Davis: Berkshire's charity program made its shares difficult to borrow and short
Christopher Davis · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · Mar 5, 2024 · at 1:24:05
Christopher Davis explains how Berkshire Hathaway's historic shareholder giving program created a structural scarcity of registered borrowable shares for short sellers.
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“Berkshire for many, many years had a charity program where if you owned a share of Berkshire each year, you were given a dollar amount per share that you could assign to any charity of your choice... But In order to be able to do that, you had to own the shares in your own name, right? It had to say your name on the stock certificate. So very little few shares were held in street name. And because there were very few shares in street name, if you wanted to short Berkshire Hathaway, it was really hard to find any shares to borrow.”
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