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Posts Tagged ‘berkshire hathaway’

Snce Warren Buffett recently acquired the Omaha-World News for the portfolio of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-A) and mutli-billionaire Carlos Slim increased his holdings of The New York Times Corporation (NYSE: NYT), small cap income investors should look at the stock of a. H. Belo Corporation (NYSE: AHC).a.H. Belo Corporation has a high dividend income for its shareholders of 5.21%.  The average dividend yield for a stock on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index is under 2%.  Neither The New York Times Corporation (NYT) nor Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A) pays a dividend.Many features of the balance sheet of a.H. Belo Corporation are as impressive as its high dividend yield.  The price-to-sales ratio is 0.21.  The price-to-book ratio is 0.54.  The gross magin is over 85%.  there is no debt.  by contrast, The New York Times Corporation (NYT) has a great deal of debt.a.H. Belo Corporation operates four newspapers: The Dallas Morning News, The Providence Journal, The Press Enterprise and The Denton Record Chronicle.  Like so many others in the newspaper business, The great Recession and the rise of the Internet have not been salutary for the share price of AHC or NYT.  for 2011, it is off more than 40%.but there are bullish signs.  over the past month, the stock is up more than 8%.  Insiders are buying a.H. Belo Corporation on the open market.  Uber investor Peter Lynch stated that there are many reasons for insiders to sell a stock (buy home, pay tuition, etc…).  but there is only one reason for an insider to buy: they believe the price will rise.Institutions are also bullish on a.H. Belo: the ownership level is over 70%.  both institutional and insider ownership at a.H. Belo Corporation is rising, which is a very positive sign.

<a href="http://www.smallcapnetwork.com/Warren-Buffett-likes-Newspapers-and-AH-Bello-has-No-Debt-Strong-Balance-Sheet-NYT-BRK-A-AHC/s/via/3420/article/view/p/mid/1/id/499/tag:news.google.com,2005:cluster=http://www.smallcapnetwork.com/Warren-Buffett-likes-Newspapers-and-AH-Bello-has-No-Debt-Strong-Balance-Sheet-NYT-BRK-A-AHC/s/via/3420/article/view/p/mid/1/id/499/Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:06:51 GMT”>Warren Buffett likes Newspapers and AH Bello has No Debt, Strong Balance Sheet (NYT, BRK-A, AHC)

I mean. Warren Buffett is the oracle of Omaha and he is usually very good with prediction..

why don't people invest in companies that Warren invest in? Does he keep it secret or something?

you can buy exactly what he is holding .
There is a mutual funding that holds the exact holdings.

Berkshire a or B

Some do, but you can't duplicate his success by buying his stocks. he also invests in bonds, preferred stocks, whole companies, foreign currency, commodities, etc.

Also, a very important point is that Buffett makes these investment using float (mostly from his insurance operations) which gives him no cost leverage.

Most of his stock holding are made public with Berkshire Hathaway's SEC filings. However there is a time delay.

Why don't people buy stocks that Warren Buffet buys?

NEW YORK (AFP) – Goldman Sachs said Friday it would pay $5.5 billion to repurchase the preferred stock bought by billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway at the height of the 2008 financial crisis.

The Wall Street giant said the US central bank had given a green light to its capital plan for this year.

“The Federal Reserve has concluded that it has no objection to Goldman Sachs’ proposed 2011 capital actions, which include the redemption in full of the 50,000 shares” of the company’s preferred stock owned by Berkshire Hathaway, it said in a statement.

Buffett, known as the “Oracle of Omaha” for his investment savvy, invested $5 billion in Goldman at the height of the financial crisis, signaling confidence in the Wall Street titan.

Goldman pays 10 percent interest on those preferred shares, bringing the buyback to $5.5 billion, and also will pay a one-time dividend of $1.64 billion.

Goldman said the redemption will be made on April 18.

The capital plan includes a “potential” increase in common stock dividend, the firm said.

Buffet, who recently said in an annual letter to shareholders that he was “itchy” for more takeovers, is the third-richest person in the world with net worth of $50 billion, according to the Forbes annual list published last week.

On Monday Berkshire Hathaway said it was buying chemicals group Lubrizol for $9.7 billion.

