Jim,
With great respect, I’ll take Buffett’s judgment of the GRN acquisition over yours. Exchanging over 20% of Berkshire for a commodity insurance company was a mistake. And the mistake compounded over the years as Berkshire grew and GRN did not.
I argued GRN as being a mistake with Greg Defelice on this board a few short years after it happened. If Buffett wanted to acquire more assets to use as investments he could simply have issued overpriced stock to the market. That would have avoided a lot of grief.
It’s not a hindsight argument. The later facts just demonstrate that you don’t exchange good assets for no growth ones. The cash and fixed income didn’t go down starting from the acquisition’s close.
The big mistake was to not buy back the good assets when they were cheap. Buffett even talked about doing so in 2000.
I’ll leave it at that. Gen Re isn’t even remotely worth the stock that was issued to buy it. Berkshire shareholders are worse off for Buffett having done so.
I stand by my position.