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Warren Buffett’s company has agreed to trade roughly $1.4 billion of its stock in Phillips 66 for one of the refiner's chemical businesses. Houston-based Phillips 66 said Monday that Berkshire Hathaway will give up about 19 million of its 27.2 million Phillips 66 shares to acquire a business that makes additives that help crude oil flow through pipelines. …

H.J. Heinz Co. is closing three plants in North America and cutting 1,350 jobs in an effort to operate more efficiently. The food maker said Thursday that it will close facilities in two states and Canada over the next six to eight months. The cuts total 200 jobs in Florence, S.C., 410 jobs in Pocatello, Idaho and 740 employees in Leamington, Ontario, in Canada. …

McDonald’s has lost its taste for Heinz ketchup. The fast-food giant said in a statement Friday that it is cutting ties with the condiment company after 40 years due to management changes there. A former Burger King CEO became head of Heinz in June after the company was bought by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital. 3G, a Brazilian investment firm, also controls Burger King. The impact of the change may be tasted more overseas. In the U.S., McDonald’s uses Heinz products only in Pittsburgh and Minneapolis restaurants. …

Investor Warren Buffett says he didn’t buy the Washington Post because he didn't want it to be a burden on his company or family. His Berkshire Hathaway Inc. conglomerate has purchased dozens of other newspapers since 2011. And Berkshire was the largest Washington Post Co. shareholder before the newspaper was sold to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for $250 million. But Buffett told Fortune magazine he only briefly considered buying the Post because he didn’t want to saddle Berkshire’s next CEO or his children with a metro newspaper. …

Brazilian private-equity firm 3G Capital is sliding the chief executive of Burger King Worldwide Inc. (BKW), which it currently controls, into the same role at H.J. Heinz Co. (HNZ) once 3G and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRKA, BRKB) complete their $23 billion buyout of the ketchup maker. Bernardo Hees will replace Heinz CEO William Johnson, who has led the ketchup-maker for 15 years and turned it into more of a global food company by selling ketchup and other Heinz's products all across the world. 3G and Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway in February teamed up to buy Heinz for $72.50 a share...

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is dipping into the ketchup business as part of $23.3 billion deal to buy the Heinz ketchup company. H.J. Heinz Co. says it’s the largest deal ever in the food industry. The company, based in Pittsburgh, also makes Classico spaghetti sauces, Ore-Ida potatoes and Smart Ones frozen meals. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and its partner on the deal—3G Capital, the investment firm that bought Burger King in 2010—say Heinz will remain headquartered in Pittsburgh. Heinz CEO William Johnson said in a statement that the company “will have an opportunity to drive further growth” as a private enterprise....

(Reuters) - Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and private equity firm 3G Capital will buy ketchup and baby food maker H.J. Heinz Co for $23.2 billion in cash, a deal that combines 3G's ambitions in the food industry with Buffett's hunt for growth. Including debt assumption, Heinz valued the transaction, which it called the largest in its industry's history, at $28 billion. Berkshire and 3G will pay $72.50 per share, a 19 percent premium to the stock's previous all-time high.

Now, this is awkward. One agency of the federal government is suing a company for fraud while another agency continues to endorse it. On Monday in Los Angeles, the Department of Justice sued Standard & Poor's and its parent McGraw-Hill MHP -0.25% for $5 billion. The claim is that S&P committed civil fraud when it issued high credit ratings on mortgage-related securities prior to the financial crisis of 2008. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have piled on the suit. No doubt investors who relied on the opinions of S&P and the other big credit-rating agencies, Moody's and Fitch,...

Warren Buffett's company has sold two short-line railroads it recently discovered it owned to satisfy regulators who might have reviewed Berkshire Hathaway's 2010 acquisition of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad. Berkshire told the Transportation Department's Surface Transportation Board earlier this month that it had completed the sale of both short-line railroads ahead of schedule. If Berkshire had reported owning those railroads when it bought BNSF, the Surface Transportation Board would have had to scrutinize the deal. Berkshire first disclosed owning the railroads to the Surface Transportation Board in September. (snip)

A decision by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. BRKB -0.15% to end a large wager on the municipal-bond market is deepening questions from some investors about the risks of buying debt issued by cities, states and other public entities. The Omaha, Neb., company recently terminated credit-default swaps insuring $8.25 billion of municipal debt. The termination, disclosed in a quarterly filing with regulators this month, ended five years early a bullish bet that Mr. Buffett made before the financial crisis that more than a dozen U.S. states would keep paying their bills on time, according to a person familiar with the...

On September 24, 2008, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A), (BRK.B) and Goldman Sachs (GS) entered into an agreement in which Berkshire Hathaway purchased $5 billion of Goldman’s preferred shares paying a 10% dividend. Berkshire also received warrants granting it the right to buy $5 billion of Goldman Sachs common stock at $115 per share (or 43.5 million shares) through October 1, 2013. Goldman Sachs called the preferred stock for redemption on April 18, 2011 at a premium of 10% over par value, plus accrued and unpaid dividends. As a result, Berkshire Hathaway earned approximately $1.75 billion ($1.25 billion in dividends plus a...