Source

Goldman to pay $5.5 bn for Buffett stake

I heard that Warren Buffet has some nice return investments for 1000.00 Goodmorning America? I can't find out. any idea's on what this means? Don't have a guy that knows a guy. just poor me. HA

You probably heard about Warren Buffet's company Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

The so-called 'Baby Berk' stock trades under the symbol BRK-B, current market price is around $72 per share.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=brk-b

The original common trades under BRK-A and trades for $107,950 per share.

Warren buffet investments?

I wrote this post right now on http://www.gurufocus.com.

It amazes me how widespread the use of EBITDA has turn out to be. People attempt to dress up economic statements with it.

We won’t get into businesses in which somebody’s speaking about EBITDA. If you look at all firms, and split them into companies that use EBITDA as a metric and people that don’t, I suspect you’ll discover a lot far more fraud in the former group. Look at companies like Wal-Mart, GE and Microsoft — they’ll never use EBITDA in their annual report.

Men and women who use EBITDA are either hoping to con you or they’re conning themselves. Telecoms, for illustration, devote every dime that’s coming in. Curiosity and taxes are real expenses.”

Source: Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting 2002 Tilson Notes

The above quote exhibits that Warren Buffett is not found of utilizing EBITDA as a valuation metric. Buffett has created comparable remarks about EBITDA on other occasions mocking the use of EBITDA.

Numerous huge Buffett fans and worth traders use EBITDA. some of the greatest traders use EBITDA includingDavid Einhorn appear at metrics like EBITDA. Businesses, in their press releases a lot of times like to highlight EBITDA. Offer-Aspect analysts practically constantly venture EBITDA in their designs, and talk about EBITDA in valuing a firm.

Must you go with Warren Buffett or nearly every person else in regards to EBITDA?

The relaxation of the write-up can be discovered here-http://www.gurufocus.com/information.php?id=121085

Investment Strategy Tips- EBITDA: Warren Buffett Versus Everyone Else

I discovered my hero when I was 20 years old. It’s all a bit tragic really. When my mates were talking about Andrew Johns, ‘Plugger’ Lockett, Warnie and Axl Rose, I bit my lip because I knew no one wanted to hear about a retirement-aged Nebraskan investor. after several years of wandering aimlessly through the investing wilderness, discovering value investing was like a club to my head full of ignorance, and joining the Warren Buffett cult changed everything.

Since then, I’ve read every one of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway chairman’s letters, every one of his partnership letters from before that, and every decent book ever written on him. I’ve attended the Berkshire annual meeting in Omaha four times, and I have a book, a dollar bill and a one hundred dollar bill signed by Buffett and partner Charlie Munger. OK, it’s more than a bit tragic.

From Passion Pop to pinot noir

Like many other Buffett fans, after a few years hoovering up everything ever written about him I found another hero – Charlie Munger. A Buffett fan becomes a Mungerophile much like a wine connoisseur progresses from Passion Pop to pinot noir.

Where Buffett offers insightful homespun wisdoms and words of encouragement digestible to all, Munger offers long speeches on The Psychology of Human Misjudgement and A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom. At age 20, I didn’t appreciate pinot noir or Charlie Munger. but with a bit of ageing, I’ve been drawn to the depth, complexity, and lack of sweetness.

Not that I’ve ever given up on Buffett, of course. I knew there was a lot more going on behind that simple façade. As Forbes once wrote: ‘Buffett is not a simple person, but he has simple tastes.’ Unfortunately, though, the world’s yearning for easy answers had it focusing on whatever could be condensed into five golden rules. and Buffett’s compulsion to offer something for everybody effectively stonewalled those wanting more.

That’s why I was so excited by the release of Buffett’s authorised biography, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. Alice Schroeder was a financial analyst who covered Berkshire Hathaway and obviously made a significant impression on him. All previous biographies have been unauthorised and unassisted, but when Schroeder tried to convince Buffett to write an autobiography, he ended up convincing her to write this book.

A simple instruction

He gave her seemingly unfettered access to both himself and his family and friends over a five-year period, with one instruction: ‘Whenever my version is different from somebody else’s, Alice, use the less flattering version.’

