Warren Buffet was a guest on Squawk Box this morning. You know things are bad when the Oracle graces CNBC at 6AM for two hours. Buffet seemed pretty dire about the whole situation with the markets in the U.S. He had one parable that summed up the overall American situation.
Well, in the end we have an enormous amount of assets in this country, which the world is willing to take. I mean, Indonesia or Thailand couldn’t do this because they couldn’t issue–they couldn’t issue debt in their own currency and have people keep accepting it. But we–we’re like a country that has a farm the size of Texas, or we’re a family farm the size of Texas, and it beings all kinds of goods and services to us, but we want to consume 5 or 6 percent more than the farm produces, so we sell off a little bit of the farm every day or we mortgage a little bit of the farm every day. And we can’t even see it because the farm is so big, and that we can–we can give a little mortgage and nobody notices, put an IOU on it. Or we can sell a little bit of it like when the sovereign wealth funds come in and we don’t even hardly see it. But over time, it’s like eating an extra 100 calories at every meal. I mean, you don’t sit down at the table and then get up and everybody says, `My god, you’re fat.’ But if you keep doing it over time pretty soon they’ll say, `My god, he’s gotten fat.’
You hate to ever discount anything Buffet has to say. He knows far more than me. However, it does seem to me that as the dollar weakens we should see our exports grow rapidly. Buffet made mention of this and says the exports are not growing as they theoretically should. You can read the transcript of Buffet’s interview over at CNBC.
The Thoroughbred Folio took a large lashing over the last week. We did receive a dividend from Roh & Haas for $0.50. Of course, that $0.50 ain’t what is used to be. Nevertheless, we trudge on under the weight of a declining U.S. market.
There was no change at the top this week as Synovus, Nucor, and VF Corp continue to lead the pack. But wait a minute, there is a new thoroughbred in last place. Gannet has stumbled and now Total System Services can hold its head just a bit higher as it moves into second-to-last. Consolidated Edison rounds out the bottom three.
Thoroughbred Performance (Week 11 of 52): $186.59 (-6.22%)
Dividends To Date: $7.45
Top 3 Stocks
- Nucor Corp $9.48 (+12.64%)
- Synovus Financial $3.44 (+10.16%)
- VF Corp $6.53 (+8.71%)
Bottom 3 Stocks
- Gannett $12.55 (-16.73%)
- Total System Services $6.73 (-16.34%)
- Consolidated Edison $12.01 (-16.01%)
Stocks used in this post:
- (ED: 40.63, -1.05%, Yield: 5.69%)
- (GCI: 13.18, +3.29%, Yield: 12.54%)
- (NUE: 34.29, -12.73%, Yield: 5.52%)
- (ROH: 70.75, +0.88%, Yield: 2.22%)
- (SNV: 9.81, +10.10%, Yield: 159.52%)
- (TSS: 14.73, +0.82%, Yield: 22.66%)
- (VFC: 59.02, -5.58%, Yield: 3.71%)
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