Battered Pacific Gas and Electric stock, fresh off an all-time low, continued to hemorrhage Monday as the Kincade Fire raged in Northern California.
Shares plunged another 30 percent to a low of $3.55 before recovering some ground. On Friday, the stock closed at $5.00, then its lowest-ever price.
At a news conference Saturday, Gov. Gavin Newsom encouraged billionaire investor Warren Buffett to buy the troubled utility, which has been linked to the 60,000-plus-acre fire burning in Sonoma County. The fire originated near a company transmission tower that experienced a malfunction. Newsom wants Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate to make a bid for PG&E, but Buffett has so far been silent about the proposal.
Never try to catch a falling knife is Wall Street cliche that warns against buying a stock which is dropping sharply, so it's not surprising that Buffett might find PG&E a less than appealing target.
In April, Buffett shot down a Bloomberg report that Berkshire Hathaway was in talks to acquire the company, calling it "100% not true."
PG&E, California's largest investor-owned utility, filed for bankruptcy in January as part of a reorganization to deal with $30 billion in wildfire liabilities resulting from the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people. If found to have responsibility in the Kincade Fire, its efforts to emerge from bankruptcy could be severely undermined...
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Decades of poor land management and burdensome regulations are coming home to roost...or should I say roast.
1 comment:
Wild fire arson is a bullet without any identifying characteristics. Look back in 30 years of fire history in California and try to find an equivalent in number of fires at one time and size of fires at the same time. Don't try and blame all of this on poor land management which is certainly to blame but it is not THE CAUSE. Power lines are not the cause of ignitions solely. The majority of this is man caused but the MSM will not report who is causing this. They are afraid of the names that will show up. So blame poor land management, government stupidity, environmental bloviating and whatever else suits the pc crowd and the fires will continue each year without end. So Sad!
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