The result is extraordinary. As our company pre-ordered many copies of the book, I received a pre-release sample copy and set about trying to be one of the first Aussies to read it cover to cover. I’m sure someone beat me to the punch but, for the record, I was done by the evening of 6 October. The book’s 838 pages and my slow reading turned the event into a 30-hour readathon. but I came away with a very different, more complete picture of my hero. This is a very personal account that attempts to discover why Warren Buffett is who he is.

‘You’d better be picking up snow as you go along, because you’re not going to be getting back up to the top of the hill again. That’s the way life works.’

Warren Buffett.

Not that there isn’t plenty of investment gold in the book. It goes into considerable detail on the key investments he’s made over the decades, and fleshes out those choices in a way that adds something to the thousands of pages already inked on Buffett’s approach to investment. we learn how he turned the first few snowflakes – money earned selling gum at age six – into a giant, ever-growing snowball.

Hoard and compound

Influenced by his Depression-scarred parents, and perhaps his own experience with war-time rationing, Buffett had a burning desire to collect and hoard from an early age. At first it manifested itself in a stamp collection, but pretty soon he switched his attention to cash, realising that wealth tends to increase one’s freedom. Aged 11, he declared that he would be a millionaire by the time he reached 35. in fact he got there by 30, and his many early business ventures make fascinating reading. later in life, of course, he moved on to hoarding companies … and managers … and friends and admirers.

This tendency, combined with a freakish mathematical talent, competitive spirit and single-mindedness, makes Buffett the compounding machine that he is. It enabled him to save $10,000 by the end of high school, and to compound his nest egg at the freakish rate of 61% per year in the first half of the 1950s. It explains how investors in the Buffett Partnership compounded their money at rates of 31% per year from 1956 up until 1969, and that’s after the deduction of Buffett’s hefty profit share. and he then parlayed everything into the snowball that is Berkshire Hathaway.

Tough times

We learn about the tough times in the mid-1970s, when Buffett’s portfolio was down nearly a third. not unlike today, many investors were questioning their very involvement with the stockmarket, but Buffett famously quipped that he ‘felt like an oversexed man in a harem’.

‘The economy is definitely tanking. It’s not my game, but if I had to bet one way or another – everybody else says a recession will be short and shallow, but I would say long and deep.’

Warren Buffett, early 2008.

And the book continues all the way up to the Bear Stearns collapse in March 2008, and offers Buffett’s thoughts on the current credit crisis.

Buffett the ‘implacable acquirer’ – as Munger called him – is a big part of the story. but the real gold in this book is the way it cracks open the man’s personality. Readers of The Snowball, especially those that thought they knew Warren Buffett, are likely to spend a lot of time with jaws dropped. He comes across as rather fragile and very human.

Buffett hero-worshipped his father but had a tremendously strained relationship with his mother, Leila. It turns out she was rather devoid of love for her son and, prompted by Schroeder, we wonder whether this led to his complete reliance on the kindness of other women. to this day, the many women in his life seem to have all slotted into a motherly role.

The strong moral example set by his father, a highly principled Congressman, obviously influenced the man he became. but I found it reassuring to see that, like many of us, in adolescence he came to a fork in the road and nearly took the wrong path. Actually, he started off down that wrong path before turning things around.

In those early teen years he was a nightmare for his teachers, and despite his obviously prodigious talents, he was racking up Cs and Ds in the classroom, even in mathematics. and he led a life of petty crime, filling up his closets with ‘hundreds of golf balls’ stolen from a Sears department store.

A study in contradiction

Buffett is brave and fiercely independent when it comes to financial decisions. and yet we learn that he habitually craves the praise of others and is deeply wounded by criticism. He’s obsessed with weight, putting himself on a 1,000 calorie a day diet in the lead up to the Berkshire annual meeting, yet typically eating nothing but hamburgers, french fries, ice cream and Cherry Coke.

He reads and files away the thousands of letters sent to him by fans across the world, seeking an affirmation he’s unable to find within. Yet we learn about his ‘inner Scorecard’, a wonderful concept at odds with his need for praise: ‘in teaching your kids, I think the lesson they’re learning at a very, very early age is what their parents put the emphasis on. if all the emphasis is on what the world’s going to think about you, forgetting about how you really behave, you’ll wind up with an Outer Scorecard … It helps if you can be satisfied with an inner Scorecard’.