Warren Buffet came, he saw BRK/A trading at $99,000, he took a bath, and decided that this aggression against BRK/A will not stand, man. As a result, after taking a metaphorical bath on BAC, the Octogenarian has just decided to launch a share repurchase program in the company with the massive short S&P put, because "In the opinion of our Board and management, the underlying businesses of Berkshire are worth considerably more than this amount, though any such estimate is necessarily imprecise." In other words, Buffett is slowing starting to realize that he has to put up or shut up,...

C’mon, IRS. “Stop coddling the super rich.” Contrive to successfully extract the taxes they already owe.Mr. Buffett, I barely want to waste my breath on your blatant hypocrisy.And, Mainstream Media (by which I mean the NYT, which ran Buffett’s obnoxious op-ed in the first place), WHERE ARE YOU?From NewsMax: Billionaire investor Warren Buffett triggered a major debate over taxes recently when he wrote in The New York Times that he should be paying more to the federal government. He called on Washington lawmakers to up tax rates on the rich.But it turns out that Buffett’s own company, Berkshire Hathaway, has...

Warren 'Raise My Taxes' Buffett's Company May Owe IRS $1 Billion By Noel Sheppard Created 08/30/2011 - 5:29pm As NewsBusters reported Monday, American media almost completely ignored a report that Warren "Raise My Taxes" Buffett's company Berkshire Hathaway has been fighting with the IRS for almost a decade over taxes it owes. On Tuesday, the organization digging into Berkshire Hathaway's numbers, Americans for Limited Government, estimated the total could be as much as $1 billion: Using only publicly-available documents, a certified public accountant (CPA) detailed Berkshire Hathaway’s tax problems to ALG researcher Richard McCarty. Now, the American people have a...

Warren Buffett has swooped in to save the day, this time for Bank of America. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. agreed to invest $5 billion in Bank of America Corp. to help assure investors that the company will not go under. What's with all the recent do gooder deeds? Is this guy considering a run for president in 2012? Probably not. By investing and "bolstering confidence" in Bank of America, Buffett will be rewarded with a handsome $300 million annually. Maybe he can use some of that to donate to his "the rich deserve to be taxed" cause.Already stocks have...

Buffett's Berkshire has agreed to buy 50,000 preferred shares of Bank of America for $5 billion. That means he's paying $100,000 per share. He also has options to buy 700 million. That's 7% dilution for shareholders. Buffett says it's not just a vote of confidence in Bank of America, but in the U.S., according to Becky Quick on CNBC. It's a better deal for Bank of America than Buffett gave to Goldman Sachs in some ways, he says. And get this - he dreamt up the idea to invest in Bank of America yesterday - in the bathtub. Bank of...

The surprise announcement yesterday that NetJets Chairman David Sokol had resigned from Berkshire Hathaway under a cloud of insider trading suspicion produced smiles of satisfaction among many general aviation leaders. When the word of Sokol’s sudden exit spread during a dinner at the Sun ‘n Fun airshow in Lakeland, Fla., last night, one general aviation manufacturing CEO said, “There’s celebrating going on in Wichita and Savannah today.” Sokol cancelled orders for hundreds of business jets built by Cessna and Hawker Beechcraft, both based in Wichita, Kan., and Gulfstream, which is headquartered in Savannah, Ga. He said he did so to...

In a very surprise move, a longtime lieutenant of Warren Buffett, David Sokol, resigned from his position at Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. Sokol had been considered a possible successor for Buffett’s post as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett also dropped a bombshell in a letter about Sokol: he said Sokol had purchased shares of Lubrizol, a specialty chemicals company which Berkshire announced it is buying, before Sokol convinced Buffett on the merits of the deal.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has agreed to pay $9bn (£5.6bn) in cash for US chemicals maker Lubrizol, making good on a pledge that he was on the hunt for big acquisitions. Mr Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway company offered $135 a share for Lubrizol, which is based in Ohio but has factories in almost 20 countries. The company expanded into Britain in the 1930s in its first venture outside the US. The deal follows Mr Buffett's near-$30bn acquisition in late 2009 of Burlington Northern Santa Fe, one of America's biggest railroad companies. The decision also underlines the billionaire's appetite for buying American...

To Warren From The Taxpayers: Eat #@/t You JackassKarl DenningerSeptember 24, 2020 As if Munger's hubris wasn't enough, now we have this: “Sentiment has turned very sour in the last three or four or five months,” the chairman and CEO of Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc. said in an interview broadcast Thursday. “I hope we get over it pretty soon, because it’s not productive,’’ Buffett said. “We will come back regardless of how people feel about Washington, but it is not helpful to have people as unhappy as they are about what’s going on in Washington.” Your businesses stole literal trillions...