Matt Levine, Columnist

Buffett Deals and Blockchain Crashes

Also Uber as an autonomous company, bank stress tests, psychopath CEOs and airline stocks.

June 23, 2017 at 1:31 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Home Capital.

A nice thing about being a celebrity is that people will pay you money just to show up, be yourself, and bestow some of your glamour on whatever they've got going on. Even minor Kardashians can get tens of thousands of dollars to hang out at the club. Similarly, when Warren Buffett shows up at a struggling company and buys a stake, he is immediately rewarded just for being Warren Buffett. This is not just about the terms of the deal -- struggling companies tend to offer Buffett very attractive terms for investing in them -- but also about the subsequent market reaction. So after the close on Wednesday, Home Capital Group Inc. announced that it is getting a C$2 billion credit line from Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., which is also buying 38 percent of its stock at C$10 a share. The stock closed on Wednesday at C$14.94, so Buffett got a discount, but it closed yesterday at C$19.00: Shareholders were so pleased by Buffett's appearance that they basically threw money at him.