Perceived as a technophobe, by 1994 Buffett had grasped ‘how the internet was going to affect the auto-insurance industry in the coming decades – better than the auto-insurance industry itself had’. while the general public assumed technology was beyond him, he was pushing change within Berkshire’s auto-insurance subsidiary GEICO, proclaiming: ‘He who wins the internet, wins the war’.

Coldly rational

Buffett is able to empathise with the underdog, campaigning for the rights of Jews and African Americans in a segregated America and, more recently, committing his entire wealth to charity, mostly to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help solve difficult problems like AIDS and malaria in the poorest parts of the world.

Yet he struggles to empathise with his own children, viewing them as winners of the ‘ovarian lottery’ and perhaps therefore already spoiled. and while we’re obviously not privy to the full story, I was astounded by his coldly rational approach to his son’s adopted daughters. He hasn’t embraced them as his own granddaughters, despite the issue being very much outside their control.

‘Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.

‘I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. but the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. if you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.’

Warren Buffett.

We learn of his fear of death and illness. When Buffett’s beloved father, Howard, was in hospital dying, his wife made sure he visited regularly, but he struggled to come to terms with it all and was totally unable to grieve after he passed away. we then share a tender moment in 2003–04 when he put that all aside to be there for his wife, Susan, through her illness and eventual death.

Ultimately, this book is about the character of Warren Buffett, flawed and human like the rest of us, and yet able to inspire an urge for greatness and goodness in people who’ve never even met him.

The inside scoop

In 2005 I got the sort of inside scoop others might kill for. My friend and alleged boss Greg Hoffman and I were queuing with perhaps 1,500 other Berkshire shareholders in the ‘international meet and greet’ session at the Berkshire annual meeting. It’s a chance for shareholders who’ve travelled from outside of North America to briefly meet the duo and get some memorabilia autographed.

We aimed to be dead last in the queue, plotting to hog a little more than the necessarily short periods granted to others. in front of us was a young Asian couple:

Buffett (loosely paraphrased from my leaky memory): Howdy, where you from?

Buffett: oh, I’ve been looking at stocks over there; they seem very cheap.

At least a year before the rest of the world, we got a very clear signal that Buffett was looking at and likely buying Korean stocks. over the next week, we thought about how we might do the same. we looked at funds and direct shares, and wondered how we might get our heads around Korean accounting.

After a little work, we decided it was too much like learning a foreign language, and our attention floated off elsewhere despite the fact that we were struggling to find outstanding ideas in the Australian market at the time.

A different approach

We now know that Buffett, already fabulously wealthy, was spending ‘night after night’ thumbing through a Korean stockmarket almanac, and digesting a book on Korean accounting to ‘reduce the odds of getting hornswoggled by the numbers’.

Working through a list of thousands of Korean stocks, he narrowed it down to a shorter list of potential gems and got to know them better. He set up a special account with a bank in Korea, and apparently ‘that’s not easy to do’.

He then put $100m of his own money into a portfolio of about 20 securities. That’s probably the equivalent of a few hundred dollars to you or I, but where we saw difficult hurdles he saw a puzzle to be solved. That’s why he’s Warren Buffett and why we’re not.

Thank you Alice Schroeder for writing this wonderful book, for putting five years work into it and for resisting the urge to sugar coat. honest biographies of living legends are all too rare, and it must take a lot of courage to write one.

And thank you Warren Buffett for encouraging the development of this book and, as Schroeder put it, ‘for not meddling with the book for more than five years – right up until the day it went to the printer’. I could never imagine what it’s like to have my whole life laid bare like that. You’ve inspired a great many to become better, and not just at investing. That’s why you’re my hero, and I look forward to getting my copy of The Snowball signed at next year’s meeting.

Get yourself a free copy of The Snowball

We’ve ordered one of the first shipments of The Snowball. take out a one or two year subscription before 19 December 2008 and we’ll send you a copy of the book for free, infinitely cheaper than the recommended retail price of $49.95. Either click on this link or give us a call on 1800 620 414.

