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Berkshire Hathaway’s cash pile swelled to a record $189bn in the first quarter of 2024 as Warren Buffett’s sprawling conglomerate continued to dump stocks, including Apple, one of its largest positions.

The figure underscores the difficulty the billionaire investor and his team have had in trying to find worthwhile investments, as well as the relative allure of the high yield on US government debt.

The company on Saturday disclosed it had sold just under $20bn-worth of stocks in the first three months of the year, buying $2.7bn over the same period. As a result the value of its stock portfolio slipped to $336bn, from $354bn at year-end.

The filing with US securities regulators indicated that Berkshire had sold a significant portion of its stake in Apple, which had become a core holding for the Omaha-based business since one of Buffett’s deputies first invested in 2016.

The company said its position in the iPhone maker was worth $135.4bn in the first quarter, down from $174.3bn at the end of 2023, suggesting it had sold more than 100mn shares in the company at the start of the year. Berkshire started to pare its holdings in Apple in late December, selling roughly 10mn shares.

Buffett has long heaped praise on Apple’s management team and in 2022 he described the company as one of Berkshire’s “four giants”, alongside its insurance operations, the BNSF railroad and its energy and utility business Berkshire Hathaway Energy.

Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, told CNBC that Buffett had told him about the stock sales on Friday. Cook added that it was still “a privilege to have Berkshire as a shareholder”.

The figures come as Berkshire shareholders gather in Omaha, Nebraska, for the company’s annual meeting, dubbed the Woodstock of capitalism. It is the first time Buffett will take to the stage since his longtime business partner Charlie Munger died in November.

Berkshire reported solid earnings in the first quarter, driven almost entirely by improvements in its insurance businesses as well as a boost from higher interest rates. Operating profits across the company jumped 39 per cent from the year before to $11.2bn.

The company disclosed that its auto insurer Geico had passed along higher rates to customers and had suffered fewer claims, lifting its results. The unit has scaled back its footprint since the pandemic after it suffered a period of losses.

Auto insurers across the US had struggled with the high replacement costs of new cars, exacerbated by supply chain issues and surging inflation.

Geico, which is led by one of Buffett’s top investment deputies, cut millions of policies in a drive to return to profitability. The move has been successful. Pre-tax profits at Geico more than doubled from a year ago to $1.93bn. The unit also signalled its retrenchment could be near its end, saying that “the rate of decline” had slowed and it was winning new business.

The company has also benefited from the US Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates in a bid to quell inflationary pressures. Berkshire said it earned $1.9bn in the quarter in interest income from its cash pile, which is largely invested in short-term Treasuries.

Over the past year, it has earned almost $7bn on that portfolio.

Overall, Berkshire said it generated a net profit of $12.7bn in the first quarter, down 64 per cent from $35.5bn a year earlier.

Buffett has long discouraged his shareholders from relying on the company’s net income figures — calling them “meaningless” — as they are affected by swings in value of its stock portfolio from quarter to quarter. It can result in huge losses or profits that do not reflect the underlying business performance.

Berkshire’s results are typically pored over by investors, given the company employs nearly 400,000 people and touches almost every part of the US economy. The results were generally upbeat and pointed to an improving US outlook.

Sales at Precision Castparts, an aeroplane parts manufacturer that supplies Boeing, jumped 10 per cent to $2.5bn. Sales at Berkshire’s home building group, which includes the modular home builder Clayton Homes and roofing maker Johns Manville, also rose.

The BNSF railroad’s revenues fell 4.1 per cent, almost entirely driven by lower shipments of coal. The unit, which has more than 32,000 miles of track criss-crossing the US, said it had shipped more consumer and agriculture products than previously.

Shares of Berkshire have climbed 11 per cent this year, outpacing the 8 per cent total return of the S&P 500. Berkshire has not paid a dividend since the 1960s.

ATLANTA (AP) — It was Election Day last November, and one of Georgia’s top election officials saw that reports of a voting machine problem in an eastern Pennsylvania county were gaining traction online.

