Berkshire News Briefs - 1/6/16

Report Finds Warren Buffett’s Modular Housing Company Ripped Off Minorities (Time)

Recently, the Seattle Times published a special report in conjunction with BuzzFeed News on the business practices of Clayton Homes, a massive modular housing company owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company that serves as a massive investment vehicle. The report does not paint a rosy picture of Clayton, which is the country’s largest homebuilder. [...]

The report found that Vanderbilt Mortgage, the lending arm of Clayton, lends with extremely high interest rates for minorities as opposed to their white counterparts. [...]

Berkshire Hathaway's Clayton Homes defends its loan practices involving minorities (Omaha World-Herald)

In response, Clayton said in a press release that the story’s allegations about loan rates are based on “raw data” that ignore factors including credit score, down payment, loan size, collateral and type of land.

Clayton said Vanderbilt’s average rate was the same for white and nonwhite borrowers with credit scores less than 600 who borrowed less than $50,000 to place a mobile home placed on private land. For borrowers with credit scores greater than 720, the average rate for nonwhite borrowers was 0.07 percentage points less than for white borrowers, Clayton said. [...]

Berkshire Hathaway Buys Newspaper in Fredericksburg, Virginia (Bloomberg)

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. purchased a Virginia newspaper and printing facility as the company run by billionaire Warren Buffett adds to its roster of publications.

The purchase includes The Free Lance-Star and Print Innovators, both located in Fredericksburg, Berkshire’s BH Media Group said Thursday in an e-mailed statement. Terms of the deal with Sandton Capital Partners, which acquired the assets in bankruptcy in June 2014, weren’t disclosed.

The Free Lance-Star has a daily circulation of 31,700, according to the statement. Print Innovators prints the newspaper and other publications in the region.

Berkshire Hathaway Fails Warren Buffett's Test -- Again (Fool)

Berkshire's underperformance this year is inopportune, as the Financial Times noted yesterday:

"The underperformance comes in Mr Buffett's Golden Anniversary year at the helm, when he told investors for the first time that they should judge his record based on Berkshire's share price, rather than just the book value of the company, which had been his preferred yardstick for decades."

BNSF Railway furloughs workers in Minnesota and North Dakota (Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal)

BNSF Railway Co. recently laid off railyard employees in Minnesota and North Dakota due to lower-than-expected demand for freight shipping, the Grand Forks Herald reported.

The job cuts — reportedly around 100 — were at the rail company's North Dakota rail yards in Grand Forks, Mandan and Minot, as well as the Minnesota yard in Dilworth.

EU clears Berkshire's acquisition of Precision Castparts (Reuters)

The European Commission said on Wednesday it had approved Berkshire Hathaway's planned $32.3 billion acquisition of Precision Castparts Corp, a maker of aerospace and other parts.

The Commission said in a statement it had concluded that the proposed acquisition would not raise competition concerns given the absence of horizontal overlaps and the limited vertical relationships between the activities of the two companies.

MidAmerican Energy adds 'green' trucks (Eastern Iowa Gazette)

The Des Moines-based utility’s new Green Fleet service trucks are equipped with a conventional engine and a large battery pack that operates the boom and other vehicle features. The dual system eliminates the need to have the engine idling at the job site, thereby saving fuel, reducing engine emissions and the need for engine maintenance, and minimizing job site noise. [...]

“By eliminating those four hours of idling every day, we will save four to eight gallons of gas per vehicle per day, which will add up to a significant reduction in emissions and significant fuel cost savings over the course of the year.”

How Venmo Plans to Make Money (Fortune)

MasterCard doesn’t offer a consumer P2P payment service, but it is selling the technology to businesses. It’s charging customers like Berkshire Hathaway and FreeShipping.com an undisclosed fee to add peer-to-peer payments to their own businesses. Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection’s Dean Sivley says those fees cost the company less money than printing out and mailing checks or wiring money. The insurer developed a mobile app based on MasterCard’s tech to enable its policyholders to submit a claim and receive a decision and payment in minutes.

The Dairy Queen® System’s Epic Resolution (Business Wire)

The start of the New Year often comes with grand resolutions. But this year, Dairy Queen® restaurants [...] are kicking off the New Year with an epic resolution: beginning January 1, 2016, participating DQ® and DQ Grill & Chill® restaurants across the country vow to serve all Blizzard® Treats upside down or the next one is free. [...]