Gareth Brown

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life – Intelligent Investor

It is apparent that the DAD owns shares in Berkshire Hathaway. I would suggest that the reviewer attend the meetings with DAD. I would suggest that the reviewer listen carefully during the 7 hours. I would suggest that the reviewer study the owner’s manual. I would suggest the reviewer highlight the owner’s manual. I would suggest that the reviewer prepare like they would teach from the owner’s manual. I would suggest that the reviewer obtain Alice Shroeder’s detailed analysis from Berkshire Hathaway “Float Based Method”. I would suggest that the reviewer read “The making of an American Captitalist” by Lowenstein. I would suggest that the reviewer bond with the DAD. I would suggest that the reviewer learn daily from the DAD. The DAD is a “wonderful and most relevant” DAD. I have owned Berkshire Hathaway shares since 1983. I have NEVER sold a shares since 2000. My better half and I attend the annual meeting and HAVE TOO MUCH FUN TO HARDLY EXPLAIN IN THIS SHORT REVIEW. I would suggest that I wish your DAD was my DAD. Suggest to your DAD to make his way to Gorat’s at 5 PM on Friday, April 30, 2010 via Ms Lori’s section. it would be FUN to meet DAD.

Reviewer: Longhorn Reviewer

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Longhorn Reviews – [Longhorn Review] The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

He calls his 1964 decision to buy the textile company a $200 billion dollar blunder, sparked by a spiteful urge to retaliate against the CEO who tried to “chisel” Buffett out of an eighth of a point on a tender deal.

Buffett tells the story in response to a question from CNBC’s Becky Quick for a Squawk Box series on the biggest self-admitted mistakes by some of the world’s most successful investors.

COMPLETE CNBC INTERVIEW VIDEO AND TRANSCRIPT

Buffett tells Becky that his holding company (presumably with a different name) would be “worth twice as much as it is now” — another $200 billion — if he had bought a good insurance company instead of dumping so much money into the dying textile business.

Here’s his story, as it appeared this morning in edited form on Squawk Box:

BUFFETT: The— the dumbest stock I ever bought— was— drum roll here— Berkshire Hathaway. And— that may require a bit of explanation. It was early in— 1962, and I was running a small partnership, about seven million. they call it a hedge fund now.

And here was this cheap stock, cheap by working capital standards or so. but it was a stock in a— in a textile company that had been going downhill for years. So it was a huge company originally, and they kept closing one mill after another. and every time they would close a mill, they would— take the proceeds and they would buy in their stock. and I figured they were gonna close, they only had a few mills left, but that they would close another one. I’d buy the stock. I’d tender it to them and make a small profit.

So I started buying the stock. and in 1964, we had quite a bit of stock. and I went back and visited the management, mr. (Seabury) Stanton. and he looked at me and he said, ‘Mr. Buffett. We’ve just sold some mills. We got some excess money. We’re gonna have a tender offer. and at what price will you tender your stock?’

And I said, ‘11.50.’ and he said, ‘Do you promise me that you’ll tender it 11.50?’ and I said, ‘Mr. Stanton, you have my word that if you do it here in the near future, that I will sell my stock to— at 11.50.’ I went back to Omaha. and a few weeks later, I opened the mail—

BECKY: oh, you have this?

BUFFETT: and here it is: a tender offer from Berkshire Hathaway— that’s from 1964. and if you look carefully, you’ll see the price is—

BUFFETT: —11 and three-eighths. He chiseled me for an eighth. and if that letter had come through with 11 and a half, I would have tendered my stock. but this made me mad. So I went out and started buying the stock, and I bought control of the company, and fired mr. Stanton. (LAUGHTER)

Now, that sounds like a great little morality table— tale at this point. but the truth is I had now committed a major amount of money to a terrible business. and Berkshire Hathaway became the base for everything pretty much that I’ve done since. So in 1967, when a good insurance company came along, I bought it for Berkshire Hathaway. I really should— should have bought it for a new entity.

Because Berkshire Hathaway was carrying this anchor, all these textile assets. So initially, it was all textile assets that weren’t any good. and then, gradually, we built more things on to it. but always, we were carrying this anchor. and for 20 years, I fought the textile business before I gave up. as instead of putting that money into the textile business originally, we just started out with the insurance company, Berkshire would be worth twice as much as it is now. So—

BECKY: Twice as much?

BUFFETT: Yeah. this is $200 billion. you can— you can figure that— comes about. Because the genius here thought he could run a textile business. (LAUGHTER)

BECKY: Why $200 billion?

