing and Airbus. Boeing had a really funny way to account for its development cost (against projected production volume into the future), while Airbus was the more conservative.

Thats a great chart. Watsa the outlier. One big call option that other have less of. - Everybody else is right now until they aren’t. - Watsa the outlier is wrong now until he is right.

Actually. Larry Culp new 2024 product: GE Aviation pure-play stock, will make GE more attractive than SAFRAN from 737/320 exposure point of view (valuation asides)

The other thing, even though SAFRAN is more than just an engine manufacturer, i think with SAFRAN one could have gotten a far more focused play on the massive 737MAX + A320NEO backlog than the General Electric where that CFM/LEAP focus was diluted in a sea of unwanted assets.

Couche-Tard RTX Mercadoliber

I was just suggesting that Ukraine would have been (the eastern portion) as a series protectorates, buffer states, DMZ but no direct annexation (except in Crimea) as a province. So a broken country in a state of perpetual chaos and in-fighting where the Ukrainian identity slowly would have eroded with time. I dont think you need as much Russian troops to occupy a broken state that has splintered into fiefdoms (all vying for Moscow’ blessing) than you would if you were occupying a single identity-nation. but yeah not a democracy, just a series of buffer states