Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett.
Andrew Harnik | AP
Warren Buffett’s loyal following of value investors is about to hear from the legend himself, at a crucial time when interest rates have soared and recession fears are raging.
The 92-year-old chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway is slated to release his annual shareholder letter Saturday morning, along with the conglomerate’s latest quarterly earnings. The letter from the “Oracle of Omaha” has been required reading for investors for decades, and this year’s message is particularly anticipated given the changing investing landscape.
Notably, there’s been a sea change in Treasury yields, which have surged to the highest level since the Global Financial Crisis amid the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate hikes. Six-month and one-year yields have both surpassed 5% for the first time since 2007, while the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield sits just below 4%. After more than a decade of near zero interest rates, the sharp rise in yields could dent the appeal for equities and hurt asset prices, Buffett said previously.
“Interest rates are to asset prices, you know, sort of like gravity is to the apple,” Buffett famously said at Berkshire’s annual meeting in 2013. He believed that when interest rates are high, it could be a major “gravitational pull” on values.
“We have a roughly 15-year period of abnormally and historically low interest rates. The short term rates we have now are more normal,” said David Kass, a finance professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. “Interest rates are the main determinant of equity prices, to quote Buffett, so I think I’m looking for and expecting a discussion on interest rates.”
Perhaps that explained why Berkshire was likely a net seller of stocks in the fourth quarter. The conglomerate dumped a significant portion of Taiwan Semiconductor, a chip stock it had just bought in the third quarter….
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