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Comment by hackaflocka | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't Warren Buffett own a large percentage of BOA? This is the Buffett strategy, use the public sphere to allow private entities to acquire monopoly power. He did this with his opposition to the Keystone Pipeline so that his trains would benefit from the need to move oil in that corridor.

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Buffett owns about a quarter of Berkshire Hathaway, which owns warrants to purchase about a 10% stake in Bank of America at a deep discount to the current price. Berkshire does not currently have voting rights because the warrants haven't been exercised. That's not to say Buffett can't or doesn't influence Bank of America, but it is much more of distant relationship than, for example, the dozens of operating companies whose CEOs report to Buffett. It seems a stretch to imagine him involved at this level at all.

Doesn't Warren own more parts in other banks? So is he like controlling banks?

Control is a magic word and requires certain minimum percentages of shares to be held.

Yes but then there is that percentage 8 to 10% he owns in large banks which means he will have say in what banks do atleast unofficially.

Berkshire, which Buffett manages and effectively controls, owns insurance companies and a mortgage lender outright. Berkshire also has stakes in publicly traded banks including US Bank, Wells Fargo, and American Express (they converted into a deposit-taking bank company in the wake of the financial crisis). Then there's Bank of America, in which Berkshire has warrants to buy a stake < 10%, but they likely won't be exercised until they're about to expire.

Beyond this, managers and policy makers listen when Buffett talks/writes; an outcome of his 50-year track record in investing and managing at Berkshire. I personally don't think there's anything sinister going on.

You can get a really good overview of Berkshire as a company, including its operating companies, investment philosophy, and current investment holdings from the annual letters that Buffett writes: http://berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html

If you want to see exactly what securities Berkshire owns, you can look up the 13F filings on http://edgar.sec.gov

I've been thinking recently that powerful people treating the real world like a game is possibly one of the most destructive forces in society.

It depends entirely what their end goal is.

To make money with no regards to anything else? Yes, they are dangerous to the human race and should be treated as the absolute worst terrorists possible.

However, if their end goal is to actually leave the world a better place than when it was when they were born, and it just happens it takes being one of the richest people ever to do that? More power to them, and I hope they succeed.

Not all rich and powerful people are assholes, some just want to make the world less shitty, and some actually succeed at it.

By "treat like a game" I mean, play to win, with winning defined as beating the other guy.

I arrived at this line of though when I started wondering why would the head decision makers of (for example) trafigura decide to horribly pollute the Ivory coast just so they can squeeze out a bit of extra profit, when they are all already super-rich. You can only enjoy so many yachts and so on. I arrived at the conclusion that their motivation is not to get more money per se, its to beat the other guys.

ps. Above is just the product of my idle musings. One thing that is very interesting and related and certainly worth mentioning is one of the elements of Jared Diamonds framework for societal collapse: Decision makers being insulated from the negative consequences of their decisions.

duh power > money

It's not the game that's the problem, it's their objectives: to gain as much power as possible.

> so that his trains would be the only option to move oil in that corridor.

Not sure how true this is. There are other options, including the using the Canadian Pacific Railway, which also operates in that corridor.

We can never be "sure" of these things, but here's an article that provides some background to my claim: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/03/08/obama-did-w...

Here is another fool.com article suggesting other Canadian railroads that can also transport the oil (and are doing so). Including your own article, there is hardly a hint of monopoly.

http://www.fool.ca/2015/09/04/will-a-keystone-rejection-bene...

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