Warren Buffett is a living, breathing billionaire, but he’s also a leading economic indicator. So after his Berkshire Hathaway dumped almost $13bn of stocks in the throes of the Covid-19 crisis, investors were beside themselves. They’ll now be quite relieved to see that his company is back in buying mode, making the biggest outlay for equity purchases in a year.

And he’s not just making oddball bets, like Japanese trading houses and, yikes, gold. A filing late on Monday showed that in the latest period Berkshire Hathaway bought a handful of US pharmaceutical giants: AbbVie, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck and Pfizer. It also purchased a new stake in T-Mobile US, the wireless carrier with the most enviable spectrum position heading into 5G, and Snowflake, one of the hottest tech IPOs of 2020...

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