How the Lab Leak Theory Could Strain U.S.-China Relations

A 1 percent tax on stock repurchases was included in the Inflation Reduction Act passed last summer, and was meant to deter the practice; still, it did little to stop Apple, Exxon Mobil and scores of other businesses from continuing to use them. Earlier this month, President Biden called on the tax to be quadrupled in his State of the Union address.

But Mr. Buffett offered a ringing defense. Buybacks — which he explained, in Buffett-esque fashion, by talking about a hypothetical local car dealership — benefit all investors, he said. For ongoing Berkshire investors, buybacks mean their interest in the company’s various businesses goes up. (Berkshire itself didn’t spend that much on buybacks, relatively speaking: it paid about $7.9 billion for 1.2 percent of its outstanding stock.)

Similarly, buybacks at Apple and American Express gave Berkshire shareholders more exposure to those businesses without having to spend a dime.

Then Mr. Buffett got punchy, writing:

When you are told that all repurchases are harmful to shareholders or to the country, or particularly beneficial to C.E.O.s, you are listening to either an economic illiterate or a silver-tongued demagogue (characters that are not mutually exclusive).

“I hate to quote him at all, but I do so to dissuade responses that this is a ‘cancel culture’ decision.”

— Chris Quinn, editor of The Cleveland Plain Dealer, on the paper’s decision to stop publishing the “Dilbert” comic strip after its creator, Scott Adams, made a series of racist comments on YouTube last week. Hundreds of other newspapers around the country have also dropped the strip.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/business/energy-department-theory-coronavirus-china.html