Deals wrap: A successor for Buffett?
A fairly unheralded 44-year-old Chinese-American hedge fund manager, with a strong background as a human rights activist, has become a leading candidate to replace Warren Buffett, should he retire as founder and CEO of the $100-billion Berkshire Hathaway fund, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Li Lu, who was a student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, is the first person to be identified to potentially replace the soon to be 80-year-old Buffett, in what the WSJ story said is “among the most high-profile succession stories in modern corporate history.”
Buffett told the WSJ his retirement plans are not imminent and his job would likely be split after he leaves the company into separate CEO and investing functions. The WSJ story revealed David Sokol, the current chairman of Berkshire unit MidAmerican Energy Holdings, is considered the top contender for Buffett’s CEO role, while Li would potentially serve as one of Berkshire’s top fund managers.
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Recently Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told ABC News’s Diane Sawyer he would only consider an IPO “when it makes sense,” but now Bloomberg, “citing three people familiar with the matter,” reports that may not be until 2012.
The postponement would give Zuckerberg more time to increase users – Facebook just surpassed the 500 million mark – and boost sales which could double to at least $1.4 billion in 2010, according to the sources quoted by Bloomberg.
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The rising and falling default rate
Rating agencies Moody’s and S&P regularly publish figures on how many companies have defaulted on their debt, and the numbers are rising fast.
S&P’s latest report, which came out on Thursday, shows the global speculative-grade bond default rate increased to 8.58% in July, up slightly on June, and a massive hike on the record low of 0.79% hit in November 2007.
It is less clear what will happen next. Earlier this year the agencies predicted defaults amongst speculative grade borrowers could reach 20 percent — a huge increase — but now agencies have rowed back and are painting a slightly less bleak picture.
S&P’s new report says the number of “weakest links” — companies with low (B- or worse) ratings on review for a downgrade or with a negative outlook — has declined. This, the agency says, is because the increased number of defaults has knocked out many of these weak credits.
A sliver of silver lining around this grey cloud is that the rate of companies falling into weakest-link territory is lower than the number of companies defaulting, which may suggest the default rate may ease sooner rather than later.
The reopening of the credit markets, and banks’ determination not to write off debts, seems to have slowed the pace of defaults. However, talk of double-dip recessions may mean rating agencies’ earlier, bleaker predictions may end up being proved correct, just over a longer time frame.
Whichever way it finishes, little of this will help rating agencies’ reputation for making accurate predictions.
