Getting tired of reading posts from people who clearly didn't watch or read this earnings report or probably any earnings report so here we go. Tldr: His cash position (actually t-bills) is not large compared to the entirety of Berk's assets. Now can you all stop with the "But Buffett's holding cash" meme?
"I show our net, our cash and Treasury bill position on March 31st. And you might look at that and say, “Well, you’ve got $125 billion or so in cash and Treasury bills. And you’ve got…” At least at that point, we had about, I don’t know, $180 billion or so in equities. And you can say, “Well, that’s a huge position to have in Treasury bills versus just $180 billion in equities.”
But we really have far more than that in equities because we own a lot of businesses. We own 100% of the stock of a great many businesses, which to us are very similar to the marketable stocks we own. We just don’t own them all. They don’t have a quote on them. But we have hundreds of billions of wholly owned businesses. So our $124 billion is not some 40% or so cash positions, it’s far less than that.
And we will always keep plenty of cash on hand, and for any circumstances, with a 9/11 comes along, if the stock market is closed, as it was in World War I—it’s not going to be, but I didn’t think we were going to be having a pandemic when I watched that Creighton-Villanova game in January either."
Submitted May 06, 2020 at 06:30PM by GromGrommeta https://ift.tt/2SE8nDy
