US, CHINA WILL NOT BE AT ODDS ON TRADE, SAYS BUFFETT
Billionaire Warren Buffett on Saturday said it was not likely that the US and China would come to loggerheads on trade, saying the two countries would avoid doing “something extremely foolish”. “The United States and China are going to be the two super-powers of the world, economically and in other ways, for a long, long, long time,” Buffett said at Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Omaha, Nebraska.
“We have a lot of common interests and like any two big economic entities, there are times when they’ll be tensions, but it is a win-win situation when the world trades,” Buffett said. “We will have disagreements with each other (both Democrats and Republicans) and we’ll have disagreements with other countries on trade,”he said about a trade war. “It is just too big and too obvious for that the benefits are huge and the world is dependent on it in a major way for its progress that two intelligent countries will do something extremely foolish,”he said. “We both (US and China) may do things that are mildly foolish from time to time. There is some give and take.”
The Trump administration has drawn a hard line in trade talks with China, demanding a $200-billion cut in the Chinese trade surplus with the US, sharply lower tariffs and advanced technology subsidies, people familiar with the talks said on Friday. Buffett, 87, and his longtime partner and fellow billionaire Charlie Munger, 94, are leading Berkshire’s annual meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, where they are fielding five hours of questions from shareholders, journalists and analysts.
Buffett defended Wells Fargo & Co and its chief executive, Tim Sloan, in response to a question asking when Berkshire would ditch the bank, one of its largest common stock holdings. Many shareholders in the audience applauded the question.
“Wells Fargo is a company that proved the efficacy of incentives, and it’s just that they just had the wrong incentives,” said Buffett. He said, the company is not "inferior" as investment or from a moral standpoint "to the other big banks with which it competes.” Berkshire owns $25.2 billion of Wells Fargo stock as of March 31, down from $29.3 billion three months earlier. Wells Fargo investors last week gave strong backing to the bank's directors and executives on Tuesday, indicating they are ready to give its revamped leadership time to rebuild from scandals that included its employees opening potentially millions of sham accounts.