Billionaire Warren Buffett says it is not likely that the US and China will come to loggerheads on trade, saying the two countries would avoid doing "something extremely foolish".
"The United States and China are going to be the two super-powers of the world, economically and in other ways, for a long, long, long time," Buffett said at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholders' meeting in Omaha, Nebraska on Saturday.
"We have a lot of common interests and like any two big economic entities, there are times when there'll be tensions, but it is a win-win situation when the world trades," Buffett said.
"We will have disagreements with each other (both Democrats and Republicans) and we'll have disagreements with other countries on trade," Buffett said about a trade war.
"It is just too big and too obvious for that the benefits are huge and the world is dependent on it in a major way for its progress that two intelligent countries will do something extremely foolish," he said. "We both (US and China) may do things that are mildly foolish from time to time. There is some give and take."
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The Trump administration has drawn a hard line in trade talks with China, demanding a $US200-billion cut in the Chinese trade surplus with the United States, sharply lower tariffs and advanced technology subsidies, people familiar with the talks said on Friday.
Buffett, 87, and his longtime partner and fellow billionaire Charlie Munger, 94, led Berkshire's annual meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, where they fielded five hours of questions from shareholders, journalists and analysts.
Buffett defended Wells Fargo and its chief executive, Tim Sloan, in response to a question asking when Berkshire would ditch the bank, one of its largest common stock holdings. Many shareholders in the audience applauded the question.
"Wells Fargo is a company that proved the efficacy of incentives, and it's just that they just had the wrong incentives," said Buffett.
Berkshire owns $US25.2 billion of Wells Fargo stock as of March 31, down from $US29.3 billion three months earlier.
Shortly before the meeting, Berkshire ended its more than year-long stretch of falling operating profit, while a new accounting rule caused the conglomerate chaired by Warren Buffett to suffer an overall net loss. Buffett said the results are not representative of the business.
Operating profit, which excludes investment and derivative gains and losses, rose 49 per cent to $US5.29 billion, or about $US3,215 per Class A share, higher than the $US3,116 per Class A share analysts had expected, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
The accounting change required Berkshire to report unrealised losses in its equity portfolio, which totalled $US170.5 billion at year end, regardless of whether it planned to sell those stocks. That helped the company to a net loss of $US1.14 billion, or $US692 per share, compared with net income of $US4.06 billion, or $US2,469 per share, a year earlier.
The results showed little sign of dimming the enthusiasm of the shareholders who gathered in Omaha.