So Gabriel Sterling, a Republican who had defended the 2020 election in Georgia amid an onslaught of threats, posted a message to his nearly 71,000 followers on the social platform X explaining what had happened and saying that all votes would be counted correctly.

He faced immediate criticism from one commenter about why he was weighing in on another state’s election while other responses reiterated false claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

“It’s still the right thing to do,” Sterling told a gathering the following day, stressing the importance of Republican officials speaking up to defend elections. “We have to be prepared to say over and over again — other states are doing it different than us, but they are not cheating.”

Sterling, the chief operating officer for the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, is part of an effort begun after the last presidential election that seeks to bring together Republican officials who are willing to defend the country’s election systems and the people who run them. They want officials to reinforce the message that elections are secure and accurate, an approach they say is especially important as the country heads toward another divisive presidential contest.

The group has held meetings in several states, with more planned before the Nov. 5 election.

With six months to go before the likely rematch between Democratic President Joe Biden and former Republican President Donald Trump, concerns are running high among election officials that public distrust of voting and ballot counting persists, particularly among Republicans. Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, continues to sow doubts about the last presidential election and is warning his followers — without citing any evidence — that Democrats will try to cheat in the upcoming one.

This past week, during a campaign rally in Michigan, Trump repeated his false claim that Democrats rigged the 2020 election. “But we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election,” he said.

Just 22% of Republicans expressed high confidence that votes will be counted accurately in November, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll last year.

“It’s an obligation on Republicans’ part to stand up for the defense of our system because our party — there’s some blame for where we stand right now,” said Kentucky’s secretary of state, Michael Adams, who is part of the group and won reelection last year. “But it’s also strategically wise for Republicans to say, ‘Hey Republicans, you can trust this. Don’t stay at home.’”

The effort, which began about 18 months ago, is coordinated by the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the center-right think tank R Street Institute. The goal has been to start conversations about trust in elections, primarily among conservative officials, and to develop a set of principles to accomplish that.

“This has never been and will never be about Trump specifically,” said Matt Germer, director of governance for the R Street Institute and a lead organizer of the effort. “It’s about democratic principles at a higher level –- what does it mean to be a conservative who believes in democracy, the rule of law?”

He said an aim is to have a structure in place to support election officials who might find themselves in situations like that of Georgia’ secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger in 2020, when he supported Trump but rejected false claims that the election was stolen. Prosecutors in Georgia have since charged Trump and others, alleging a plot to overturn the results. Trump has pleaded not guilty.

“You can be a Republican and you can believe in all the Republican ideas without having to say the election was stolen,” Germer said.

A guiding principle for the group is that Republican officials should “publicly affirm the security and integrity of elections across the U.S. and avoid actively fueling doubt about elections in other jurisdictions.”

Kim Wyman, a Republican who previously served as Washington state’s top election official, said it’s imperative when officials are confronted with questions about an election somewhere else that they don’t avoid the question by promoting election procedures in their own state.

It’s OK to say you don’t know the various laws and procedures in another state, Wyman said, but she urged fellow Republicans to emphasize what states do have in common — “the security measures, the control measures to make sure the election is being conducted with integrity.”

Kansas’ secretary of state, Scott Schwab, a Republican who has participated in meetings organized by the group, said he believes there are certain aspects of elections that officials should feel comfortable talking about. But he said he would remain cautious of speaking directly about something specific happening in another state.

“If I start going beyond my realm and my role, then they don’t trust me. And if they don’t trust me, then they don’t trust the elections in Kansas, and that’s pretty important,” Schwab said in an interview.

Some election officials who have questioned election procedures outside their state have a different perspective.

Secretary of State Mac Warner of West Virginia, a Republican who has questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election, said the focus should be on improving policies, such as putting in place voter ID requirements across the country, not silencing those who have questions.

“Our primary job as election officials is to build confidence, and that comes from strengthening protocols and not weakening them,” he said.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican who has raised questions about the way elections are run in other states, criticized what he called “activist lawsuits” and state officials who seek to change voting rules previously set by legislators.

