BUFFETT SPEAKS: Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett attends the Fortune Most Powerful Women summit at Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Time Inc.)Warren Buffett’s investment company, Berkshire Hathaway, reported a 58 percent drop in first quarter earnings, mostly due to the company’s insurance costs after Japan’s magnitude 9.0 earthquake in March.
The Omaha, Neb.-based company reported first quarter profits of $1.51 billion, far less than the $3.6 billion reported in the same quarter last year. Losses related to natural disasters totaled $1.6 billion due to the recent earthquake in Japan and New Zealand, which has hurt insurance companies and reinsurers.
The company’s Class-A shares gained 3.6 percent year-to-date as of last Friday.
Tens of thousands of Berkshire shareholders descended upon Omaha this past weekend to annual the company’s annual meeting—and Buffett took the opportunity to express his bullish optimism on the U.S. economy.
“We had some major catastrophes in the Pacific Asian areas, and that hit the reinsurance industry particularly hard,” Buffett said at Berkshire’s annual meeting on Sunday. Buffett, known as the “Oracle of Omaha,” is one of the world’s richest and most famous investors.
Buffett believes that the U.S. Congress would raise the debt ceiling and avoid the catastrophic consequences of delaying. Not raising it would be the “most asinine act Congress has ever performed,” Buffett shared in an interview with the Omaha World-Herald. “The amount and number of silly statements you hear seems like such a waste of time. In my view, there’s no chance they don’t increase the debt ceiling.”
At the investors conference, Buffett shared that the recent debt watch and warning on the U.S. credit rating by Standard & Poor’s was premature, as the country could simply replay its obligations by printing more money.
