Omaha

I attended Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting and wrote about it for The New York Times Op-Ed page: THE Berkshire Hathaway Corporation held its annual shareholders meeting here last weekend, drawing a record 27,000 capitalist faithful from all over the world to worship at the Qwest Center in downtown Omaha. Onstage, the chairman and investor in chief Warren Buffett and his partner and vice chairman, Charles Munger, once again entertained the well-washed and well-heeled masses and educated them in the doctrine of value investing. And what’s not to worship? Berkshire shareholders gained $16.9 billion in net worth last year alone, an 18.4 percent increase in per share book value. Even more fun, the guy in charge, despite being the second-wealthiest man in the world, is a prize ham who loves to play his ukulele, show a video of himself “winning” a rigged one-on-one game against LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and then kick off the shareholder meeting by sending the singer Jimmy Buffett onstage to pretend he is a distant cousin who believes “that blood is thicker than water” and therefore he — the Margaritaville Man — should be Mr. Buffett’s successor. Succession was much discussed at both Saturday’s shareholder […]

The fourth installment of The New York Times Home Economics series: Sweet Home Omaha – New York Times, by Richard Dooling. “HOUSING prices are falling on both coasts, and bubble panic is around the corner. The financial magazines are already grabbing their readers by the throat and taunting them with headlines like: “U.S. Housing Crash Continues!” “Where Will Housing Prices Fall the Most?” “Is It Time to Cash Out?” “What if it is time to cash out? Where do you go? If you sell on either coast, then you need to find real estate somewhere that the housing bubble missed. Guam? American Samoa? Wait, how about eastern Nebraska? Downright frothless when it comes to housing: the median home price here usually chugs along at the annual rate of inflation and never goes down (up 4 percent last year, up 22 percent over the last five years). . . [more] Or listen to NPR: Talk Of The Nation.

The third Economic Postcard from Omaha: “Immigration Beefs Up Nebraska,” by Richard Dooling is at the New York Times site, with links to the first two dispatches in the series. “Unemployment’s down, inflation’s up and consumer confidence blows with the wind. Just how are Americans actually doing? Last fall, the Op-Ed page asked writers to provide snapshots of their local economies over the course of the year. Here is their third round of dispatches.” More at NYTimes: Immigration Beefs Up Nebraska

For all of today’s up-to-the-second economic analysis, how are Americans actually doing? The New York Times Op-Ed page asked writers to provide snapshots of their local economies over the course of the year. Here is Richard Dooling’s second dispatch on the state of the economy in Nebraska: Nebraska’s Nostalgia Trap. I’ll be doing two more columns for the New York Times on the Nebraska economy in 2006, so leave any ideas, suggestions, or commentary here. Thank you, Richard Dooling