“The things that happen in other states that go wrong are not the result of some cloak and dagger, secretive cabal conspiracy,” he said in an interview. “That’s the far-fetched stuff that makes for great YouTube videos and what have you. But the real things that go wrong in other states, are out in the open, are in full public view.”

Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who is the state’s top election official and has been participating in the group’s discussions, said avoiding criticism of other states and vouching for the legitimacy of election procedures is important for another reason: It can help reduce the threats and harassment directed toward election workers.

A recent survey by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s Law School found that nearly 40% of local election officials had experienced such abuse. It’s caused many to leave their jobs. Of 29 clerks in Utah, Henderson said 20 are new since 2020 and nine have never overseen an election.

“It’s one thing to suggest that someone could do something better. It’s another thing to impugn their integrity, their character, accuse them of cheating, accuse them of nefarious things that don’t happen,” Henderson said. “It’s exhausting.”

___

Associated Press writer Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Two US insurers have sued specialist rating agency AM Best in an effort to stop it from downgrading its estimate of their financial strength, in an escalating dispute over their exposure to Everton bidder 777 Partners.

In a lawsuit filed last week, Atlantic Coast Life Insurance and Sentinel Security Life Insurance, part of US insurance group A-Cap, asked a New Jersey court to stop AM Best from “issuing the rating it has prepared” and to force the agency to recalculate it. The planned downgrade would have taken their financial strength rating down three notches, from B++ to B-, they said.

The insurers, which offer life insurance and annuity products to families across America, accused the rating agency of a “fixation” with 777 Re, the Bermuda reinsurer linked to the Miami investment group.

A-Cap has been rushing to take back assets that it ceded to 777 Re through reinsurance transactions, and regulators have pushed it to reduce its exposure to the investment firm, after AM Best raised concerns about the quality of assets held by the reinsurer.

In a separate letter to the court, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argued that the “very existence of [the insurers’] business hangs in the balance”.

The letter also purported to summarise AM Best’s position, saying the agency was refraining from publishing the updated credit rating. That, AM Best reportedly argued, left the market and insurance customers relying on outdated information and left the company at risk of breaching its own policies on prompt publication.

AM Best did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A-Cap said. “This matter is the subject of litigation and we have already communicated our views on it in the filing referenced. It speaks for itself.”

The A-Cap insurers argued in their suit that AM Best had misunderstood the relationship between the insurers and 777 Re, had taken too dim a view of assets at 777 Re and had not taken into account A-Cap insurers’ progress in reducing their exposure to the reinsurer. They said AM Best had stated in an email that it would apply $1bn in writedowns “largely on assets held outside of the A-Cap insurers’ books”.

The insurers accused the agency of using “flawed methods, improper assumptions, and demonstrably false data” and of a “capricious review process that swung wildly between arbitrary ratings without considering relevant information or co-operating with the A-Cap insurers”.

The insurers said they had provided new information to AM Best relating to the recent “successful recapture” of $510mn of 777 Re-related assets which had been “transferred to a new insurer at par”. In the filing, made on April 23, the insurers said they expected to eliminate their 777 Re exposure by the end of that month.

The scrutiny has taken its toll on 777 Re, which had helped to fund 777 Partners’ investments. The Miami group has stakes in a global portfolio of football clubs, including Genoa in Italy, Vasco da Gama in Brazil, Hertha Berlin in Germany and Standard Liège in Belgium.

777 Partners agreed to buy Everton in September 2023 and had expected to complete the takeover by the end of the calendar year. However, the Premier League has not yet approved its takeover of the Liverpool-based club.

The league has put in place a number of conditions for 777 Partners to meet, including the need to repay £158mn of debt which is owed to lenders including MSP Sports Capital in connection with the new stadium that Everton is building.

In the meantime, 777 Partners has lent more than $200mn to Everton to help meet working capital requirements, said two people briefed on the matter.