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Warren Buffett: Buying Berkshire Hathaway Was $200 Billion Blunder-Video

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Warren Jobs | Week Ahead: Jobs, Cars and Warren Buffett – FOXBusiness

WILMINGTON, Delaware (Reuters) – Billionaire investor Warren Buffett told his annual meeting that it “blows your mind” how quickly the newspaper industry is losing the fight for readers and advertisers.

Deals

Yet several companies that would collectively form the second-largest U.S. newspaper group, with a daily circulation of around 4 million, are expecting years of rising advertising sales, their main source of revenue.

These publishers, whose papers include the Trentonian in New Jersey and the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, have one other thing in common: They all have been bankrupt.

Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway Inc (BRKa.N)(BRKb.N) owns the Buffalo News and a stake in the Washington Post (WPO.N), told his annual gathering of shareholders earlier this month that the outlook is really tough for newspapers.

But a handful of publishers are hoping that rinsing a combined nearly $2 billion in debt through bankruptcy will give them the capital to reinvest and halt a revenue decline that plagues the industry.

“Yes, the margins and profits of past years will never be repeated, but that doesn’t mean that these businesses can’t make rational sense once the crushing weight of borrowed money is written down in some way,” said Alan Bell, a former chief executive officer of publisher Freedom Communications, which recently came out of bankruptcy.

Many newspaper companies have been able to stay profitable by hacking away at costs. What sets the bankrupt publishers apart is that they forecast stable or even rising ad revenues for years to come, although this would follow declines of 30 percent or more prior to their Chapter 11 filings.

Consider the Journal Register Co, with its circulation of 400,000 by way of 19 dailies, including the New Haven Register. It forecasts ad revenue will rise 8.4 percent over 2010-2013, according to bankruptcy court documents.

Journal Register cut $500 million of its debt in bankruptcy and is now trying to grab readers by giving reporters cameras and blending print and video. It has said it is looking for areas to add editorial staff, a rarity in the industry.

“These companies are trying to come up with new products beyond yesterday’s news in tomorrow’s paper,” said newspaper consultant Alan Mutter. “They get that the business is declining and wasting.”

He pointed to MediaNews Group, which recently introduced a glossy lifestyle magazine to supplement its 54 dailies and their circulation of more than 2 million.

“The fact is, that’s something they could not have done before bankruptcy,” said Mutter.

MediaNews Group’s holding company recently shed $765 million in debt through bankruptcy, and it expects advertising revenues to pick up this year and keep rising through 2013, according to court documents.

The company owns the Detroit News, the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota and the San Jose Mercury News in California. its CEO recently indicated it may use the newfound strength of its balance sheet to snap up weaker rivals.

Other examples include Freedom, which owns the Orange County Register, and the Star Tribune Media Co, which owns the top daily in Minneapolis. both forecast ad revenue to begin rising this year or next, and each scrubbed about $400 million of debt through bankruptcy.

Mutter said that newspaper companies that clear a chunk of their debt gain critical flexibility.

“The people who didn’t cleanse through bankruptcy are running around with big fat rocks in their pockets.”

Bankruptcy also provides shock treatment that can change entrenched interests, said Michael Epstein, a managing partner of turnaround firm CRG Partners.

“It’s like having a mild heart attack,” he said. “How are you going to treat your body after that mild heart attack? are you going to continue to pollute it or begin to take care of it?”

But not everyone agrees with the recently bankrupt publishers’ forecasts.

Brian Tierney, who was CEO of Philadelphia Newspapers LLC when it filed Chapter 11 last year, has said the hedge fund and bank lenders that now own rival publishers have used upbeat forecasts to justify piling debt on the newspapers after they emerge from bankruptcy.

As Buffett has said, that could lead to more financial trouble if it turns out the business is eroding.

Fitch Ratings analyst Mike Simonton said newspaper ad revenue might stabilize this year, in part because of easy comparisons with a very weak 2009. but he doubted cutting debt could free up capital soon enough to halt a long-term decline.

He noted another possible reason for the publishers’ optimism: shaky forecasting.

“These companies typically missed predictions and projections about their revenue going into the downturn,” he said, “and it’s not surprising that many would miss coming out.”

(Additional reporting by Jennifer Saba in New York; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

Newspapers bet on revenue driver: bankruptcy