Warren Buffett is stepping down as Berkshire’s chairman this week, fifty-six years after he took the job in 1970, and the timing is almost too on the nose. His entire investment philosophy amounts to one instruction repeated for half a century: ignore the noise, hold on, let time do the work. He’s handing off the chair during a stretch where the 10-year hit 5%, the Fed raised rates into a live war, the Bank of Japan hiked to a level it hasn’t touched since 1995, and the market’s mood flipped completely between Thursday’s relief rally and today’s mixed, lower open. That’s not noise. That’s the whole orchestra playing at once.

The succession itself is the tell, though. Howard Buffett gets the chairman title; Greg Abel already runs the company. Warren isn’t handing his son the capital allocation job, he’s handing him the job of protecting the culture, which is a strange thing to need a dedicated person for unless you’ve quietly concluded the culture is the fragile part now. Fifty-six years of “be greedy when others are fearful,” and his last structural decision is to wall the temperament off from the trading desk.

I keep coming back to the Bank of Japan line, though. A rate hike explicitly described as “muddied by U.S. pressure,” nudged there more by Washington’s currency preferences than Tokyo’s own inflation math. Central banks used to at least perform independence for the cameras. Now it’s just in the headline.

Meanwhile the 10-year yield target keeps getting raised by people asking what stocks do at 5.3%, like that’s still a hypothetical and not just Tuesday.

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