Introduction

Jason Tank from Traverse City, Michigan asks two questions about Berkshire Hathaway. One is if you strip out the leverage effect of the cost of the float being nearly zero or negative throughout the years, how fast do you think your book value would have grown over the last 30 plus years? Are we talking about 5 or 6 percent due to just the leverage piece on the insurance float? I don't think it would run as much as 5 or 6 percentage points but the float has been very useful to us and actually I've never made the calculation.