Business Notes

Pssssst! Wanna look at the hottest read in town? Then snap up a copy of . . . the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. annual report. While the title suggests a pastiche of dry statistics and commercial puffery, connoisseurs of corporate entertainment eagerly await each year's version -- particularly the plain- spoken chairman's letter, written by superinvestor Warren Buffett. In the Omaha-based holding company's 1990 edition, released last month, the author quotes such thinkers as Woody Allen, Bertrand Russell and Buffett's four-year- old granddaughter Emily, while characteristically mocking his own financial acumen.

"Your Chairman displayed exquisite timing," he writes about his purchase of a large stake in USAir. "I plunged into the business at almost the exact moment that it ran into severe problems." Buffett also notes his purchase since late 1989 of $440 million of RJR Nabisco junk bonds. A crazy investment? He acknowledges that he's leery of new issues of junk bonds ("The only time to buy these is on a day with no y in it"), but the RJR bonds have been traded for a while -- and Buffett says their market value has increased $150 million since he bought them.